Researchers have long focused on the STING (Stimulator of Interferon Genes) pathway as a way to harness the immune system’s natural defenses against cancer. This pathway, which plays a key role in helping the body defend against potential pathogens, can be leveraged to trigger an innate immune response that targets cancer cells. However, a study published July 3 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, led by biochemist Lingyin Li (Bluesky: @lingyinli.bsky.social), is spearheading a new school of thought.

Just over 200 years after French engineer and physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law of thermodynamics, an international team of researchers has unveiled an analogous law for the quantum world. This second law of entanglement manipulation proves that, just like heat or energy in an idealised thermodynamics regime, entanglement can be reversibly manipulated, a statement which until now had been heavily contested. The new research – released on July 2, 2025 in Physical Review Letters – deepens understanding of entanglement’s basic properties and provides critical fundamental insight into how to efficiently manipulate entanglement and other quantum phenomena in practice.

Like all complex organisms, every human originates from a single cell that multiplies through countless cell divisions. Thousands of cells coordinate, move and exert mechanical forces on each other as an embryo takes shape. Researchers at the Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks (CIDBN), the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation, and the University of Marburg have now discovered a new way that embryonic cells coordinate their behaviour. This involves molecular mechanisms previously known only from the process of hearing. The researchers attribute the fact that such different cells use the same proteins for two such different functions to their evolutionary origin. The results were published in Current Biology.

Quantum sensing: 

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, have developed a tunable system that paves the way for more accurate sensing in a variety of technologies, including biomedical diagnostics. The potential range of technologies is large, stretching from the largest scales – detecting gravitational waves in space over environmental monitoring to the tiny fluctuations in our own bodies – biomedical sensing for imaging and diagnostics in e.g. magnetic scanners. The result is now published in Nature.

A first in 3D food printing, Ali Ubeyitogullari, an assistant professor of food engineering with the food science and biological and agricultural engineering departments at the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, and postdoctoral fellow Sorour Barekat developed sorghum protein into a 3D food printing gel noted for its hydrophobicity to aid in product cohesion. Known for its drought tolerance, grain sorghum also has multiple health benefits.

Harvard scientists have described a particular movement observed mostly in young, teenaged anacondas, called an S-start. A mathematical model shows that young anacondas, as opposed to babies and adults, exist in a “goldilocks zone” of relative weight and strength to allow them to execute the movement.