The torrent of corona related discoveries keeps coming. Lately we’ve covered a variety of potential solutions to the “coronal heating problem” - why the Sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface. Now, a paper led by a team of researchers from the University of Newcastle, Indian Institute for Astrophysics, and University of Sheffield, offers another answer - that we’ve been viewing the “spicules” that form in the lower solar atmosphere all wrong.

Colorectal cancer rates have been rising in people under 50 since the mid-1990s. These early-onset cancers tend to be more aggressive and resistant to treatment than cancers in older adults — and now, scientists may be learning why. A new study published Thursday (Oct. 29) in the journal Nature Medicine compared colorectal tumors from people between 29 and over 90 years old, and it revealed key differences between young and old patients. The new findings might, in turn, help scientists uncover new ways to fight colorectal cancer in young people, said study co-author Ana Anderson, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and a core faculty member of the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "I believe that our study is essentially a turning point now in the field," Anderson told Live Science. "Because up until now, we've had more questions than answers."Many questions surround early-onset colorectal cancer, as the disease is rising in people under 50 even as it falls in older populations. It's now the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. for people under 50, and its numbers are even on the rise among children and adolescents.Beyond questions about what's driving this uptick in cases, another mystery has been why this disease is so deadly in young people. "The clinical data suggests that the disease in the younger patients is more aggressive overall," Anderson said. "The patients, being very healthy otherwise, do not do well with treatment." The reason why colorectal cancer is often aggressive in younger patients hasn't been clear. (Image credit: Gerardo Huitrón via Getty Images)To investigate that mystery, Anderson collaborated with Dr. Kimmie Ng, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Dr. Ramnik Xavier, a gastroenterologist at the Broad Institute and Mass General Brigham. They used a method of analyzing RNA in cells that allowed them to work with frozen and banked tumor tissue. RNA, a cousin of DNA, reflects the genes that are active in cells. In all, the team analyzed 189 tumors: 54 from patients under 50 and 135 from patients over 50. With that many samples, the researchers could look at gradual differences tied to each age group, instead of just comparing tumors between the younger and older groups overall. That enabled them to pinpoint subtle differences, Anderson said. For starters, younger people had a higher proportion of connective tissue cells in their tumors than they did of malignant cancer cells. That pattern was flipped in patients of older ages. Having a smaller proportion of malignant cells might sound good, but connective tissue in tumors can secrete compounds that suppress the immune system, Anderson said. That helps protect the tumor from immune cells that might otherwise target its cells for destruction.These connective tissue cells can also physically block chemotherapy drugs from getting to the cancerous cells. This could be one reason younger patients' cancers resist treatment, the researchers suggested. Based on patterns of gene activity in the tumors, the researchers suspect that younger patients' cancer cells also show distinct activity related to cell-to-cell communication. That may help the cells migrate through the body more easily than cancer cells in older patients do. In other cancers, this kind of gene activity has been linked to more aggressive tumors and a greater chance that the disease will spread, or metastasize, Anderson said. Related storiesThe 10 deadliest cancers, and why there's no cureGut bacteria linked to colorectal cancer in young peopleColon-cancer risk in young people linked to one amino acid, small study findsThe study's results also turned up an intriguing mystery: the presence of lots of long noncoding RNA. These strands of RNA contain more than 200 building blocks, called nucleotides, that don't provide instructions for building proteins. Coding RNA, in contrast, is ferried to protein-building factories in cells to be used as blueprints. Scientists don't know what much of this long noncoding RNA does in the body, nor do they understand what it is doing in the tumors specifically. However, they hope to find out. Anderson and her team are already working on manipulating the RNA they found inside cancer cells in petri dishes. In time, this line of research could supply another piece of the puzzle, helping scientists understand why colorectal cancer is so aggressive in young people."It's a new avenue for research into this disease that we previously had no idea about," Anderson said. This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice

Scientists are getting a new glimpse of how the first galaxies came to be. In a stunning new simulation, researchers charted the aftermath of the universe's "dark age," including the appearance of the first galaxies that began to shine about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.Lumina, the program behind the simulation, catalogs 2 billion years of cosmic time and represents a decent chunk of the 13.8 billion-year-old history of our universe. The results were published Monday (Oct. 26) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society."Other simulations cannot zoom in as far as this," study co-author Mark Vogelsberger, a professor of physics at MIT, said in a statement. "The difference between the smallest and largest scales that we simulate is larger than in any other simulation."A video published alongside the paper shows what the scientists saw. The team zoomed in on an area roughly 1.6 billion light-years wide to learn more about how the ingredients of space create galaxies.This section of the Lumina simulation shows the gas temperature in different parts of the early universe, with redder areas showing active galaxy clusters. (Image credit: Lumina simulation)Lighting up the Cosmic Dark AgeIn the earliest years of our universe, a fog of neutral hydrogen atoms gradually built up, blocking out the light of the first stars. The hydrogen served as a "shroud" and didn't make light visible until galaxies began to form. This ancient, enshrouded period is known as the Cosmic Dark Age.The video begins in the middle of this epoch, at roughly 45 million years after the Big Bang. Zooming in on one small part of the simulated universe, it slowly reveals a gassy halo giving way to young galaxies shining brightly within it. Included in the calculations are dark matter, stars, gas and radiation — all contributing to the reemergence of cosmic light."We see this is where the first galaxies form," first author Oliver Zier, a former postdoctoral researcher and computational astrophysicist at MIT who is now at Harvard University, said in the statement. "And the first stars form in those first galaxies. Those stars then create radiation. The simulation then tracks that radiation, and we can zoom way out to see how that radiation travels out from stars, through the universe, until at some point it ionizes some neutral hydrogen."Related storiesThe universe may end trillions of years sooner than we thoughtA neglected particle from the dawn of time could explain why everything in the universe existsOur model of the universe is deeply flawed — unless space is actually a 'sticky fluid,' new research hintsLumina aims to show off two phenomena key to the young universe's history: hydrogen reionization and helium reionization — a first for a program of its kind. Reionization describes how the intergalactic medium, or the area between galaxies, changed from neutral hydrogen to negatively charged ions. Hydrogen reionization took place when ultraviolet light from young stars and galaxies hit the hydrogen, removing negatively charged electrons from the hydrogen molecules — a process that also allowed light to shine through the fog. Helium reionization happened when supermassive black holes, which have a lot of energy, broke apart neutral helium molecules.The team said the simulation could eventually be used to validate telescope observations of the early universe, especially those focused on mapping many galaxies at the same time.

“A one-in-a-million occurrence.”ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.

Fewer than 7% survive this disease.ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.