The blood and tissue shed from the uterus each month is often overlooked — and even stigmatized by some — as medical waste, but Penn State Professor Dipanjan Pan and his team have found that menstrual effluent could enable earlier, more accessible detection of biological markers to help diagnose endometriosis in just 10 minutes. The debilitating uterine disease impacts more than 200 people worldwide yet no commercially available point-of care diagnostic test exists.

Specific way genetic material is organized in cells determines its ability to adapt to resist treatment. Scientists modulated this organization with an FDA-approved drug on the market. Strategy prevented cancer cells from adapting, making chemotherapy more effective in lab cultures and animal models of human cancer.

Finely preserved brain features in a tiny marine arthropod fossil suggest that arachnids – spiders and their close kin – may have first evolved in the ocean rather than on land, challenging conventional wisdom. The fossilized brain shows the reverse arrangement of the front-to-back organization found in present-day crustaceans, insects and centipedes, and horseshoe crabs.

Researchers at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) have developed a new way to predict 2D materials that might transform electronics, such as sensors and solar cells. They used a mix of data mining, computer modeling, and structural analysis to reveal 83 candidate materials. Collaborators at the University of Maryland, College Park successfully synthesized some of the proposed materials in the lab, proving the UMBC predictions could be used to guide experiments with the novel materials. 

Georgia State University’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array is marking the 20th anniversary of its first scientific results, published in the July 20, 2005, issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Fast X-ray transients (FXTs) are blasts of X-rays from distant galaxies. Astronomers have detected FXTs since the 1970s, but their origins have remained unknown. By studying the closest FXT associated with a supernova ever detected, scientists found it was produced by a geyser of high-energy particles trapped inside the outer layer of a massive star.