The physics behind these sails is deceptively simple but demanding in practice. Photons carry momentum even though they have no mass, and when sunlight reflects off a thin reflective membrane, the momentum transfer exerts a small but continuous force. Unlike chemical rockets that burn out after minutes, a light sail accelerates for as long as it faces a light source, which is why the concept has long been championed for ambitious missions such as Breakthrough Starshot, which envisions laser-driven sails carrying tiny probes to nearby star systems. The challenge has always been engineering: a sail must be extraordinarily light, fold into a tiny launch volume, and deploy reliably in the unforgiving environment of space. Cornell’s approach attacks all three constraints at once by folding the sail origami-style inside a CubeSat and pairing it with ChipSat electronics that weigh a fraction of a conventional satellite bus.

Alpha CubeSat, a 1U CubeSat funded through NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, deployed its light sail in low Earth orbit. The mission’s most striking early result came through the TinyGS network, a distributed array of amateur ground stations around the world, which established contact with the ChipSat riding on the sail. According to Joshua Umansky-Castro, the mission lead and a recent graduate of Cornell’s Aerospace Engineering Ph.D. program, this was the first time a spacecraft this small transmitted complete data packets from orbit to ground. He described the achievement as a huge milestone that advances the state of the art for the ChipSat platform. The sail itself met a quick end, as atmospheric drag at low altitude rapidly decelerated the ultralight structure, but the communications demonstration had already been secured.

Until its deorbit in May 2026, the Alpha CubeSat confirmed successful sail deployment and carried out a remarkable series of secondary technology demonstrations. The spacecraft performed spin stabilization using only magnetorquers, coils that interact with Earth’s magnetic field to control attitude without moving parts or propellant. Its avionics were built entirely from commercial off-the-shelf components, including the first-ever flight of a RockBLOCK Iridium modem, which allows a small satellite to communicate through the Iridium satellite constellation. The chassis was fully 3D-printed, and the mission even carried the first holographic-image message plaques sent to space, part of an effort to embed durable messages on light sails that might one day travel to other stars.

The companion experiment, Sailing to the Stars, took a different approach to the same problem by testing sail deployment inside the microgravity environment of the space station itself. Funded by the ISS National Laboratory in collaboration with Rhodium Scientific, the experiment deployed six of the light sails and captured critical video footage and inertial measurement unit data. This combination gives the student engineers a direct view of how the sails unfurl and how the deployment dynamics behave when gravity does not mask subtle oscillations, snags, or asymmetric release. Understanding these kinematics on the station is far cheaper and safer than discovering them during an orbital deployment that cannot be repeated or repaired.

A particularly inventive aspect of the Sailing to the Stars experiment was the hardware itself. Two different CubeSat-scale deployer designs were tested, both built entirely from 3D-printed modular components the team describes as CubeSat-LEGO. The deployers were spin-stabilized using reaction wheels salvaged from laptop hard disk drives, and they were commanded using ordinary TV remote controls. This deliberate use of consumer hardware reflects a philosophy of radical cost reduction: if a deployment mechanism can be validated with parts costing a few dollars, the barrier to flying many more sail missions drops dramatically. By comparing video and IMU data from both designs, the team assessed which release mechanism produced more stable kinematics, and those insights now feed directly into the design of future missions.

The human story behind the hardware is as notable as the technology. The original concept for Alpha was proposed by a high school student through the Museum of Science Fiction’s International CubeSat Design Competition, and since 2016 more than 150 students have contributed to the spacecraft projects. Over half of those participants have gone on to intern or work in the aerospace industry after graduation. Verena Padres, a member of the class of 2026 who managed the Sailing to the Stars project, said that working on something that would fly in space was her dream going into college, and that she was grateful not only for hands-on spacecraft engineering experience but for the chance to lead the team from mission concept through launch.

What makes the ChipSat-sail combination significant for the broader field is the mass budget it opens up. Traditional solar sails require booms, deployment mechanisms, avionics, and power systems that can add kilograms, and that mass directly reduces the acceleration the sail can achieve for a given area. By making the sail itself the structural carrier and letting a gram-scale ChipSat handle communications and steering, the Cornell design shrinks the total system mass toward the regime where photon pressure becomes genuinely useful for propulsion. The team’s stated roadmap builds on this: future ChipSat-sail launches are planned to demonstrate steering, orbit-raising, and laser propulsion, with longer-term ambitions extending to solar system exploration missions targeting the moon, Mars, and beyond.

The ultimate destination, as the team emphasizes, is interstellar space. Initiatives such as Breakthrough Starshot have argued that sails riding on powerful laser beams could one day propel tiny spacecraft to a significant fraction of the speed of light, reaching nearby star systems within a human lifetime in the search for life beyond Earth. Demonstrating that a sail can deploy reliably in orbit, that a gram-scale spacecraft can close the communications link from orbit to ground, and that deployers can be built from printed modular parts and consumer components are all necessary steps on that path. Each of those boxes has now been checked by a student laboratory.

