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Immunotherapy injection shrinks tumours in patients with head and neck cancer

A targeted cancer treatment given via a simple injection under the skin shrank tumours in more than one third of patients with recurrent and/or metastatic head and neck cancer whose disease has stopped responding to standard treatments.

New results from phase Ib/II OrigAMI‑4 clinical trial, by scientists from The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, confirmed tumour shrinkage in 42 per cent of patients treated with the drug amivantamab, alongside encouraging survival outcomes in a group of patients who until now had very limited options. The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, are based on blinded independent central review (BICR), where outcomes were checked by external experts who did not know which treatment each patient received, helping ensure the results are fair, unbiased, and reliable.

Researchers say the findings provide very strong evidence to support the further development of amivantamab as a potential treatment for head and neck cancer, a disease which affects around 12,800 people in the UK each year and is the sixth most common cancer worldwide.

It’s Ethics. Not Tech Ethics

Every startup now has an “AI breakthrough.” Often a blockchain one, too.

Then I noticed a second fad growing just as fast: the ethicists. AI ethicists. Blockchain ethicists. Startup ethicists. VC ethicists. Unicorn ethicists. Someone called them “ethics natives.”

So back in 2024 I wrote a short, blunt piece arguing something that still gets me in trouble:

There is no such thing as tech There is only

And one other thing, which I’ll let the piece name for itself.

This isn’t a word game. Most of the #AIEthics I see starts with the trolley problem and works outward from edge cases. I think that’s backward, and in the piece I explain why it may do more harm than good.

Continue reading “It’s Ethics. Not Tech Ethics” | >

Thursday, September 17th

‘It’s open source so it’s basically American now’

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Bypassing the Speed Limit for Thermally Driven Demagnetization

Contrary to expectations, the magnetization dynamics of a ferromagnet can be accelerated by increasing temperature, laser excitation, or magnetic field—a behavior that holds promise for high-speed spintronics.

The ability to control the spins of electrons has given rise to the field of spintronics, opening the door to faster, more energy-efficient electronics exploiting the spin degree of freedom of electrons rather than their electrical charge. However, controlling spin in real devices is still slower than controlling charge in conventional electronics. In the past 30 years, femtosecond light pulses have emerged as a promising means of rapid control in spin-based electronics. A magnetic material responds to external excitation most strongly when the system nears its phase-transition temperature. Unfortunately, that’s also where the response decelerates drastically—a phenomenon known as critical slowing down [1–3].

Stable frontal signals, flexible hippocampal ones: How the brain preserves context as goals change

While humans are completing a task, they can temporarily store information in their minds while also manipulating and adapting it based on changing circumstances. To support this capability, known as working memory, the brain needs to hold onto important context about a task, updating it when rules, goals or circumstances change.

Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the University of Toronto and other institutions recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding how neurons preserve context over time as the goals of an ongoing task change. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that the brain can represent the same information through different patterns of neuronal activity that vary in stability and flexibility.

“We were inspired by the remarkable ability of an individual to relentlessly pursue a goal over long periods of time, while still remaining flexible and encoding information about a changing environment,” Hristos S. Courellis, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.

New simulations link unusual particle diffusion to yielding in soft jammed matter

Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, emulsions, foams and gels often display complex and unusual behaviors compared with ordinary solids or liquids. From a mechanical point of view, for instance, they can resist deformation like solids, but they can also start to flow like liquids when a sufficiently strong external drive is applied. This transition from solid-like to liquid-like behavior, known as “yielding,” is central to the physics of soft amorphous materials and to many industrial and biological processes.

Some of these systems are also athermal: They are made of particles large enough that thermal motion plays no role in their dynamics. Their microscopic motion is therefore governed mainly by mechanical driving and interactions with neighboring particles, making their behavior even more unusual and intriguing.

A new study published in Communications Physics, establishes a connection between the mechanical yielding of soft athermal matter and a distinctive form of microscopic dynamics: Fickian yet non-Gaussian diffusion (FnGD). This phenomenon, also referred to as Brownian yet non-Gaussian diffusion, was first reported in 2009 and has since been identified in a variety of molecular systems, as well as in thermal and active soft matter, especially for particles moving in heterogeneous environments.

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