Welcome to Bill Ray’s home page.
You’ll find information about Bill here along with occasional musings about various topics he finds interesting, amusing, or annoying.
Take a look and around, and feel free to drop a note on the comments page.
Meantime, check out the latest science news below.
- Scientists just found a sugar switch that protects your brain from Alzheimer’son June 30, 2025 at 2:04 pm
Scientists have uncovered a surprising sugar-related mechanism inside brain cells that could transform how we fight Alzheimer’s and other dementias. It turns out neurons don’t just store sugar for fuel—they reroute it to power antioxidant defenses, but only if an enzyme called GlyP is active. When this sugar-clearing system is blocked, toxic tau protein builds up and accelerates brain degeneration.
- This AI tracks lung tumors as you breathe — and it might save liveson June 30, 2025 at 1:05 pm
An AI system called iSeg is reshaping radiation oncology by automatically outlining lung tumors in 3D as they shift with each breath. Trained on scans from nine hospitals, the tool matched expert clinicians, flagged cancer zones some missed, and could speed up treatment planning while reducing deadly oversights.
- Ancient DNA reveals leprosy hit the Americas long before colonizationon June 30, 2025 at 12:07 pm
Leprosy’s tale stretches from 5,000-year-old skeletons in Eurasia to a startling 4,000-year-old case in Chile, revealing that the rare strain Mycobacterium lepromatosis haunted the Americas millennia before Europeans arrived. Armed with cutting-edge ancient-DNA sleuthing, scientists have pieced together remarkably well-preserved genomes that challenge the idea of leprosy as purely a colonial import and hint that the disease may have homegrown American roots awaiting confirmation by future finds.
- JWST unlocks 10-billion-year mystery of how galaxies shape themselveson June 30, 2025 at 10:43 am
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists spotted thin and thick disks in galaxies as far back as 10 billion years ago—something never seen before. These observations reveal that galaxies first formed thick, chaotic disks, and only later developed the calm, thin disks seen in modern spirals like the Milky Way.
- Planets may start forming before stars even finish growingon June 30, 2025 at 10:19 am
In a stellar nursery 460 light-years away, astronomers sharpened old ALMA data and spotted crisp rings and spirals swirling around 27 infant stars—evidence that planets start taking shape just a few hundred thousand years after their suns ignite, far earlier than anyone expected.