The Space Systems Design Studio, a lab within Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering run by Professor Mason Peck, focuses on exploiting spacecraft physics to improve space capabilities, and these missions exemplify that philosophy. With both experiments having completed all major objectives, the results published through the Small Satellite Conference proceedings, and a pipeline of students trained on flight hardware, Cornell has established that free-flying light sails are no longer a paper concept. The pizza-box sail and its chip-sized passenger have flown, talked to the ground, and come home with data, and the next generation of sails is already being designed to steer, climb, and eventually ride beams of light far beyond Earth.

Subject of Research: Orbital deployment of free-flying light sails carrying gram-scale ChipSat spacecraft

Article Title: Cornell University successfully deploys free-flying light sails in orbit

Article References: Cornell University successfully deploys free-flying light sails in orbit. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: light sails, ChipSats, CubeSat, Alpha CubeSat, Sailing to the Stars, Cornell University, solar propulsion, low Earth orbit, ISS National Laboratory, Breakthrough Starshot, 3D-printed spacecraft, student space missions

The central insight behind the work is that rankings, which look deceptively simple on the surface, are statistically very complicated objects. Rose Graves, a doctoral student studying statistics at Rice and the study’s corresponding author, explained the challenge: two experts may rank different numbers of items, disagree about the order, or even change their opinions over time. Traditional approaches to combining rankings, such as simply averaging a player’s position across several lists, can mask meaningful information, especially when a player is omitted from one list altogether or when assessments shift substantially between seasons. An average also says nothing about how confident we should be in the resulting ordering. BMRR takes a fundamentally different approach, treating each published ranking not as a final verdict but as evidence about an underlying, latent value for each player, and then using a hierarchical Bayesian framework to combine that evidence in a principled way.

The Bayesian machinery at the heart of the method is what allows it to handle the messiness of real-world ranking data. Because the model is hierarchical, it can incorporate incomplete rankings and ties, borrow information across years, and estimate how closely each individual source aligns with the overall consensus. Crucially, unlike a single definitive list produced by conventional aggregation, the output includes a measure of uncertainty. The model shows when the data strongly favor one player over another and when two players are effectively too close to separate. That distinction matters because rankings can carry real economic consequences. In professional baseball, perceptions of player value can influence trades, salary negotiations, arbitration hearings, and draft decisions. Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice and one of the authors of the paper, noted that rather than asking only who ranks first, the framework lets researchers ask how confident they are in that conclusion, why someone may be ranked highly, and how much agreement actually exists among the people doing the ranking. That kind of uncertainty quantification, she emphasized, can be extremely important when rankings are being used to inform decisions.

For their real-world test case, the researchers turned to annual lists of Major League Baseball’s best players, analyzing preseason rankings published by ESPN, CBS, Bleacher Report, Yahoo Sports, and MLB itself from 2021 through 2024. Each outlet ranked its top 100 players, but the lists varied both in who was included and where players were placed. To create a consistent pool for comparison, the researchers focused on 55 players who appeared in at least one outlet’s rankings in each of the four years. This dataset captures precisely the features that make ranking data difficult to analyze: overlapping but non-identical item sets, divergent orderings, and temporal change. By modeling all of this simultaneously, BMRR could estimate a consensus trajectory for each player across the entire period rather than producing four disconnected snapshots.

Beyond producing a consensus, the model allowed the researchers to investigate what characteristics were actually associated with higher rankings. They incorporated three player-level variables into the regression framework: age, base salary, and wins above replacement, or WAR, a widely used statistic that estimates a player’s overall contribution to his team. All three turned out to be associated with rankings. Higher WAR had the strongest positive effect, followed closely in magnitude by age, with younger players tending to rank more favorably. Higher salaries were also associated with higher rankings. Taken together, the findings suggest that media rankings reflect not just recent on-field performance but also expectations about a player’s future potential and value. This ability to attach covariates to the ranking process is one of the features that distinguishes BMRR from earlier rank-aggregation techniques, which typically treat the incoming lists as raw inputs without asking what drives them.

The analysis also produced some recognizable results at the top of the consensus. For the 2023 season, the model’s four highest-ranked players were Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Mike Trout, and Mookie Betts. All four were selected as All-Star starters that season, and Ohtani went on to win the American League Most Valuable Player Award. But the more striking demonstration of the method’s power came from looking across multiple years, which allowed the researchers to capture something a one-season ranking cannot: the difference between sustained excellence and a rapid rise or fall. Ohtani, for example, showed unusually high variability across the four-year period. After injuries affected his earlier seasons, only one of the five outlets included him in its top 100 for 2021. By 2022, two outlets ranked him No. 1, and by 2024 all five placed him in their top 10. The model captured both his eventual position near the top and the dramatic trajectory that got him there.

