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Google Earth, human organ style

Have you ever been playing around with Google Earth just to see if your childhood home is still standing?

Researchers from University College London and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility created something similar, but for human organs — not to make sure they’re still there, but to explore them on an unprecedented scale. And anyone can use it.

Inspired by structural lung damage resulting from SARS-CoV-2 and the lack of imaging to help researchers understand how this happens, the team created a database of 3D organ imaging called the Human Organ Atlas. Users can zoom in to view the organ at a near cellular level, no cuts required.

This online library is free to use and contains 3D scans of real human organs. It allows an immersive learning experience for students and researchers alike.

CAPTION: Glioblastoma MRI Image IMAGE: Shutterstock
CAPTION: Spheroids of glioblastoma cell culture IMAGE: Shutterstock

The tool can offer insight into disease pathology to help to build better treatments and medicines and a completely immersive anatomy lesson. It is also expected to contribute greatly to the development of AI medical systems.

Three-D organ scanning has been around for some time but many people were frustrated to zoom in to find blurry images that make fine details difficult to see. Additionally, tissue samples from organs in detail could be viewed under a microscope, but there was no way to view the organs and the tissue cells synchronously. Now both can be studied as a complete system.

The atlas was built using scanned organs from autopsies and a synchrotron (particle accelerator).

A synchrotron, roughly the size of a football stadium, “accelerates electrons very, very fast. And as these electrons are bent with magnets, they give off X-rays. And it’s these X-rays that we’re using for imaging,” Claire Walsh, lead author on the paper and director of the Human Organ Atlas Hub, tells Science Friday.

Currently we work on isolated organs, but in the future, we expect to develop the technique to be able to image complete human bodies with a resolution 10 to 20 times higher than what is possible today. Such data could transform how anatomy is studied and understood.”

– Paul Tafforeau, Beamline scientist, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

The scanning technique called hierarchical phase-contrast tomography (HiP-CT), was developed in 2021 by Walsh and her team. It scanned at about 20 microns per voxel — that’s roughly thinner than a human hair. The scans are 100 billion times brighter than conventional hospital CT scanners.

There are currently 62 organs from 12 organ types in the atlas: the brain, heart, lung, kidney, liver, colon, spleen, placenta, uterus, prostate, testis and eye. These organs offer insight into conditions such as hypertension, cancer, damage from COVID-19 and rarer disorders like Dandy-Walker Syndrome.

The world-wide usable atlas offers downloadable datasets (in multiple resolutions), tutorials and software tools for analysis, ongoing data additions and interactive browser-based visualization.

This level of biomedical imaging has been a goal for decades, and it was declared officially a functional whole-organ imaging technique in 2021. The online Human Organ Atlas was launched for all users, whether you’re a researcher, student or just an interested individual, in March 2026.

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Contrails, take a hike

When you’re looking up at the sky to observe the jet you heard flying overhead, you’ll often notice the wispy, white lines it leaves behind. What you may not know is that those white lines, known as contrails, are aviation’s biggest contributor to climate damage. The good news is that fixing it might be simple.

A new study published in Nature Communications indicates that making small detours around parts of the sky where those contrails form could be the solution.

Smarter flight paths may make the flights slightly longer, which uses more fuel, but it’s only minimal. The tradeoff: There will be far less heat trapped without the contrails.

Under the Paris Agreement, the world aims to keep the global temperature increase under 1.5 degrees, pre-industrial revolution, 2 degrees at the most. But we’ve already spent far too much of that allowance and we will soon be over target.

If we get started soon (by at least 2035), we could save 9 percent of the remaining budget by 2050. This means instead of reducing emissions, we stop adding heat right now.

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Noisy sweet spot

Have you ever been in an area where it’s so crowded no one can move?

Robot swarms experience the same issue — when too many are trying to move in perfect order, they get jammed up and go nowhere. But there’s a solution.

There is a “sweet spot” between chaos and perfect order that leads to best performance. And it’s a simple fix.

A new study led by researchers at Harvard University reveals that throwing a little randomness into the mix can break up robot traffic jams and help bots get their jobs done quicker.

A smidge of capriciousness among robot movement lets them slip past each other and maintain flow. Not enough noise results in jams, too much noise and robots are off wandering aimlessly.

The “just right” area in the middle is where the magic happens.

Researchers tested using both computer models and real robots and discovered that at just the right level of randomness, traffic jams resolved, and test models reached their goals quicker. No central system instruction required.

Knowing that sometimes the best method of organization is to be a little less organized is meaningful not just for robots, but for such applications as warehouse logistics and crowd management.

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Sugary disguise

Killing cancer cells is tricky business, partly because they can be hard to find. Those tricky cells are good at hiding, but researchers are on to them. It seems their “invisibility cloak” is made up of a sugary coating that can now be detected.

The study, published in Science, shows that leukemia cells coat themselves in a slippery, sugar-coated protein called CD43. This shield makes it difficult for the body’s immune system to grab and destroy them.

When researchers removed the CD43, they found that immune cells were suddenly more adept at doing their job.

The sugar coating acts both as a barrier and a disguise — cancer cells are harder to reach, and the signals received by cells like macrophages, the body’s cleaning crew, says “don’t attack me.” This combination is what scientists are referring to as a glyco-immune barrier.

Notably, the barrier isn’t evading only one type of immune cell, it also interferes with natural killer cells and T cells, which are instrumental in fighting cancer.

The next step is for scientists is to figure out a way to strip away this sugary cloak at scale, which could make existing cancer treatments like immunotherapy more effective.

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The immensity of intensity

Terms like “glacial” are often applied to regions like the Antarctic. Although that might create an image of slowly changing landscapes, sometimes it’s quite the opposite.

A recent study conducted by researchers from Khalifa University shows that snow can grow or shrink daily due to sudden weather shifts.

While studying the ice close to Mawson Station in East Antarctica, scientists discovered that although the seasonal patterns of growing and shrinking sea ice is predictable, the snow on top can change quickly.

These shifts aren’t caused by seasonal changes, but by sudden weather. Extreme snowfall, strong winds or gusts of warm air can add, shift or remove snow.

Most notably, these changes can be caused by atmospheric rivers, which are large streams of moisture in the air that can simultaneously drop snow and stir up strong winds that could blow much of the snow away.

Katabatic winds (fast-moving air speeding down from the Antarctic’s high interior) can also be responsible for removing snow from the surface or disappearing it into the air.

Why does this matter?

Snow and sea ice help regulate the Earth’s climate. Understanding that the Antarctic ice system is more akin to a volatile stock market than a slow drift can help scientists improve climate models and better understand what’s coming next as Antarctic ice continues to shift.

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