This is the best map yet of what Antarctica looks like under the ice. Ice thickness shown at left; ice-stripped topography of the continent shown at right.
Let's hope we never get to see what an ice-free Antarctica looks like for real.
https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/new-map-of-landscape-beneath-antarctica-unveiled/ #science #nature #climate
I am excited to hear some #scienceFiction, #drama, #educational, #science, #poetry, or other #texts on air.
Behold! This is what a lunar eclipse looks like... from the surface of the Moon. That dark circle is Earth.
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander took this image last night.
Not everyone’s rockets are blowing up:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lunar-eclipse-moon-lander-blue-ghost
Is ranch dressing a liquid or a solid? our @ScienceDesk asked, via @TheConversationUS's Curious Kids series (also good for curious adults). Turns out it’s something called soft matter, like cookie dough, toothpaste, and snot.
https://theconversation.com/is-ranch-dressing-a-liquid-or-a-solid-a-physicist-explains-249435
When Spanish colonizers established a town in the mountains of Bolivia in the 1500s, they might have expected to expand their communities by having babies, but they could not. While Indigenous folks raised families, not a single child of European descent was born for decades. It was all down to the lack of oxygen at altitude, which the settlers were not genetically adapted to deal with. @KnowableMag reports on how scientists are now studying this to see if they can help pregnant people whose bodies are struggling to provide enough oxygen to their fetuses, at any altitude.
Last week, Aix Marseille University in France offered funding to American scientists who feel like their work is being censored. It’s already seeing great interest from researchers at NASA, Yale and Stanford, and the program may extend through more universities across Europe. “We are witnessing a new brain drain,” Éric Berton, Aix Marseille University’s president, said in a press release. Here’s more from @emanuelmaiberg for @404mediaco
@coreyspowell 
A Moment of Unity for Humanity! 
This stunning image captures something bigger than politics—Earth eclipsing the Sun, seen from the Moon. 
A powerful reminder that we share one planet, one sky, one future. No borders, no sides—just humanity united in awe and discovery.
What does this moment mean to you? Share your thoughts below!
The mRNA technology behind coronavirus vaccines is now being used to create bespoke vaccines for cancer patients.
"Cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.
mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.
Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.
In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.
The UK was ready. We had fridges and we had world-class manufacturing and research facilities. During the pandemic, we had proven we could open and deliver clinical trials fast. Also, the UK had established a genomic global lead with Genomics England and the 100,000 Genome Project. All doctors and nurses in this country are trained in genomics.
So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned.
For many years, we believed that research is inherently slow. It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools.
We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. It’s now completed. We over-recruited again, just like every single one of the trials that we ran, and the trial finished one year ahead of schedule. That’s completely unheard of in cancer trials because they normally run over-long.
What will happen now is that, over the next six to 12 months, we will monitor the people in the trial and work out if there’s a difference between the people who took the cancer vaccine and the ones who didn’t. We’re hoping to have results by the end of the year or beginning of 2026. If it’s successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That’s pretty impressive."
- Dr. Lennard Lee, UK National Health Service oncologist and medical director at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford
https://www.wired.com/story/wired-health-lennard-lee-cancer-vaccines/
Here it is: The first clear image of an eclipse of the Sun by the Earth, taken from the surface of the Moon.
This is what last night's lunar eclipse looked like from the Blue Ghost lander's perspective on the Moon. Amazing!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/54386246629/in/dateposted/ #space #science #art #tech
@eclectech I'm almost positive that emu's don't fly for that reason.
The "smallest known galaxy" sounds like an oxymoron (akin to the old joke, "jumbo shrimp").
But the discovery of Andromeda XXXV, just one-millionth the size of our Milky Way, offers serious clues about how coherent structures form & survive in a chaotic universe.
https://news.umich.edu/small-faint-and-unexpected-in-a-lot-of-different-ways-u-m-astronomers-make-galactic-discovery/ #science #space #nature
When you support arXiv, you support #accessible research.
arXiv strives to be as accessible as possible to support the work of ALL researchers, including those with disabilities. Because #science is only truly #open when it is accessible to all.
SpaceX delays flight to replace NASA’s stuck astronauts after launch pad problem.
@AssociatedPress reports: https://flip.it/rVHpIy
The news has been more than a bit grim of late, so hooray for Carbon Brief providing some genuine and really meaningful **good** news: the UK's carbon emissions in 2024 were the lowest since 1872, because demand for fossil fuels just keeps decreasing.
@pluralistic Oh, that was a wonderfully cheeky "over-clickbait". I clicked. I wanted to know: What, this person? Should I have misjudged him?
And then I had a huge pleasure as the article chased me through the polarities to present its finely differentiated findings. It got exciting.
It's been a long time since I've enjoyed reading something so serious so much! 
Cause of post-#COVID inflammatory shock in children identified: Reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus appears to cause the rare condition #MISC. The findings, uncovered by a team from #CharitéBerlin & the DRFZ, have now been published in #Nature.
These insights open the door to new treatment methods, potentially not limited to MIS-C.
#CharitéPaper #Science #Research #Medicine #EBV #PIMS #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #corona
@nature.portfolio
National Cancer Institute Employees Can’t Publish Information on These Topics Without Special Approval
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Vaccines. Fluoride. Autism. Communications involving these and 20 other “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics will get extra scrutiny under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