The framework can also calculate the probability that one player should rank above another, which makes it potentially useful for head-to-head decisions. Among four infielders who entered free agency after the 2024 season, for example, the analysis showed strong consensus that Alex Bregman, Pete Alonso, and Paul Goldschmidt ranked above Willy Adames. In practical terms, this means the model can translate a tangle of conflicting expert opinions into a quantified statement of the form: the evidence supports this ordering with a given degree of confidence. For decision-makers weighing signings, trades, or contract disputes, that is a meaningfully different kind of output from a bare list of names, because it comes with an explicit statement of how much the underlying sources actually agree.

Notably, BMRR does not only evaluate the players being ranked; it can also reveal how individual rankers behave. In the baseball analysis, MLB’s own rankings aligned most closely with the model’s overall consensus, followed closely by ESPN. Bleacher Report and Yahoo deviated more substantially from the aggregate rankings, and the authors observed that Yahoo’s lists, for instance, appeared more inclined to elevate younger, rising players over established veterans. That does not necessarily make one ranking right and another wrong. Instead, the model provides a quantitative way to see which sources tend to track the broader consensus and which bring a genuinely different perspective. When the researchers tested BMRR on simulated data, it consistently performed well compared with existing rank-aggregation methods, and its advantage was especially pronounced when rankings were incomplete, a common real-world scenario in which different people rank only their preferred subset of a much larger group.

While Major League Baseball provided a compelling proving ground, the researchers designed BMRR for a much broader problem. Rankings appear almost everywhere: search engines order websites, voters rank candidates, experts prioritize intelligence information, and clinicians may rank treatment preferences. Existing statistical approaches often struggle when different raters evaluate different items, when rankings are repeated across multiple criteria or points in time, or when analysts want to incorporate additional information about the items being ranked. Dan Kowal, a former Rice statistics faculty member now at Cornell University and second author on the paper, observed that the biggest challenges when working with ranking data are remarkably similar across different fields and industries, and that the team believes BMRR can be impactful in many areas beyond baseball. The authors have made the code for the method publicly available on GitHub so that other statisticians can apply it to their own data. As Graves put it, wherever multiple sources disagree about what belongs at the top, the framework offers a way to identify a consensus while measuring how confident that consensus should be, turning one of the oldest arguments in sports into a problem that statistics can finally address with rigor.

Subject of Research: Bayesian statistical methods for aggregating conflicting sports rankings

Article Title: Who’s really No. 1? Rice University statisticians build better way to make sense of competing sports rankings

Article References: Who’s really No. 1? Rice University statisticians build better way to make sense of competing sports rankings. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Bayesian statistics, rank aggregation, sports analytics, Major League Baseball, uncertainty quantification, hierarchical models, player rankings, wins above replacement, Rice University, Cornell University, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, rank regression

Oarfish are enormous, reaching lengths that can exceed several meters, and they are rarely encountered alive by humans. Their bodies are long and laterally compressed, and running along the top of the body is a continuous dorsal fin supported by hundreds of bone-like fin rays connected by a thin, webbed membrane. When the fish swims in its characteristic mode, these rays move in coordinated, wave-like patterns, rippling the membrane and pushing water in a way that drives the animal forward or backward. Because the propulsion comes from the fin rather than from side-to-side bending of the trunk, the oarfish can travel without the large body undulations that most elongated fishes depend on, a capability with important consequences for how it hunts and avoids detection in the open water column.

Part of the reason the fin rays have remained so poorly understood is the fragility of the animals themselves. When oarfish die, their long bodies tend to break into segments, and intact specimens suitable for detailed anatomical work are exceptionally rare. That scarcity has left scientists with a limited picture of how the fish’s unusual propulsion actually works at the tissue level. The Cornell team overcame this obstacle by combining several lines of evidence: careful dissections, histological sectioning of tissues, x-rays of a specimen held at the Smithsonian Institution, computed tomography scans made at Cornell, and frame-by-frame analyses of movies showing the dorsal fin rays in motion. Together, these methods allowed the researchers to reconstruct the anatomy of a structure that few laboratories have ever been able to examine in depth.

What the dissections and scans revealed is an architecture unlike anything described before in such detail. Each fin ray is attached at its top to the thin fin membrane. Below, at the base of the ray, the anatomy becomes more elaborate: the ray connects to cartilage, to a series of muscles, and to a ball-and-socket joint. It is this joint that grants each ray its remarkable freedom of movement, allowing it to swivel through a complete rotation rather than merely swinging back and forth in a single plane. In effect, every one of the hundreds of rays is a small, individually controlled actuator, and the fin as a whole functions as a dense array of independently steerable oars, which is fitting for a fish named for the implement it so closely resembles in action.

The coordinated motion of these rays is what turns the fin into an engine. By rotating in sequence, the rays create waves that travel along the connecting membrane, and those waves push against the water to generate thrust. The system is not limited to a single direction of travel. A section of the membrane can wave toward the posterior of the animal while another section simultaneously waves toward the anterior, allowing the oarfish to fine-tune its propulsion with a subtlety that conventional body-driven swimming cannot match. This means the fish can generate forward and backward thrust, and modulate each along different parts of the fin, all without moving its trunk laterally.

