Scientists have discovered that there is ice deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus and want to find out what form it takes and how it behaves. They cannot dig for it and transport it all the way back to Earth, so they do the next best thing: recreate those extreme conditions in the lab.

That’s exactly what a team of scientists led by Alexis Forestier from the CEA, France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, did. What they discovered could help us better understand the strange magnetic fields and deep interior layers of these distant worlds.

The weird world of hot ice
On those planets, ice is not like the frozen cubes you put into a cold drink...

Obesity caused by disrupted stress-hormone rhythms is metabolically very different from obesity caused by a high-fat diet, according to a new preclinical study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators...

Nitrogen is a key ingredient in the biomolecules that form the building blocks of life. Yet as an unbonded gas, it is far more likely to drift into space than to lock itself into solid compounds, making it difficult for astronomers to trace its journey to Earth in the distant past.

Through new research published in Nature Astronomy, a team led by Toru Matsumoto at Kyoto University has found some of the best evidence yet of how this journey happened, hidden inside grains of dust from the asteroid Ryugu.

Evidence across the solar system
Nitrogen-bearing compounds, particularly ammonia, have already been spotted on the dwarf planet Ceres and on several carbon-rich asteroids, hinting ...

CAR T-cell therapy is an immune-reprogramming procedure that turns a patient’s own immune cells into cancer-fighting specialists. The entire process is complex, but researchers have now found a faster way to achieve similar effects using a single intravenous (IV) drip of a harmless engineered virus.

In the standard process, clinicians extract T cells from the patient’s blood, then re-engineer them in the lab, arming each one with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)—engineered proteins designed to recognize specific markers on cancer cells...