‘No mother ever really believes her child is going to die,’ said Elizabeth Glaser. Her young daughter had succumbed to the AIDS virus and died of the disease just after her seventh birthday. ‘I didn’t. But after two years of struggling, in our home and community, to achieve some balance and quality of life . . . I had to face the reality that our daughter Ariel was going to die.’
This is how Glaser recalled the heartbreaking story in front of a committee of the US House of Representatives, investigating priorities in AIDS research, some four years ago. With her husband Paul Michael Glaser, star of the Starsky and Hutch TV series of the late 1970s, Glaser had come before the committee to plead for government funding for pediatric AIDS research. During Ariel’s birth in 1981, Glaser had haemorrhaged and was given a blood transfusion. Unknown to anyone – at the time, AIDS and the virus that causes it were unheard of – the blood was contaminated with HIV. Glaser breast-fed her baby, passing on the virus.
‘I watched my daughter suffer from symptoms that adults didn’t seem affected by,’ Glaser told the committee. ‘I watched her central nervous system atrophy as she became, at the age of six, unable to walk, talk, or even sit up.’ Why had this happened, she asked. And why had her son – born in 1984, three years after Ariel – also become infected when many children born to HIV-positive mothers do not?
It is a conundrum that has yet to be solved by researchers who study the transmission of AIDS from mother to child. Every year…
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
