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Dusty structure explains near vanishing of faraway star
Stars die and vanish from sight all the time, but astronomers were puzzled when one that had been stable for more than a decade almost disappeared for eight months.
Between late 2024 and early 2025, one star in our galaxy, dubbed ASASSN-24fw, dimmed in brightness by about 97%, before brightening again. Since then, scientists have been swapping theories about what was behind this rare, exciting event.
Now, an international team led by scientists at The Ohio State University may have come up with an answer to the mystery. In a new study recently published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, astronomers suggest that because the color of the star’s light remained unchanged during its dimming, the event wasn’t caused by the star evolving in some way, but by a large cloud of dust and gas around the star that occluded Earth’s view of it.
Why did MIT find 95% of AI projects fail? Hint: it wasn’t about the tech itself
The research was less about what’s wrong with today’s AI models and more about what’s wrong with how companies are trying to use them
Immunotherapy drug eliminates aggressive cancers in clinical trial
Over the past 20 years, a class of cancer drugs called CD40 agonist antibodies have shown great promise—and induced great disappointment. While effective at activating the immune system to kill cancer cells in animal models, the drugs had limited impact on patients in clinical trials and caused dangerously systemic inflammatory responses, low platelet counts, and liver toxicity, among other adverse reactions—even at a low dose.
But in 2018, the lab of Rockefeller University’s Jeffrey V. Ravetch demonstrated it could engineer an enhanced CD40 agonist antibody so that it improved its efficacy and could be administered in a manner to limit serious side effects. The findings came from research on mice, genetically engineered to mimic the pathways relevant in humans. The next step was to have a clinical trial to see the drug’s impact on cancer patients.
Now the results from the phase 1 clinical trial of the drug, dubbed 2141-V11, have been published in Cancer Cell. Of 12 patients, six patients saw their tumors shrink, including two who saw them disappear completely.
The researchers demonstrate that an engineered antibody improves a class of drugs that has struggled to make good on its early promise.
Fat-trapping microbeads provide drug-free weight loss in rats, study finds
Researchers developed edible microbeads made from green tea polyphenols, vitamin E and seaweed that, when consumed, bind to fats in the gastrointestinal tract.