MIT Media Lab researchers developed injectable nanoantennas, called HITMAN, that are magnetically activated to generate localized electric fields targeting drug-resistant brain cancer tumors. Preclinical studies showed HITMAN eliminated 52 percent of glioblastoma cells and extended survival by 50 percent with no side effects.
Results from an early-stage clinical trial, published in Nature Communications, showed encouraging outcomes among patients with newly diagnosed cancer whose tumors had spread to distant organs. Most strikingly, one patient experienced a pathologic complete response—meaning no viable cancer cells could be found—and remains cancerfree for more than two years without further treatment. These findings offer an important signal that a new approach may be able to overcome one of the disease’s greatest challenges: its resistance to immunotherapy.
The Stoics believed character is fate.
Two years ago I argued that what holds for a person also holds for a company, and that this, not the technology, decides what #AI ends up doing to us.
It got me into arguments I am still having.
Peter Voss once told me there is nothing more important than building AGI. Nikolas Badminton told me AI is not a strategy. Both sentences appear in the piece. Only one of them survives it.
Here is the part nobody wants to sit with. AI is not created in a vacuum. It is built by people, inside a culture, trained on what that culture already produced. Not on our aspirations. On our record. So it inherits our intellectual DNA, flaws included, and then hands it back to us at scale.
A military AI and a commercial AI are not the same creature. Ask yourself why. Then ask who decided.
The article also runs through C.S. Lewis on what every new power quietly costs its owner, Frank Herbert’s 1965 warning about people who outsourced their thinking and got exactly what they deserved, and one sentence near the end about which species on this planet is actually out of control.
Cancer treatments, including chemotherapy and radiation therapy, give a growth advantage to cells with particular genetic changes in healthy tissue, new research finds.
Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University of Cambridge, University College London and their collaborators used DNA sequencing to map mutations in normal esophageal tissue from esophageal cancer patients who had received either chemotherapy, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, or no treatment before surgery.
The results, published in Nature Genetics, show that different cancer treatments changed the landscape of mutations in normal tissue. In particular, combined chemotherapy and radiation therapy led to significantly more normal cells with cancer-related mutations in these patients.
A few years ago, scientists saw something surprising in the brain tissue of people who died with Alzheimer’s disease: white blood cells that multiply in response to foreign threats and are seldom seen inside healthy brains.
Whether these so-called CD8+ killer T cells, which normally target infected cells in the body, were there to harm or help was unclear. An answer began to emerge in 2023, when a team led by neuroscientist David Holtzman showed that in mice bred to overexpress tau—a toxic protein that builds up in the neurons of people with Alzheimer’s and several other neurodegenerative diseases—getting rid of the T cells stemmed tissue loss and preserved the mice’s cognition, even as tau kept building up.
Now, the same group has explored what prompts these cells to wreak havoc in the brain. In a mouse study published last week in Nature Neuroscience, Holtzman and immunology researcher Hao Hu, both at Washington University in St. Louis, report that immune cells in the lymph nodes of the neck instruct the T cells to clone themselves before they enter the brain. Without them, the mice had far fewer cloned T cells inside their brains and experienced less neurodegeneration. The study is “beautiful work,” says neuroscientist Kenneth Kosik of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies tau but was not involved in the research. It also suggests that existing drugs, developed for other conditions, might work in Alzheimer’s by shielding the brain from the destructive cells.
Quantum technologies are poised to transform fields ranging from medicine and sensing to computing and communications by manipulating the energy states of atoms and molecules. These manipulations are achieved by controlling quantum states with laser pulses.
However, the intense laser fields often required for this control can cause unwanted effects that disrupt the very system they aim to manipulate.
Now, Stevens researchers and their collaborators have developed a novel method that enables precise control of quantum systems without these undesirable effects.
For decades, scientists have understood proteins primarily through two defining features: their amino acid sequence and their three-dimensional structure. This framework has driven major advances in biology, biotechnology and medicine, culminating in recent artificial intelligence tools capable of predicting protein structures with remarkable accuracy.
Yet a fundamental challenge remains: Even when a protein’s sequence and structure are known, predicting its function, interactions and behavior often remains difficult. An international team of researchers from Japan, Finland, Italy and the United States now reports evidence that part of this missing information may lie in an often-overlooked component of proteins: the highly organized water surrounding them.
In a study published in Nature Communications, the team provides the first direct three-dimensional visualization of sequence-dependent hydration architectures surrounding peptide assemblies at subnanometer resolution using advanced three-dimensional atomic force microscopy (3D-AFM).
Light in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum plays a key role in modern sensing. Because molecules interact with this kind of light in specific ways, researchers use technologies like mid-IR spectroscopy to identify biological materials, drugs and pollutants. Mid-IR light can also serve as a carrier of information in free-space optical communications, where data are transmitted through the air without using cables or fibers. Better control of mid-IR light could therefore lead to more sensitive detectors and faster communications.
Metasurfaces are one solution scientists are exploring to achieve this kind of control. These ultrathin structures are built using nanoscale patterns that can shape and direct light waves. Unfortunately, most metasurfaces developed thus far are static: Once fabricated, their optical properties are fixed, limiting their use in real-world photonic systems.
Now, researchers led by Hatice Altug in the Bionanophotonic Systems Laboratory (BIOS) in EPFL’s School of Engineering have overcome this bottleneck with metasurfaces based on suspended membranes of crystalline silicon. By inducing mobile electrical charges within the silicon itself, the researchers can change how the metasurfaces respond to light in real time without changing their physical structure. The devices also achieve record optical performance, with more than an order of magnitude better performance in key metrics compared with previous mid-IR platforms based on similar materials.
The University of Michigan is getting a $10 million boost to research and expand the use of histotripsy, a medical advance pioneered on the Ann Arbor campus that uses precisely targeted ultrasound waves to destroy cancerous tumors without damaging surrounding tissue.
Already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat liver tumors, U-M leaders say the money will be used to advance the technology and research so histotripsy could become a future treatment option for people with kidney cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain tumors, hemorrhagic stroke, blood clots, epilepsy and more.
“Michigan is at its best when our brightest minds connect to tackle the most consequential challenges of our time,” said U-M President Domenico Grasso during a Sept. 10 news conference, announcing the $10 million donation from multiple sources, including the university’s engineering department, private donors and HistoSonics, the U-M startup that commercialized the technology.
The amount of DNA damage caused by certain chemotherapies used to effectively treat childhood cancer has been revealed, along with a hidden impact on the liver, paving the way for future research into new ways to mitigate these effects.
Platinum-based chemotherapy drugs are powerful at treating cancer but can have an underappreciated impact on the rest of the body. To investigate this, a team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge, the Francis Crick Institute and King’s College London used new sequencing technologies and found distinctive DNA damage in the liver. They suggest that further research could lead to new ways to protect against this.
Published in Science, the researchers also discovered that while effectively destroying cancer cells, chemotherapy can “age” a child’s healthy cells. This results in children’s healthy cells having the same number of DNA changes that adult cells gain over many decades.