Willy Bemis, a retired Cornell University ichthyologist and one of the study’s authors, placed the finding in the context of how long-bodied fishes normally move. Most fishes with elongated bodies swim like eels, he explained, propelling themselves through a series of undulations that press water back and forth. Oarfish can do that as well, but they also do something remarkable: they use the dorsal fin to propel themselves without moving their bodies laterally. According to Bemis, the animals are continuously able to change the pattern of the dorsal fin rays and to do so very quickly, and the fin rays are, in his words, incredibly mobile. That combination of speed and flexibility in reconfiguring the wave patterns gives the oarfish a level of locomotor control that sets it apart from nearly every other fish of comparable size.

The biological payoff of this system appears to be stealth. Because the fin-driven mode of swimming does not require vigorous bending of the whole body, the oarfish can move through the water while presenting a much quieter profile than an eel-like swimmer of the same dimensions. The researchers note that this lets the animal silently stalk prey without having to swim hard to propel its entire body. For a large predator living in the open ocean, where there is little cover and where prey may be alert to disturbances, the ability to approach slowly and quietly using only a rippling fin could be a decisive advantage. It may also help explain why oarfish are so seldom seen making sudden, conspicuous movements when encountered by divers or remotely operated vehicles.

The research did not begin as a purely zoological inquiry. Rob Shepherd, a roboticist at Cornell, became interested in the oarfish’s unusual locomotion while working on a project to design a large yet quiet swimming robot, supported by a grant from the Office of Naval Research. The machine he envisioned would serve as an ocean monitoring platform, housing a range of instrumentation, and would need to swim silently forward and backward to monitor ocean health without scaring off fish and other aquatic creatures. The Navy shared an interest in such a platform. Recognizing that the oarfish had already solved, through millions of years of evolution, the problem of large-scale, low-disturbance propulsion, Shepherd consulted Bemis, and the collaboration that followed produced the anatomical study now published.

The intersection of the two disciplines is part of what makes the work notable. Engineers building bioinspired underwater vehicles have long drawn on the swimming of fishes, but most designs have focused on body undulation or on the motion of tail fins and pectoral fins. The oarfish offers a different template: a long, continuous fin along the back, driven by hundreds of independently rotating rays, capable of producing waves in either direction along its length. Translating that arrangement into a robotic actuator array could yield vehicles that maneuver precisely at low speed, hold position, and travel in reverse, all while generating minimal hydrodynamic noise. For an ocean monitoring platform meant to observe marine life rather than disturb it, those are exactly the properties a designer would want.

For now, the study stands as the first full anatomical description of the system that makes the oarfish’s swimming possible, documenting the chain from fin membrane to cartilage, muscle, and ball-and-socket joint that gives each ray its joystick-like rotation. It also underscores how much remains to be learned about large deep-sea animals simply because intact specimens are so hard to obtain. The oarfish, an animal that has haunted maritime folklore for centuries, turns out to carry in its dorsal fin a propulsion mechanism of remarkable sophistication, one that a team of anatomists and roboticists has only now begun to describe, and one that may soon ripple outward from ichthyology into the design of the next generation of quiet underwater machines.

Subject of Research: The anatomy and mechanics of oarfish dorsal fin ray rotation and its role in fin-driven swimming and bioinspired underwater robotics

Article Title: Researchers uncover the mechanics behind the oarfish's unusual swimming style

Article References: Researchers uncover the mechanics behind the oarfish's unusual swimming style. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: oarfish, fin rays, dorsal fin, swimming mechanics, Cornell University, Ichthyology and Herpetology, ball-and-socket joint, bioinspired robotics, underwater robot, deep-sea fish, locomotion, marine science

Oral squamous cell carcinoma, or OSCC, is a formidable enemy in canine medicine. Oral tumors affect an estimated half a percent of dogs over their lifetimes and account for about six percent of the canine cancer burden, with OSCC making up roughly nineteen percent of all oral tumors. The disease is locally invasive, growing through multiple anatomical planes of the jaw and surrounding tissue, causing severe pain, difficulty eating, and in some cases pathological fractures of the bone. Up to twenty percent of affected dogs show signs of metastasis by the time they are diagnosed. Left untreated, it is deadly.

The current standard of care is blunt: wide-margin surgical excision. While surgery is highly effective when non-metastatic tumors are completely removed, with very low recurrence rates, it is also highly invasive and invariably disfiguring. Roughly thirty percent of dogs have difficulty eating after surgery, and larger operations bring longer healing times, greater postoperative pain, and higher risks of complications. Radiation is occasionally used for tumors that cannot be surgically removed or as an adjunct to surgery, but the fundamental treatment paradigm has not changed in decades, even as researchers have made major strides in understanding the molecular machinery driving the disease.

That machinery centers on the RAS signaling pathway. Recent studies have shown that canine OSCC displays highly activated RAS signaling compared with healthy gingival tissue, a finding confirmed by gene set enrichment analysis comparing tumor samples with normal tissue. RAS is a small GTPase that, when activated by extracellular signals binding to receptors on the cell surface, launches a cascade of molecular events that ultimately drive cell growth and survival. The most important arm of this cascade for tumor growth is the RAS-RAF-MEK-ERK pathway, which ends with ERK initiating the gene transcription programs that keep a tumor expanding. The question facing the Cornell team was whether this pathway could be pharmacologically attacked in a way that would benefit dogs whose tumors are driven by a variety of different upstream mutations.

