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STING Like a Bee: MIT’s Revolutionary Approach to Cancer Immunotherapy

A cancer vaccine combining checkpoint blockade therapy and a STING-activating drug eliminates tumors and prevents recurrence in mice. MIT researchers have engineered a therapeutic cancer vaccine that targets the STING pathway, vital for immune response to cancer cells. This vaccine has shown significant potential in eliminating tumors, inhibiting metastasis, and preventing recurrence in mouse models of different cancers, with minimal side effects. The treatment is even effective in cases where the STING gene is mutated. The study also revealed an unexpected key role of CD4+ T cells in antitumor immunity. Immune checkpoint blockade therapies have been revolutionary in the treatment…

MIT’s AI System Reveals Internal Structure of Materials From Surface Observations

Lead Image: A machine-learning method developed at MIT detects internal structures, voids, and cracks inside a material, based on data about the material’s surface. On the top left cube, the missing fields are represented as a gray box. Researchers then leverage an AI model to fill in the blank (center). Then, the geometries of composite microstructures are identified based on the complete field maps using another AI model (bottom right). Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT and the researchers A new method could provide detailed information about internal structures, voids, and cracks, based solely on data about exterior conditions. MIT scientists have used…

Rare Beetle Rediscovered After 55 Years

Lead Image: UC Berkeley entomologist Kipling Will discovered a specimen of Bembidion brownorum while sampling for insects near Freshwater Creek on former Gov. Jerry Brown’s ranch. The species had not been observed by scientists in more than 55 years. Credit: David Maddison During the insect sampling expedition at Jerry Brown’s ranch, a researcher from UC Berkeley stumbled upon a beetle species that had eluded scientific observation since 1966. Upon learning that ex-Governor Jerry Brown was inviting field researchers to his Colusa County ranch, Kipling Will, a University of California, Berkeley entomologist, was eager to seize the opportunity to search for…

From African Dust to Atlantic Storms: NASA’s CPEX-CV Mission Finds Clues to How Hurricanes Form

Lead Image: A layer of dust layered atop a cloud, as seen from the window of the DC-8 Airborne Laboratory. Credit: NASA/Kris Bedka NASA’s CPEX-CV mission in September 2022 gathered extensive data on the early stages of hurricane formation off Africa’s northwestern coast, providing insight into how dust, moisture, clouds, and the ocean interact to influence storm development. This publicly available data, which includes detailed profiles of meteorological elements and documentation of a major dust event, is expected to significantly aid future research and weather forecasting. When the dust that wafts off the Sahel and Sahara regions of Africa mixes…

Star Swarms Reveal a Hidden Beast: NASA’s Hubble Hunts for Black Hole Close to Earth

Lead Image: A Hubble Space Telescope image of the globular star cluster, Messier 4. The cluster is a dense collection of several hundred thousand stars. Astronomers suspect that an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun, is lurking, unseen, at its core. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, Eduardo Vitral (STScI) A Dark Central Mass is Lurking at the Hub of a Glittering Stellar Island Gravitational traps in space, black holes, come in different sizes. Or more correctly, different masses, because they are all infinitely small. The first black hole ever discovered, in 1971, weighed in…