Fascinating article which discusses researchers’ explorations into why lightning occurs, including a recent hypothesis that cosmic rays trigger lightning cascades within Earth’s clouds!
Armed with a slew of new instruments, physicists are closing in on one of nature’s oldest mysteries — and finding that storm clouds are seething with violent and unexpected phenomena.
Molecular machines are regarded as the next step in miniaturization. Their models can be found in living cells, where molecular motors convert energy and generate movement. Scientists have been working for decades to artificially replicate such systems. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for this research.
Molecular motors powered directly by an electric current have been in existence since 2011. Until now, however, they have only functioned as molecules on a surface, driven by the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope.
For their new machine, the researchers drew inspiration from one of humanity’s oldest documented machines: the Archimedes screw, which transports water uphill. The researchers applied the principle of the Archimedes screw at the molecular level. Instead of water, electrons flow through a helical structure, setting it in rotation.
This is exciting news!
LOS ANGELES and STUDIO CITY, Calif., Oct. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the International Myeloma Foundation (IMF) announced the launch of the US Myeloma Network (USMN) — a first-of-its-kind national clinical research network designed to accelerate the prevention and cure of multiple myeloma by advancing scientific discovery, expanding access to clinical trials, and ensuring more patients benefit from breakthrough therapies. Johnson & Johnson joins this initiative as the network’s first industry collaborator. The USMN will focus on clinical trials with the potential to change clinical practice across care settings, accelerating the delivery of innovative therapies and new treatment approaches to patients.
The USMN connects leading academic centers, community oncology practices and industry partners through a coordinated national infrastructure designed to streamline trial activation, reduce operational barriers, expand equitable access to clinical trials, and accelerate the development of more effective therapies across the continuum of myeloma care – from prevention and early intervention through relapsed and refractory disease.
“The future of myeloma depends on our ability to bring scientific innovation to patients more quickly and more equitably,” said S. Vincent Rajkumar, MD, Mayo Clinic, Chairperson of the International Myeloma Foundation. “The US Myeloma Network creates an unprecedented opportunity to unite investigators across the country through a coordinated research infrastructure that accelerates clinical trials, expands patient participation, and advances the discoveries that will ultimately lead to the prevention—and one day the cure—of multiple myeloma.”
Legendary philosopher Peter Singer defends effective altruism. I don’t self-identify as an EA, but I do think highly of the core thesis of using data to decide what actions will do the most good. I do consider myself a longtermist — a philosophical stance which is often thought of as existing under the EA umbrella. Note: there is a common misconception that longtermists *only* care about the long term future, which is false. Most care about the long term future as one major priority, but certainly don’t think we should ignore the issues of today.
When the US Department of War posted on X that they were focused on “Americanism, not effective altruism”, it said much more about them than about the movement I helped to launch 15 years ago.
The simple fact is that while President Trump’s popularity has reached an almost unprecedented-26% approval, rivalled by only Nixon after Watergate, the movement that his administration is spending its time attacking enjoys majority support among those who are familiar with its tenets.
Perhaps that’s why The Economist cover this week has termed it “this century’s biggest idea” because ultimately, a movement focused on the simple question of how to do the most good possible with the resources we have is not, as an internal memo circulating in the White House termed it, “putting shrimp over families”
Cephalopods like squids may be as close to an alien intelligence as we’ll ever know, with a diverse evolutionary lineage from a wholly different world beneath the waves.
Yet despite our uniquely developed brains and bodies, we are all works in progress through a common process.
Humans and other animals constantly undergo an ephemeral, reversible transcriptomic remixing through what’s known as ‘adenosine deaminase acting on RNA’ or ADAR-mediated RNA editing.
You don’t need medication to improve cholesterol levels. A few simple dietary tweaks can make a serious difference.
In the classical Universe, the arrow of time flies one way – but in the quantum realm, where classical physics breaks down, could even time’s direction be ripe for the tweaking?
