This view of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is among the last images the Cassini spacecraft sent to Earth before it plunged into the giant planet’s atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Researchers with NASA’s Cassini mission found evidence of a toxic hybrid ice in a wispy cloud high above the south pole of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. The finding is a new demonstration of the complex chemistry occurring in Titan’s atmosphere – in this case, cloud formation in the giant moon’s stratosphere – and part of a collection of processes that ultimately helps deliver a smorgasbord of organic molecules to Titan’s surface.

Invisible to the human eye, the cloud was detected at infrared wavelengths by the Composite Infrared Spectrometer, or CIRS, on the Cassini spacecraft...

The system uses a commercial smartphone to acquire and interpret real-time images of an enzymatic amplification reaction that takes place in a silicon microfluidic chip that generates green fluorescence and displays a visual read-out of the test. The system is composed of an unmodified smartphone and a portable 3-D-printed cradle that supports the optical and electrical components, and interfaces with the rear-facing camera of the smartphone. Credit: Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A multidisciplinary group that includes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Washington at Tacoma has developed a novel platform to diagnose infectious disease at the point-of-care, using a smartphone as the detection instrument in con...

Approximate number of driver mutations needed to cause cancer by area of the body

The results show the number of mutations driving cancer varies considerably across different cancer types. For the first time, scientists have provided unbiased estimates of the number of mutations needed for cancers to develop, in a study of more than 7,500 tumours across 29 cancer types. Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and their collaborators adapted a technique from the field of evolution to confirm that, on average, one to ten driver mutations are needed for cancer to emerge.

In the future, such approaches could be used in the clinic to identify which few mutations in an individual patient are driving his or her cancer, from amongst the thousands of mutations present...

Artist’s conception of the complex magnetic field environment at Mars. Yellow lines represent magnetic field lines from the Sun carried by the solar wind, blue lines represent Martian surface magnetic fields, white sparks are reconnection activity, and red lines are reconnected magnetic fields that link the surface to space via the Martian magnetotail. Credit: Anil Rao/Univ. of Colorado/MAVEN/NASA GSFC

Mars has an invisible magnetic “tail” that is twisted by interaction with the solar wind, according to new research using data from NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft...