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Advances in Systemic Treatment of Breast Cancer

Systemic therapy for breast cancer has evolved rapidly since 2020, driven by the expansion of targeted therapies, antibody–drug conjugates, and immunotherapy across biologic subtypes. The integration of tumor molecular profiling and germline testing has enabled increasingly personalized, biomarker-guided treatment strategies. In hormone-receptor–positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)–negative disease, cyclin-dependent kinase 4 and 6 inhibitors remain foundational, whereas phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase pathway inhibitors, oral selective estrogen-receptor degraders, and antibody–drug conjugates have transformed disease management after endocrine resistance. In HER2-positive disease, antibody–drug conjugates — particularly trastuzumab deruxtecan — have improved outcomes and are being used in earlier lines of therapy, a development that is reshaping treatment paradigms.

Superconducting circuit links smaller photon groups into larger entangled states

Quantum computers, computer systems that leverage the laws of quantum mechanics, store and process information using qubits (i.e., quantum bits). In many quantum computers, qubits are linked via entanglement, a quantum mechanical effect that connects particles in such a way that their shared state cannot be described as separate, independent states.

One key objective of quantum scientists is to realize entanglement between large groups of qubits. This could ultimately help to develop increasingly powerful and sophisticated quantum computers that can tackle complex optimization and computational problems.

Entanglement can be arranged into so-called graph states. The connections between qubits in these states can be described by mathematical networks, which is advantageous for quantum computation and communications.

Three quantum-inspired cores leave opposite fingerprints on the ringing of black holes

Every black hole hides a question at its center. Einstein’s theory predicts that whatever falls in is crushed into a singularity, a point of infinite density where the theory itself breaks down. Most physicists expect quantum gravity to replace that point with something finite. But the center lies hidden behind the horizon. How could we ever learn what is there?

One answer is to listen. A disturbed black hole, for instance, one just born from a merger, rings like a struck bell, shedding gravitational waves in a few quickly fading tones that physicists call quasinormal modes. Each tone has a pitch and a fading rate, set by the shape of spacetime around the black hole. Build the center differently, and the black hole should ring differently.

Over the past year, my colleague Davide Batic and I, with Fabio Scardigli for the first two papers, computed these tones for three black holes whose centers are reshaped by ideas from quantum gravity. Our third paper, now published in Physics of the Dark Universe, completes the series, and the answers fall into a simple pattern: where gravity weakens at short distances, the black hole rings higher and longer; where it grows stronger, it rings lower and dies away sooner.

Light-responsive inks could make tattoos visible on demand, but safety remains unproven

A team of engineers has designed a new line of multicolored tattoo inks that switch on and off with different kinds of light. Described in a study published in Matter & Light, the technology could one day help people hide their tattoos when they have an important business meeting. They could even doodle on their own skin using a simple laser pointer.

“Tattooing is a very ancient technology that remains mostly untapped as a platform for today’s technologies,” says lead author Carson Bruns of the University of Colorado Boulder.

The new inks, known as PhotoTat, are made from dyes and a Plexiglas-like material common in many medical technologies on the market today, including dermal fillers. The research is a passion project for Bruns, who has a lot of his own tattoos, including a green lion on his arm.

Discovery marks the first detection of variable water clouds outside of the solar system

A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Brittany Miles, assistant astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, led a team that spent 11 hours staring at WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf, collecting a spectrum of its light every 15 minutes.

Ultrafast core-level spectroscopy reveals elusive precursors of exciton condensation in quantum materials

Many fascinating phases in quantum materials emerge when electrons, atoms and other microscopic components begin to act collectively. But these phases do not necessarily appear out of nowhere when a material crosses a transition temperature. Before long-range order develops, microscopic fluctuations can already be present.

Understanding these precursor fluctuations is important because they can tell us which interactions are responsible for driving a material toward an emergent phase. However, the difficulty is seeing them.

Most experimental signatures of phase transitions are easiest to recognize once long-range order has already formed. For example, we can look for a new periodic structure in a diffraction experiment. However, fluctuations that precede this order are transient and lack the same well-defined spatial pattern, making them much harder to measure directly.

New sensing method expands label-free particle detection beyond sensor surfaces

Finding a single cancer cell in a tube of blood is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. As researchers seek to detect ever-smaller and rarer targets, from viruses to circulating tumor cells in blood, the demand for ultrasensitive, robust sensors that are practical for real-world samples continues to grow.

A major challenge is doing this without adding fluorescent tags or other labels. Most label-free optical sensors work only when the targets pass extremely close to or bind to a tiny sensing area on the device. At low concentrations, many particles never hit that spot, and even when they do, their signals can be drowned out by background noise, limiting detection efficiency and making rare targets especially difficult to find.

This limitation is shared by many optical microsensors, including whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) resonators, among the most sensitive optical sensors ever developed. These devices can detect individual nanoparticles and molecules with exceptional precision, but their sensing region is typically confined to a very small area close to the sensor surface.

Mix-and-match’ material’s properties can be tuned by changing its metallic ‘recipe

Scientists have created a new family of materials whose behavior can be tuned by changing their metallic “recipe”—opening new possibilities for uses including gas storage and sensing.

Led by the University of Birmingham, chemists have created a highly adaptable metal-organic framework (MOF), in which metal atoms are connected by organic molecules to create highly ordered structures containing tiny pores.

Publishing their discovery in Angewandte Chemie, the team has shown that changing the proportions of metals within the material can alter properties including magnetism, porosity, light absorption and CO₂ uptake.

Quantum chip holds multiple photons at once, opening path to scalable memory

For highly fragile quantum information systems, the ability to store quantum information is vital—but also challenging. Quantum information is transported in particles of light called photons, which often must be temporarily paused (or “stored”) while other, slower quantum operations catch up. This storage must be performed on microchips as small as 1 centimeter (0.4 inches)—a distance covered by light in a few trillionths of a second. Storing photons for a microsecond would represent a massive leap forward for the capabilities of quantum chips.

New research from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign addresses this challenge by developing an integrated on-chip nanophotonic platform for longer-term storage of photons.

The research, led by physics professor Elizabeth Goldschmidt and published in Nano Letters, describes an integrated platform that leverages the versatility of spectral hole burning and the scalability of thin-film lithium niobate, giving it potential for scalable manufacturing, with implications for both classical and quantum photonics.

AI image watermarks can survive new model training, but durability varies by design

Watermarks are increasingly being used to make AI-generated images recognizable and to ensure their origin can be traced. Previous research has focused on whether watermarks can withstand image manipulation. CISPA researcher Michel Meintz from the SprintML Lab has investigated whether watermarks can withstand the training of a new generative model.

The result: Not all watermarks are equally robust. Their ability to persist across multiple model generations depends heavily on their design and the model that is used. The paper “Watermark Degradation Across Model Iterations” was presented at the ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSec 26) in Florence.

AI-generated images are ubiquitous today and are widely distributed, especially via the internet. This increases the risk that AI-generated images will be used to train new image-generation models. “When companies train on their own synthetic data, it can lead to model collapse,” explains Michel Meintz. “The more you train on your own synthetic data, the more likely the model’s quality is to deteriorate.”

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