The answer they settled on was trametinib, a small molecule that inhibits MEK1 and MEK2, the kinases sitting in the middle of the pathway. Trametinib binds to the non-phosphorylated form of MEK in an allosteric pocket near the ATP binding site, blocking its catalytic activity and its ability to activate ERK. Crystal structures show the drug does more than simply plug the pocket: it also prevents BRAF from binding to MEK and appears to stabilize MEK’s association with KSR, the kinase suppressor of RAS, further reducing MEK’s affinity for BRAF. Crucially, the team chose trametinib precisely because it works on wildtype, unmutated proteins. Since RAS itself is rarely mutated in canine OSCC and BRAF mutations appear in only about a third of tumors, drugs like sotorasib, which bind only mutant RAS, would have left most patients out in the cold. Trametinib, by contrast, targets the pathway regardless of what triggered its activation.

The drug also came with a reassuring safety pedigree. It is FDA-approved in humans for BRAF-mutant melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer, typically alongside the BRAF inhibitor dabrafenib. A phase I trial in eighteen dogs had already demonstrated an acceptable safety profile over nine weeks of treatment, and the European Medicines Agency reported the drug was well tolerated in beagles over thirteen weeks and fully eliminated within about seven days. Its high oral bioavailability in both species meant it could be given at home, avoiding the stress and expense of repeated hospital visits.

The trial itself was designed with a do-no-harm philosophy. Twenty dogs with histologically confirmed OSCC were enrolled between October 2023 and February 2025, after approval by Cornell’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and with informed consent from owners. Dogs received daily oral trametinib at doses escalating from 0.015 to 0.035 milligrams per kilogram, with examinations every two weeks including caliper tumor measurements, complete blood counts, and serum chemistry panels. Full tumor staging with contrast-enhanced computed tomography was performed at the start, around day 28, and around day 56, and tumor volumes were measured from CT slices by a board-certified veterinary radiologist. Response was categorized using veterinary RECIST criteria, and any dog showing progressive disease was removed immediately and returned to standard care. Because the typical two-week wait before surgery would not be compromised, owners could try the drug without sacrificing the earliest opportunity for curative excision.

The results were remarkable in some patients. One dog achieved a complete response, with no tumor detectable by CT, and five achieved partial responses, giving an overall response rate of thirty percent. Five more dogs had stable disease, meaning fifty-five percent of the cohort derived clinical benefit. Some tumors responded with startling speed: two dogs’ tumors had shrunk to less than one cubic centimeter after just two weeks of treatment, and in five dogs the mean volume reduction at the first post-treatment evaluation was forty-five percent. In two responsive patients, bone window CT scans showed actual bone regrowth at the tumor site, visible at 28 and 56 days after treatment began, a sign of genuine tissue healing rather than mere tumor shrinkage. In some cases the visible portions of tumors became difficult or impossible to identify by external inspection.

Safety data were equally encouraging. No high-grade adverse events were detected in any dog, though about thirty percent of owners reported transient flatulence that resolved on its own. Bloodwork showed mostly grade 1 and grade 2 abnormalities that were typically no worse than pre-treatment values. The only two grade 3 events, elevated alkaline phosphatase in two dogs, were preceded by grade 2 liver enzyme elevations present before treatment began, suggesting preexisting liver pathology unrelated to the drug. No dog was removed from the study or had its dose modified because of side effects, and no neutropenia was observed. Notably, a prior phase I study had flagged hypertension and proteinuria in some dogs at similar doses, but the Cornell team did not observe owner-reported behaviors consistent with those conditions, though blood pressure and urinalysis were not directly monitored.

The most scientifically compelling finding emerged when tumors were stratified by BRAF mutational status. Seven dogs carried tumors harboring the BRAF p.V595E mutation, the canine equivalent of the human V600E mutation, and these responded dramatically better than BRAF wildtype tumors. Among BRAF-mutant cases, one dog had a complete response and four had partial responses, for a seventy-one percent objective response rate and a mean volume reduction of seventy-one percent in responding tumors. Wildtype tumors, by contrast, showed a mean reduction of only seven percent among responders, and total clinical benefit in that group was just eight percent. The difference was statistically significant at p equals 0.01. Because BRAF genotyping requires only simple PCR amplification and Sanger sequencing, the authors suggest it could readily be implemented by diagnostic laboratories to identify dogs most likely to benefit. The team recommends a starting dose of 0.030 milligrams per kilogram daily while cautioning that dose-response analyses were underpowered. Limitations remain, including the absence of an untreated control group, the lack of long-term recurrence and survival data, and the small cohort size, but the study establishes trametinib as a safe, orally available neoadjuvant option that can shrink tumors in about a third of dogs before surgery, and in the majority of those whose tumors are BRAF-mutant, with results visible in as little as two weeks.

