The Guowang network’s deployment is at an early stage, with around 180 satellites in orbit compared to Starlink’s 11,000.
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GPT-6 for Everyone: ChatGPT Answers With Buttons, Maps and Mini-Apps
Technically, OpenAI relies on a library of ready-made components that the model assembles as it writes. Where plain text works better, ChatGPT is supposed to stick with text. Users who don’t want the visuals can switch them off on the web under “Layout and visuals,” though OpenAI says some graphics may still appear. Intelligent UI is rolling out gradually on the web and in updated apps, but not in the Pro thinking mode or the older desktop apps for macOS and Windows.
More Show Than Substance?
Not everyone is convinced. Wired headlined its take by calling Intelligent UI more show than tell. Search Engine Journal points to another consequence: If ChatGPT builds calculators and converters right in the chat, websites offering those tools will lose visitors. It is also unclear how sources will be displayed alongside graphics and comparisons.
Scientists discover a hidden switch that shuts down inflammation
Inflammation is one of the immune system’s most important defense responses. It helps the body fight infection and repair damaged tissue. But if that response remains active for too long, it can begin to harm healthy tissue and contribute to conditions including arthritis, heart disease, and diabetes.
Scientists have long known a great deal about how inflammation begins. What has been less clear is how the body decides that the danger has passed and shifts from fighting a threat to repairing the damage.
Scientists identify the neuroblastoma cells that signal poor outcomes
Neuroblastoma is the most common solid tumor found outside the brain in children, yet why some children respond well to treatment while others do not has remained poorly understood. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists and their collaborators built one of the most comprehensive datasets of neuroblastoma cells to date, using it to define the tumor’s cell types and identify a gene signature marking a malignant cell population tied to poor prognosis.
The team also created patient-derived models that capture this population, which older laboratory cell lines had missed. The findings, published today in Cancer Cell, give researchers a new framework and a set of tools to study high-risk neuroblastoma.
Neuroblastoma cells are divided into two cell states: adrenergic cells (which are associated with low-risk disease) and mesenchymal cells (which are associated with high-risk disease, treatment resistance and poor outcomes). However, directly identifying cancer-related mesenchymal cells in patient tumors has been challenging because the body also contains healthy mesenchymal cells, which can be mistaken for their malignant counterparts, complicating efforts to study them.
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.