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VATICAN CITY, Feb 21 (Reuters) — The giant bronze-and-wood canopy in the middle of St Peter’s Basilica is being gradually engulfed by scaffolding as Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s masterpiece gets its first major restoration since the mid-1700s.

The almost 30-metre-high canopy covers the high altar of the basilica, and was built on the spot where St Peter, the first pope, is believed to have been buried after dying as a Christian martyr in the reign of Roman Emperor Nero (54−68 AD).

The altar, from which only the pope can celebrate Mass, is “the cornerstone of the entire architecture of the Basilica”, Father Enzo Fortunato, head of communications for the church, said on Wednesday.

Researchers have come across a wonderfully intriguing find in the north of Spain: a bronze hand dating back some 2,000 years, all the way back to the Iron Age, with four lines of strange symbols inscribed across its top.

A new study suggests that this ancient epigraph is related to ancient Paleohispanic languages, and may have been part of the language that has developed into Basque in modern day Spain.

The area is known to have been populated by a tribe called the Vascones around the time the hand would’ve been made – a tribe that left behind very little in the way of writing samples, which has led to the assumption that they were pre-literate. This hand shows that might not be the case.

Neutron stars in the universe, ultracold atomic gases in the laboratory, and the quark–gluon plasma created in collisions of atomic nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): they may seem totally unrelated but, surprisingly enough, they have something in common.

They are all a fluid-like state of matter made up of strongly interacting particles. Insights into the properties and behavior of any of these almost-perfect liquids may be key to understanding nature across scales that are orders of magnitude apart.

In a new paper, the CMS collaboration reports the most precise measurement to date of the speed at which sound travels in the quark–gluon plasma, offering new insights into this extremely hot state of matter.

Researchers are working on ways to improve the effectiveness of currently approved bile duct cancer, also called cholangiocarcinoma, treatments and finding early success in the development of more targeted therapies. Read more on the AACR Blog:


To overcome this issue, researchers are exploring next-generation FGFR inhibitors. During the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in January 2024, phase II clinical trial results were announced for tinengotinib, a FGFR1-3 inhibitor that binds to FGFR in a way that blocks FGFR2 fusion and rearrangement, preventing the mutations that cause resistance to treatment. Of the patients in the trial whose tumors had developed resistance to a previous FGFR inhibitor, 37.5% demonstrated a partial response with tumor reductions ranging from 40.7% to 54.6%. A phase III trial for the drug candidate kicked off in December 2023.

Other next-generation FGFR inhibitors are in various stages of development, including RLY-4008 (phase I/II trial), erdafitinib (phase IIa), KIN-3248 (phase I/Ib), derazantinib (phase II), tasurgratinib (phase II), and HMPL-453 (phase II).

Another target researchers have been studying in relation to BTC treatment is the immune checkpoint molecule PD-1. In 2017, the FDA approved pembrolizumab (Keytruda), an immunotherapy that blocks PD-1, for use in several cancer types, including all advanced solid tumors that have a high tumor mutation burden or microsatellite instability. About 5% of patients with cholangiocarcinoma have that type of tumor, according to a study published in ESMO Open.