Subject of Research: Clinical trial of the MEK inhibitor trametinib for treating oral squamous cell carcinoma in dogs

Article Title: Clinical application of the MEK inhibitor trametinib in dogs with oral squamous cell carcinoma

Article References: Katt, W. P., Balkman, C. E., Byron, M., Carney, P. C., Chrostek, E., Drozd, M. E., Duhamel, G. E., Fiani, N., Hume, K. R., King, A. L., Sylvester, S. R., Todd-Donato, A. B., Winokur, C. E., Wright, A. L., & Peralta, S. (2025). Clinical application of the MEK inhibitor trametinib in dogs with oral squamous cell carcinoma. Veterinary Oncology, 2(1), Article 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44356-025-00042-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44356-025-00042-3

Keywords: trametinib, MEK inhibitor, oral squamous cell carcinoma, canine cancer, BRAF mutation, RAS signaling, veterinary oncology, targeted therapy, clinical trial, neoadjuvant treatment, Cornell University, dog health

The study, published in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, found that consumers showed no consistent bias against the color of wines made from hybrid grape varieties. When evaluated alongside pinot noirs from Burgundy, Oregon and the Finger Lakes, several hybrid wines ranked among the most visually appealing in the entire panel. More striking still, color, regardless of variety, turned out to be a weak predictor of whether drinkers actually enjoyed what was in the glass. The statistical relationship between how much panelists liked a wine’s appearance and how much they liked it after tasting explained only about eight percent of the variation in their responses, leaving taste and aroma to dominate the verdict.

For Anna Katharine Mansfield, associate professor of enology at Cornell AgriTech and lead author of the work, the question had been nagging at her for years. Prior to coming to Cornell, she worked with breeders at the University of Minnesota, where there was a persistent assumption that consumers would reject a wine if its color did not look sufficiently Vitis vinifera-like. Yet, as she notes, no one had ever actually studied that question directly. The research was also motivated by wine chemistry, according to co-author Catherine Dadmun, a food science doctoral student. In Europe, historic restrictions govern certain chemical color compounds that appear uniquely in hybrid grapes, and that regulatory history has fed an assumption that the compounds must produce low-quality color. The team set out to clarify what is and is not important for consumer perception of color quality from a chemical composition standpoint.

The stakes extend well beyond academic curiosity. As winemaking regions across North America and Europe grapple with more erratic weather, late frosts and increasing fungal disease pressure, hybrid cultivars offer a compelling alternative to the European grapes that have dominated fine wine for centuries. Varieties such as marquette, Maréchal Foch and St. Croix can be grown with far fewer pesticide applications and can survive winters that would devastate conventional vineyards. For growers confronting shorter windows for spraying, shifting pest pressures and unseasonable cold, that resilience is not a niche advantage but an increasingly central part of vineyard economics. Commercial adoption, however, has been slowed by persistent doubts about whether consumers will accept the resulting wines, doubts that often center on appearance rather than flavor.

To test one of those doubts directly, the research team recruited 82 regular red wine drinkers through the Cornell Sensory Evaluation Center. Panelists were asked to evaluate eight commercial red wines: five made from hybrid cultivars sourced from New York, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Iowa, plus pinot noirs from three regions, all presented without any indication of which was which. The design separated three distinct judgments. First, panelists rated how much they liked each wine’s appearance. Second, they rated how much they expected to enjoy the wine based on color alone. Finally, after tasting, they rated how much they actually liked it. This structure allowed the researchers to disentangle the visual halo effect, in which appearance shapes expectation, from the lived experience of aroma, texture and flavor on the palate.

The results cut in two directions at once. Color did matter, but mostly as a prelude. Wines that appeared lighter or showed more yellow and brown tones scored lower for visual appeal and generated weaker expectations before tasting. Three wines clustered at the bottom of the visual rankings: a Finger Lakes pinot noir, a Norton from Tennessee and a corot noir from near Albany, New York. Notably, that bottom tier was not exclusively hybrid; a pinot noir from a prestigious viticultural region sat alongside the two hybrids, suggesting that pale or brown-tinged color is a general vulnerability rather than a hybrid-specific flaw. The critical finding came when panelists tasted all eight wines: color’s predictive power largely evaporated, and the wines that looked least promising did not consistently taste worst.

The chemistry behind wine color helps explain why the industry’s assumptions deserve scrutiny. Red wine color derives primarily from anthocyanins, the pigments extracted from grape skins during fermentation, and hybrid grapes carry distinctive anthocyanin profiles that differ from those of pure Vitis vinifera varieties. European regulators historically restricted certain of these compounds, and that regulatory posture hardened into a market prejudice: if the compounds are treated differently, the reasoning went, the color they produce must be inferior. The Cornell data challenge that chain of logic. When the researchers evaluated hue-liking and overall appearance-liking, Dadmun observed, the pinot noirs and hybrid grapes were largely in the same pool, meaning that consumers responded to the visual qualities of the wines themselves rather than to any detectable hybrid signature.

