A team at the Complutense University of Madrid has shown that the protein RAC1 needs a small chemical change to help breast cancer spread. Blocking it drastically reduced lung metastases in experimental models.
Nobel laureate W. E. Moerner's team at Stanford has built a microscope that reaches about 120 nanometres of detail in living cells without fluorescent labels, using less light so cells suffer less damage. It could help show how drugs work and how infections such as malaria take hold.
After nudging its secondary mirror by a sixteenth of a hair's width, the telescope's main instrument – launched on 30 August – is producing sharper images than its team predicted. It will hunt for planets, map galaxies and probe dark energy.
