Scientists found “youthful” brain cells that may help some people resist Alzheimer’s symptoms.
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Planck and the consciousness puzzle
Most of us, scientists included, see physics as an attempt to provide an objective description of the world independent of human subjectivity and consciousness. Yet, Max Planck, one of major scientific figures of the twentieth century and the founder of quantum mechanics, stated as a result of his investigations and experiments: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” Should we listen to Planck? Can we plausibly see matter as derivative of consciousness? Might doing so help solve the deep puzzles facing contemporary physics and overcome the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ itself? Or does this outlook, as Einstein argued, undermine the very success and objectivity of science and take us back to a world of superstition?
Investigational vaccine generates immune response to KRAS mutations in pancreatic cancer study
ROCHESTER, Minn. — An investigational vaccine helped the immune system recognize and respond to mutations that drive most pancreatic cancers, according to results from a randomized phase 2 clinical trial led by Mayo Clinic researchers. The findings, published in Nature Medicine, will help researchers design a larger phase 3 clinical trial.
Nearly every patient evaluated after receiving the vaccine developed an immune response against mutated KRAS, a gene that plays a major role in pancreatic cancer. Mayo Clinic researchers also found that patients with stronger immune responses tended to remain free of disease longer.
“Historically, pancreatic cancer has been very difficult to treat with immunotherapy,” says Ben George, M.B.B.S, M.D., a Mayo Clinic medical oncologist and lead author of the study. “What is encouraging is that we were able to generate a strong immune response against KRAS mutations in nearly every patient we evaluated. In an exploratory analysis, patients with greater immune responses to the vaccine appeared protected with longer disease-free survival times.”
Body temperature may drive the higher risk of autoimmune conditions in women
Autoimmune conditions are much more common in women than men, which could partly be due to the fluctuating body temperatures that occur during the menstrual cycle and menopause
Scientists discover new Alzheimer’s drug that repairs DNA damage and reduces brain inflammation
Scientists have discovered that a drug originally developed for spinal cord injuries can tackle several key features of Alzheimer’s disease, including DNA damage and inflammation. Already tested for initial safety in humans, the experimental treatment could offer a faster path toward therapies that target the disease at its roots.
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639 likes, — scicuriox on October 24, 2026
Enhancing the cell’s natural recycling center improves Alzheimer’s features in animal models
A defining feature of Alzheimer’s disease is the abnormal, sustained accumulation of protein aggregates such as tau inside brain cells, which disrupts the cells’ normal functions. As time passes, brain cells stop working and die, leading to a gradual decline in memory and thinking skills and other symptoms of this condition.
One goal of researchers is to find ways to reduce or stop the accumulation of tau and other related proteins to slow down or prevent disease progression.
At Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital, a team of researchers has just taken a step in that direction. They have discovered that reducing the levels of a protein called Slingshot-1 has the unanticipated effect of improving Alzheimer’s features in animal models and human cells in the lab.
GhostAction Attackers Target Nearly 23,000 GitHub Repos with Credential-Stealing Malware
Despite these changes, the IP address (“193.32.204[.]199”) is one indicator of compromise that has been constant, allowing organizations and developers to check if their repositories have been impacted by GhostAction.
“Between October 19 — 21, the attackers also went back to CI with a different goal,” Gile told The Hacker News. “The new workflows are tailored to each repo and list its real secret names, and some request a GitHub OIDC token and try to use it to assume AWS roles. The code looks inert as written, because it depends on a role ARN the files never define, so I can’t say whether it has worked anywhere.”
In a follow-up update shared on October 27, 2026, GitGuardian said the GhostAction operator pushed over 72,000 commits to 22,964 public repositories between October 13 and 21, 2026, out of which 7,989 are new victims.
One magnet turns origami robot into machine logic
Researchers in the lab of Glaucio Paulino have been developing lightweight, hollow robots composed of four distinct segments which can expand
Using Pulsars to Probe Early Growth of Black Holes
Researchers have used radio observations of rapidly spinning neutron stars to search for signals from supermassive black hole pairs at the dawn of galaxy formation.
In our lifetimes, an amazing thing has happened: Black holes have advanced from “remarkable inventions of the human mind” [1] to empirical objects studied with telescopes and gravitational-wave detectors. A major puzzle in black hole astronomy is understanding the assembly of “supermassive” black holes—those having masses over a million times that of the Sun. The debate hangs on decades of impressive work but can be summed up simply: Did black holes start massive, grow massive, or build up through mergers? Yiqin Chen from Beijing Normal University and her colleagues have opened up a new way to tackle the problem [2]. They use a long-running experiment called the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array, located in Australia, to probe a possible signal of early-Universe black hole binaries in low-frequency gravitational waves.