The finding holds an implicit challenge to long-standing wine industry assumptions. Darker wines have been associated with higher quality for so long that the bias has shaped marketing, criticism and even breeding priorities, making some winemakers reluctant to promote hybrids at all. But the Cornell data showed no meaningful correlation between color intensity and actual liking. What seemed to drive the lower visual scores for the three least-liked wines was not lightness per se, but a tendency toward brownish, yellow-tinged hues rather than the deep red-purple that consumers associate with a young, well-made red. In other words, drinkers are not reading depth of color as a quality signal so much as reading hue as a freshness signal, and a wine that leans brick or amber risks reading as old or oxidized regardless of what is actually in the bottle.

Mansfield also points to a practical wrinkle in how color judgments are made in the real world: evaluations typically happen in the glass, not the bottle. Because green glass is more protective against light damage, wine is rarely sold in clear bottles, which means most consumers never see the color until the wine is already poured. By that point, the purchase decision has been made, and the sensory experience of tasting is about to overtake any visual impression. Color, she suggests, is a non-issue in some ways, and her hope is that people breeding hybrids can simply worry less about it. That message lands at a pivotal moment, as breeders across cold-climate regions continue releasing new cultivars designed for sustainability as much as for style.

For an industry navigating climate disruption, the implications are considerable. If consumer acceptance of hybrid wines hinges far more on flavor than on hue, then growers and producers can invest in viticultural and enological quality, aroma development and site expression rather than chasing pigment targets bred from Vitis vinifera expectations. The study, conducted as an observational sensory trial with regular red wine drinkers rather than trained experts, offers a consumer-grounded counterweight to decades of anecdote. It suggests that the visual gatekeeping that has kept hybrid wines out of premium conversations rests on a shaky empirical foundation, and that the palette, in the end, matters far less than the palate.

Subject of Research: Consumer perception of red wine color and quality in interspecific hybrid grape varieties

Article Title: Hue cares? Cornell study says wine color isn't the whole picture

Article References: Hue cares? Cornell study says wine color isn't the whole picture. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: wine color, hybrid grapes, Vitis vinifera, enology, anthocyanins, sensory evaluation, consumer perception, climate change, pinot noir, Cornell University, viticulture, American Journal of Enology and Viticulture

The key to the new platform is the integration of three functions on a scale measured in tens of micrometres. Each robot carries a temperature sensor, a programmable CMOS control circuit and arrays of electrochemical actuators that beat like biological cilia. The actuators are built from a titanium–palladium stack that bends when voltage is applied, driving ions into and out of the palladium layer and causing controlled bending at engineered hinges. Because the cilia are hinged, with two rigid panels connected by rotational joints, their beat cycle can be programmed to break the time-reversal symmetry that governs fluid motion at low Reynolds number. At microscopic scales, where viscosity dominates over inertia, fluid flows are reversible unless the stroke and the recovery stroke differ in shape, a constraint famously articulated in Lighthill’s analysis of flagellar hydrodynamics. The hinged design allows the robots to sweep the fluid with a fast, extended stroke and a slow, folded recovery, producing net pumping in a chosen direction.

Powering and controlling such tiny machines is a formidable engineering challenge, and the team solved it with microscale photovoltaic regions that convert incident laser light at 635 nanometres into electrical current for both the logic and the actuators. The binary sensing circuit switches its output phase configuration at threshold temperatures of 26 and 30 degrees Celsius, and can deliver actuation frequencies ranging from 0.4 to 12.8 hertz, with 1.6 hertz used for cilium beating in the reported demonstrations. The photovoltaic supply generates currents of roughly 0.78 microamperes at one sun of illumination, rising to about 4.8 microamperes at ten suns, enough to run the circuit and drive the cilia without any tether. This architecture builds on earlier work from the same collaboration, including electronically integrated mass-manufactured microscopic robots, cilia metasurfaces for programmable microfluidic manipulation, and microscopic robots with onboard digital control, but it adds something those systems lacked: a genuine sensory loop in which the robot’s action depends on what it measures.

The researchers demonstrated three distinct temperature-responsive modalities, each producing a different coupling between robot behaviour and environmental cues. The first is binary sensing, in which the onboard sensor acts as a threshold detector. Below the threshold the cilia pump in one direction; above it, the circuit reconfigures the wiring to the actuators and the pumping reverses. The team showed that this simple switch can reverse unidirectional flow, reverse the rotation of a single vortex, or reverse both vortices in a symmetric counter-rotating pair, all in response to nothing more than the ambient temperature crossing a set point. Because the flow patterns are generated by arrays of individually wired cilia, the same sensing principle can be routed into dramatically different hydrodynamic outcomes simply by changing how the circuit output is distributed across the array.

