The U.S. National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO) near the summit of Maui’s Haleakalā, recently reached a major milestone as one of its groundbreaking instruments, the Visible Tunable Filter (VTF) achieved first light. The VTF is the world’s largest imaging spectro-polarimeter - a highly sophisticated instrument designed and built by a team at the Institut für Sonnenphysik (KIS) in Freiburg, Germany. It is the fifth and final first-generation instrument to be integrated, emerging as a crucial one among the Inouye’s instrument suite.

African sleeping sickness is a serious infection caused by a parasitic microbe called Trypanosoma brucei.

Using an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy along with artificial intelligence, a team at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA mapped the hairlike flagellum that the microbe uses to propel itself, identifying 154 composite proteins.

Findings revealed that the parasite moves in a distinctive style, similar to a dragon boat, with unique adaptations that are essential to its ability to infect its hosts.

Inspired by the movements of a tiny parasitic worm, Georgia Tech engineers have created a 5-inch soft robot that can jump as high as a basketball hoop. Their device, a silicone rod with a carbon-fiber spine, can leap 10 feet high even though it doesn’t have legs. The researchers made it after watching high-speed video of nematodes pinching themselves into odd shapes to fling themselves forward and backward

The invention is a metamaterial, which is a material engineered to feature new and unusual properties that depend on the material’s physical structure rather than its chemical composition. In this case, the researchers built their metamaterial using a combination of simple plastics and custom-made magnetic composites. Using a magnetic field, the researchers changed the metamaterial’s structure, causing it to expand, move and deform in different directions, all remotely without touching the metamaterial.

MIT engineers have fabricated a metamaterial that is not only strong but also stretchy. Their new method could enable stretchable ceramics, glass, and metals, for tear-proof textiles or stretchy semiconductors.

Scientists and space explorers have been on the hunt to determine where and how much ice is present on the Moon. Water ice would be an important resource at a future lunar base, as it could be used to support humans or be broken down to hydrogen and oxygen, key components of rocket fuel. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa researchers are using two innovative approaches to advance the search for ice on the Moon.

Some species that breed over large geographic areas can still be adapted to a fairly narrow range of climates, making them more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought. Also, species with larger brains (relative to their body size) tend to be adapted to narrower climate niches, which suggests they too could also be more vulnerable than once thought.

One of the challenges of fighting pancreatic cancer is finding ways to penetrate the organ’s dense tissue to define the margins between malignant and normal tissue. A new study uses DNA origami structures to selectively deliver fluorescent imaging agents to pancreatic cancer cells without affecting normal cells. The study, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mechanical science and engineering professor Bumsoo Han and professor Jong Hyun Choi at Purdue University, found that specially engineered DNA origami structures carrying imaging dye packets can specifically target human KRAS mutant cancer cells, which are present in 95% of pancreatic cancer cases.