miniature Archives - usatoday24

The waiting list for a liver transplant can be eternal, so they have created a solution: inject yourself with a miniature one

May 31, 2026 by usatoday24

The National Transplant Organization of Spain makes it clear: The liver is one of the most requested organs on the transplant list, only behind the kidney. Only in the Spanish state in 2025 there were 310 people waiting and that Spain It is a world power in transplants. There are not enough donated and compatible organs to arrive in time for all those people who need them. This historical gap that no country has managed to close is a double tragedy: for the sick person, who waits without guarantees, and for the health system, which cannot offer them another way out. Liver transplant remains the only cure for certain conditions, and the path to it is full of obstacles: surgical complexity, compatibility problems, the exclusion of patients too fragile for surgery or lifelong immunosuppression. Even when an organ arrives on time, not everyone can receive it. Until now, there was no alternative. That could be about to change. The invention. An MIT research team led by Sangeeta Bhatia has developed “satellite livers”, a type of mini-livers capable of assuming the functions of the diseased liver without having to remove it. One is inside, its cells form a stable structure, connect to the person’s blood vessels and begin to produce proteins that the damaged liver can no longer make. They do not replace the entire organ, but they relieve it of its functions. They are actually small grafts of functional liver tissue that are administered via a syringe guided by ultrasound, that is, without surgery: minimal invasibility. Why is it important. Because it addresses the two big problems for those who need a liver: the shortage of available organs and those who cannot face a transplant operation. If you can have surgery, they act as a bridge until they find a suitable organ. And if you can’t, these mini livers cover the liver functions that your liver can’t do. In this way, satellite livers increase the spectrum of treatable patients. From a more general point of view, this invention is a milestone in liver tissue engineering: science has been trying to replicate the nearly 500 functions performed by the human liver for more than a decade. And if implemented in the different health systems, its impact is direct: according to the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD)chronic liver disease is the 12th leading cause of death in the United States and rising. Context. Although the liver is an organ with a remarkable regenerative capacity, it does not work miracles: when it exceeds a certain threshold of damage, regeneration is not enough and only the transplant remains. Since the 90s, medical science has been trying to transplant isolated hepatocytes, but the results were poor. Bhatia is not new to this either: has been there for more than 25 years investigating bioartificial liver models, which has served as a basis for understanding what conditions hepatocytes need to remain functional outside the liver. This MIT work is precisely the practical application of all this knowledge. How it works. The research team developed the idea of turning these cells into an injectable along with hydrogel microspheres and fibroblasts. The spheres are intended to enable this route of administration by ensuring uniformity. Fibroblasts act as a support, helping hepatocytes survive and promoting the growth of new vessels into the tissue. Without blood supply, those cells would have their hours numbered. In the team’s experiments in mice, new vessels formed next to hepatocytes, allowing them to receive nutrients and function normally. In these rodents, the cells remained viable and secreting proteins during the eight weeks of the study. Yes, but. Although the results are tremendously promising, it is a preclinical study done in mice and the leap to humans is enormous. The human liver contains between 100,000 and 130,000 million hepatocytes and replicating a sufficient functional mass with injected cells is a challenge that this study has not yet addressed. Even assuming that we extrapolate this finding as is to humans, immunosuppressants would still need to be used. And it is not a minor problem: the fact that the immune system attacks weakened patients increases the risk of infections, tumors and kidney damage. In Xataka | The “silent” liver epidemic: we have a problem that escapes analysis and that science is already seeking to stop In Xataka | Fatty liver advances silently, but science has found unexpected allies: coffee and green tea Cover | Elen Sher and Magnificent

The James Webb captures a lonely object of the size of Jupiter devouring like a miniature sun

October 7, 2025 by usatoday24

An international astronomer team has witnessed an extraordinary event: a lonely object, with a mass of just 5 to 10 times that of Jupiter, has entered a violent and prolonged growth burst. Using the combined power of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and him Vary Large Telescope (VLT) of the Southern European Observatory, scientists They have observed How this object, known as Cha J11070768-7626326, drastically increases its brightness and its “food” rhythm, behaving like a miniature star. The importance. This discovery represents the first time that a outbreak of accretion of type “exor”, a phenomenon so far associated with young stars, in a body of planetary mass. The finding is not only a milestone in astronomical observation, but also further blur the borders between what we consider a giant planet and a small star. The mystery. CH 1107-7626 is not a planet in the traditional sense that we all have in our mind. Although it has a mass comparable to that of a gaseous giant, I do not orbit any star and is 620 light years from the earth. Is what is known as an “free planetary mass object” or FFPMO (for its acronym in English). The existence of these lonely bodies raises a fundamental question for astronomy: are giant planets that were expelled from their solar systems, or are smaller stars that can exist in isolation? In order to solve this enigma that astronomers have right now on the table, you have to analyze the gas and dust disc that is around, as well as the way of accumulating the material. The fact that Cha 1107-7626 has an album and feeds on it suggests that its origin is more like that of a star. A cosmic feast. Astronomers observed Cha 1107-7626 in a state of calm in April and May 2025. However, for June, something had changed drastically. The object entered a “indulgence.” This means that its rhythm of ‘food’ began to increase, and in this way it reached a mass increase rate of 10-7 masses of Jupiter per year, the highest ever measured in a planetary mass object. As a result of this frenzy, the objective became between 1.5 and 2 brighter magnitudes in visible light and its optical flow increased between 3 and 6 times. This outbreak remained active for at least two months, since it was still on the end of the observation campaign in August 2026. But the most interesting thing is the speed it has. According to the observations made with the Vray Lark Telescope of the European Observatory, the growth rate is really aggressive, with a record rate of devouring 6,600 million tons per second of dust and gas. Great footprints. Beyond the increase in brightness, the telescopes captured detailed physical changes that reveal the nature of the event. A hydrogen emission line, known as Hα, developed a “double peak” profile with a red displaced absorption. According to the authors, this profile is a “distinctive brand” of the accretion channeled through magnetic fields, a process called “magnetospherical accretion” observed in young stars. But the most surprising finding was the change in the chemistry of the disc. At first, changes in the emission lines of the hydrocarbons molecules that came from the disc during the outbreak were seen. But water vapor also began to appear with a characteristic emission around 6.6 µm. This appeared during the outbreak where there was nothing before and is relevant because it is the first time that chemical changes of this type are observed caused by an increase in accretion. Relevance. This event classifies Cha 1107-7626 as the first “exor” of known planetary mass. Exor outbursts are significant accretion events that are considered key episodes in the early evolution of the stars. They can deeply affect the physical structure and chemical composition of the protoplanetary disk, potentially influencing the early stages of planet formation. Observing this process in such a small object demonstrates that the violent and fundamental mechanisms that the stars build also work at planetary scales. The study of Cha 1107-7626 offers an unprecedented vision of the accretion in the lower mass objects of the universe, providing a new window to understand how both smaller stars and the largest planets are formed. Images | Javier Miranda In Xataka | The most transformer of modern cosmology is just around the corner, according to the hypothesis of these physicists

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