The ability to manipulate the direction of quantum evolution could offer new ways to process information – with implications especially for quantum computing.
And it may be within reach.
It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that there is at least one type of information processing and manipulation that does not readily lend itself to explanations that assume that all final causes are subsumed within brain, or more generally, central nervous system mechanisms. The cases in question are those in which the conscious act of wilfully altering the mode by which experiential information is processed itself changes, in systematic ways, the cerebral mechanisms used. There is a growing recognition of the theoretical importance of applying experimental paradigms that use directed mental effort to produce systematic and predictable changes in brain function (e.g. Beauregard et al. 2001; Ochsner et al. 2002). These wilfully induced brain changes are generally accomplished through training in, and the applied use of, cognitive reattribution and the attentional re-contextualization of conscious experience. Furthermore, an accelerating number of studies in the neuroimaging literature significantly support the thesis that, again, with appropriate training and effort, people can systematically alter neural circuitry associated with a variety of mental and physical states that are frankly pathological (Schwartz et al. 1996; Schwartz 1998; Musso et al. 1999; Paquette et al. 2003). A recent review of this and the related neurological literature has coined the term ‘self-directed neuroplasticity’ to serve as a general description of the principle that focused training and effort can systematically alter cerebral function in a predictable and potentially therapeutic manner (Schwartz & Begley 2002).
From a theoretical perspective, perhaps the most important aspect of this line of research is the empirical support it provides for a new science-based way of conceptualizing the interface between mind/consciousness and brain. Until recently, virtually all attempts to understand the functional activity of the brain have been based, at least implicitly, on some principles of classic physics that have been known to be fundamentally false for three-quarters of a century. According to the classic conception of the world, all causal connections between observables are explainable in terms of mechanical interactions between material realities. But this restriction on modes of causation is not fully maintained by the currently applied principles of physics, which consequently offer an alternative conceptual foundation for the scientific description and modelling of the causal structure of self-directed neuroplasticity.
The advantages for neuroscience and neuropsychology of using the conceptual framework of contemporary physics, as opposed to that of classic physics, stem from five basic facts. First, terms such as ‘feeling’, ‘knowing’ and ‘effort’, because they are intrinsically mentalistic and experiential, cannot be described exclusively in terms of material structure. Second, to explain the observable properties of large physical systems that depend sensitively upon the behaviours of their atomic constituents, the founders of contemporary physical theory were led to introduce explicitly into the basic causal structure of physics certain important choices made by human beings about how they will act. Third, within this altered conceptual framework these choices are described in mentalistic (i.e. psychological) language. Fourth, terminology of precisely this kind is critically necessary for the design and execution of the experiments in which the data demonstrating the core phenomena of self-directed neuroplasticity are acquired and described. Fifth, the injection of psychologically described choices on the part of human agents into the causal theoretical structure can be achieved for experiments in neuroscience by applying the same mathematical rules that were developed to account for the structure of phenomena in the realm of atomic science.
Early results of the first clinical trial to evaluate the drug invikafusp alfa (invika) in humans indicate that the treatment may be capable of managing cancers that have rebuffed most other interventions, including standard immunotherapy.
A study led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Mass General Brigham and Memorial Sloan Kettering found that, at optimal doses, invika was well tolerated and, in patients whose solid tumors had resisted standard immunotherapy, halted disease progression in most and shrank tumors in some. The work is published in the journal Nature Medicine.
“Patients whose tumors are advanced—particularly tumors that don’t respond well to immunotherapy—often have their backs against a wall. Few options remain once you reach that point, but these results highlight a more precise means of stimulating antitumor immunity that could provide another solution,” said co-corresponding author James Gulley, clinical director at the Center for Cancer Research (CCR), part of NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI).
The immortal jellyfish is capable of winding back its lifecycle to become young again. Scientists are unlocking its cellular secrets to find ways human cells could rejuvenate too.
