Senescent cells (represented here in green) no longer function but can broadcast inflammatory signals to the cells around them. These cells are implicated in a number of age-related diseases.
Credit: Image courtesy of Mayo Clinic

Zombie cells are the ones that can’t die but are equally unable to perform the functions of a normal cell. These zombie, or senescent, cells are implicated in a number of age-related diseases. And with a new letter in Nature, Mayo Clinic researchers have expanded that list.

In a mouse model of brain disease, scientists report that senescent cells accumulate in certain brain cells prior to cognitive loss. By preventing the accumulation of these cells, they were able to diminish tau protein aggregation, neuronal death and memory loss.

“Senescent cells are known to ac...

Purdue researcher Jialiang Tang helped resolve charging issues in sodium-ion batteries that have prevented the technology from advancing to industry testing and use.
Credit: Purdue University Marketing and Media photo

Worldwide efforts to make sodium-ion batteries just as functional as lithium-ion batteries have long since controlled sodium’s tendency to explode, but not yet resolved how to prevent sodium-ions from ‘getting lost’ during the first few times a battery charges and discharges. Now, researchers made a sodium powder version that fixes this problem and holds a charge properly.

Most of today’s batteries are made up of rare lithium mined from the mountains of South America. If the world depletes this source, then battery production could stagnate...

M. E. Caplan, A. S. Schneider, C. J. Horowitz. The Elasticity of Nuclear Pasta. Physical Review Letters, 2018

A team of scientists has calculated the strength of the material deep inside the crust of neutron stars and found it to be the strongest known material in the universe. Matthew Caplan, a postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University, and his colleagues from Indiana University and the California Institute of Technology, successfully ran the largest computer simulations ever conducted of neutron star crusts, becoming the first to describe how these break. “The strength of the neutron star crust, especially the bottom of the crust, is relevant to a large number of astrophysics problems, but isn’t well understood,” says Caplan.

Neutron stars are born after supernovas, an implosion ...

Artist’s conception of the Epsilon Indi system. The two brown dwarfs orbit their common center of mass, which in turn orbits the much more distant primary component, a Sun-like star. By mapping the orbital motion of the brown dwarfs, the team was able to determine their masses. Much like our Solar System’s giant planets, brown dwarfs are thought to have cloud belts that encircle the entire object and give it a striped appearance.
Credit: Illustration is by Roberto Molar Candanosa and Sergio Dieterich, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

The line that separates stars from brown dwarfs may soon be clearer thanks to new work led by Carnegie’s Serge Dieterich...