The second modality replaces the sharp threshold with continuous sensing, implemented using pulse-coupled oscillator circuits built from dynamic-leakage-suppression logic gates. In this scheme, the oscillation frequency of the onboard circuit depends on temperature through the exponential dependence of subthreshold leakage currents, so the beat frequency of the cilia rises smoothly as the fluid warms. The pumping speed therefore tracks temperature continuously rather than switching between two states. The oscillator architecture also supports synchronisation: coupling pulses from a designated leader oscillator advance the follower until the two lock with a fixed phase offset, a mechanism related to the pulse-coupled designs previously used for coordinating autonomous microscopic machines through local electronic pulses. This phase-locking provides a route to coordinated actuation across a cilia array without any central controller.

The third modality exploits spatial temperature gradients rather than absolute temperature. Using a scalable ultra-low-power temperature gradient sensor based on pulse-coupled oscillators, the robot determines which side of its body is warmer and aligns its pumping accordingly. When the imposed gradient is reversed, the leader and follower roles in the oscillator network exchange, and the pumping direction flips. The result is a microscopic machine that orients its fluid-mechanical output along the local thermal landscape, in loose analogy to the way ciliated protists orient their swimming relative to environmental cues. Together, the three modalities, threshold switching, continuous modulation and gradient alignment, form a toolkit for programming how a microrobot’s behaviour responds to its surroundings.

The most striking demonstration is the closing of the loop. Because the cilia-driven flows move fluid around, they transport heat, and the team showed that a collective array of cilia can actively reshape the local thermal field. In their experiments, unidirectional pumping advected fluid from a cooler region towards a hotter region, flattening the temperature gradient that the sensors were measuring. As the temperature field changed, the oscillator frequencies shifted, which in turn altered the pumping, which further modified the thermal field. The researchers modelled this feedback with a reduced two-dimensional description of thermally advected flow and quantified it through a thermal stretching length that grows cycle by cycle, fitting the dynamics with an exponential law. The system thus exhibits a genuine closed-loop interaction among sensing, actuation and environment, the microscopic analogue of an organism modifying its own habitat.

The experimental platform itself is a tour de force of integration. The devices were fabricated at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, with the CMOS circuits exposed by etching the top dielectric, then interconnected with titanium–platinum leads, re-encapsulated in silicon dioxide, shielded with a grounded layer, and finally released with an aluminium nitride sacrificial layer before the titanium–palladium actuator stack and rigid panels were added. Fluid temperatures were controlled with a hotplate and characterised by infrared thermography on dry samples, which showed a uniform region with a spatial standard deviation of about 0.11 degrees Celsius and a gradient region of roughly 0.5 degrees Celsius per millimetre; in liquid, where phosphate-buffered saline strongly absorbs mid-infrared radiation, the team used a micro-thermocouple instead. Flow fields were measured with particle image velocimetry and compared against three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of the beating cilia, validating the theoretical model of the two-hinged kinematics.

The implications reach well beyond the laboratory demonstration. Artificial cilia that sense and respond to their environment could regulate temperature and chemical gradients in lab-on-chip systems, create fluid microhabitats for recruiting cells or controlling microbiomes in biomedical contexts, and serve as building blocks for emergent collective behaviours in swarms of autonomous micromachines. The theoretical framing, developed with physicists studying non-reciprocal phase transitions and adaptive active solids, suggests that populations of such robots could self-organise into patterns no single robot is programmed to produce, much as bacterial colonies generate large-scale spiral waves from local interactions. Because the platform is built with standard CMOS processes and mass-manufacturable techniques, scaling to larger and more capable microrobotic collectives appears feasible. The work was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, with additional support from the Kavli Institute at Cornell and Westlake University, and the team has filed patent applications covering the actuators and control electronics.

What makes this advance conceptually important is the shift from open-loop microrobots, which execute fixed motions, to machines that participate in a dynamic dialogue with their world. In nature, the coupling between organism behaviour and environmental modification underlies nest construction, swarm thermoregulation and microbiome recruitment; until now, engineered microrobots could sense or act, but rarely both in a feedback loop. By embedding thermal sensing, programmable logic and ciliary actuation on a single chiplet smaller than a grain of salt, the Cornell-led team has created the first microscopic robotic platform in which the environment is not merely a medium the robot moves through but a variable the robot actively regulates. As the researchers and their collaborators refine the sensing modalities and extend them to chemical and mechanical cues, the boundary between living, environment-shaping matter and engineered machines at the microscale looks set to blur further.

Subject of Research: Microscopic robots with onboard sensing, logic and cilia actuators that couple their behaviour to thermal environmental cues in a closed loop

Article Title: Microscopic robots that sense and reshape their environment

Article References: Wang, W., Zhang, J., Chaudhari, P., Shim, K., Severn, J., Zheng, C., Liang, Z., Ji, Y., Pelster, J., Griniasty, I., Seara, D., Vitelli, V., Lauga, E., Apsel, A., & Cohen, I. (2026). Microscopic robots that sense and reshape their environment. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01709-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01709-x

Keywords: microrobotics, artificial cilia, CMOS, electrochemical actuators, temperature sensing, microfluidics, closed-loop control, NEMS, collective behaviour, thermal regulation, Cornell University, Nature Electronics