If there were such a thing as a photo album of the universe, it might include snapshots of pancake-like disks of gas and dust, swirling around newly formed stars across the Milky Way. Known as planet-forming disks, they are believed to be a short-lived feature around most, if not all, young stars, providing the raw materials for planets to form.

Most of these planetary nurseries are short-lived, typically lasting only about 10 million years—a fleeting existence by cosmic standards. Now, in a surprising find, researchers at the University of Arizona have discovered that disks can grace their host stars much longer than previously thought, provided the stars are small—one-tenth of the sun’s mass or less.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Letters Journal, a research tea...

Research into immunotherapy against cancer typically focuses on better recognition of cancer cells by the body’s own immune system. Researchers at Amsterdam UMC and Moffitt Cancer Center have taken a different approach.

They investigated how cancer affects the energy management of a patient’s T cells and showed for the first time that contact with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells leads to a serious energy crisis in these cells.

These findings are published in Cellular & Molecular Immunology, building on a publication in the Blood Journal.

CLL is the most common type of leukemia in the Western world and mainly affects the elderly. Despite new therapies, the disease remains incurable, and treatments are becoming increasingly expensive.

Some c...

Zuchongzhi-3, a superconducting quantum computing prototype with 105 qubits and 182 couplers, has made significant advancements in random quantum circuit sampling. This prototype was successfully developed by a research team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

This prototype operates at a speed that is 1015 times faster than the fastest supercomputer currently available and one million times faster than the latest results published by Google. This achievement marks a milestone in enhancing the performance of quantum computation, following the success of Zuchongzhi-2...

Water may have first formed 100–200 million years after the Big Bang, according to a modeling paper published in Nature Astronomy. The authors suggest that the formation of water may have occurred in the universe earlier than previously thought and may have been a key constituent of the first galaxies.

Water is crucial for life as we know it, and its components—hydrogen and oxygen—are known to have formed in different ways. Lighter chemical elements such as hydrogen, helium and lithium were forged in the Big Bang, but heavier elements, such as oxygen, are the result of nuclear reactions within stars or supernova explosions. As such, it is unclear when water began to form in the universe.

Researcher Daniel Whalen and colleagues utilized computer models of two supernovae—the...