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Investigational vaccine generates immune response to KRAS mutations in pancreatic cancer study

ROCHESTER, Minn. — An investigational vaccine helped the immune system recognize and respond to mutations that drive most pancreatic cancers, according to results from a randomized phase 2 clinical trial led by Mayo Clinic researchers. The findings, published in Nature Medicine, will help researchers design a larger phase 3 clinical trial.

Nearly every patient evaluated after receiving the vaccine developed an immune response against mutated KRAS, a gene that plays a major role in pancreatic cancer. Mayo Clinic researchers also found that patients with stronger immune responses tended to remain free of disease longer.

“Historically, pancreatic cancer has been very difficult to treat with immunotherapy,” says Ben George, M.B.B.S, M.D., a Mayo Clinic medical oncologist and lead author of the study. “What is encouraging is that we were able to generate a strong immune response against KRAS mutations in nearly every patient we evaluated. In an exploratory analysis, patients with greater immune responses to the vaccine appeared protected with longer disease-free survival times.”

Scientists discover new Alzheimer’s drug that repairs DNA damage and reduces brain inflammation

Scientists have discovered that a drug originally developed for spinal cord injuries can tackle several key features of Alzheimer’s disease, including DNA damage and inflammation. Already tested for initial safety in humans, the experimental treatment could offer a faster path toward therapies that target the disease at its roots.

Enhancing the cell’s natural recycling center improves Alzheimer’s features in animal models

A defining feature of Alzheimer’s disease is the abnormal, sustained accumulation of protein aggregates such as tau inside brain cells, which disrupts the cells’ normal functions. As time passes, brain cells stop working and die, leading to a gradual decline in memory and thinking skills and other symptoms of this condition.

One goal of researchers is to find ways to reduce or stop the accumulation of tau and other related proteins to slow down or prevent disease progression.

At Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital, a team of researchers has just taken a step in that direction. They have discovered that reducing the levels of a protein called Slingshot-1 has the unanticipated effect of improving Alzheimer’s features in animal models and human cells in the lab.

GhostAction Attackers Target Nearly 23,000 GitHub Repos with Credential-Stealing Malware

Despite these changes, the IP address (“193.32.204[.]199”) is one indicator of compromise that has been constant, allowing organizations and developers to check if their repositories have been impacted by GhostAction.

“Between October 19 — 21, the attackers also went back to CI with a different goal,” Gile told The Hacker News. “The new workflows are tailored to each repo and list its real secret names, and some request a GitHub OIDC token and try to use it to assume AWS roles. The code looks inert as written, because it depends on a role ARN the files never define, so I can’t say whether it has worked anywhere.”

In a follow-up update shared on October 27, 2026, GitGuardian said the GhostAction operator pushed over 72,000 commits to 22,964 public repositories between October 13 and 21, 2026, out of which 7,989 are new victims.

Using Pulsars to Probe Early Growth of Black Holes

Researchers have used radio observations of rapidly spinning neutron stars to search for signals from supermassive black hole pairs at the dawn of galaxy formation.

In our lifetimes, an amazing thing has happened: Black holes have advanced from “remarkable inventions of the human mind” [1] to empirical objects studied with telescopes and gravitational-wave detectors. A major puzzle in black hole astronomy is understanding the assembly of “supermassive” black holes—those having masses over a million times that of the Sun. The debate hangs on decades of impressive work but can be summed up simply: Did black holes start massive, grow massive, or build up through mergers? Yiqin Chen from Beijing Normal University and her colleagues have opened up a new way to tackle the problem [2]. They use a long-running experiment called the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array, located in Australia, to probe a possible signal of early-Universe black hole binaries in low-frequency gravitational waves.

Four superconducting cables link two large quantum processors into one

As quantum computers grow more ambitious, many researchers believe the best way forward is to build them in multiple interconnected parts. In these modular designs, separate quantum processors are linked so they can work together as one larger machine. For this to happen, however, connections must carry fragile quantum information without destroying it.

For superconducting processors, this means building reliable links around a meter (3.3 feet) long inside equipment chilled to just above absolute zero. A team at IBM Research has now achieved this for the first time: joining two large superconducting processors using four separate high-quality quantum links, all installed after both chips were already in place.

Their work is detailed in a new paper published on the arXiv preprint server.

Experiment supports theoretical foundation for potentially more error-resistant quantum computing

One approach to making information storage in quantum computing less prone to errors is known as topological quantum computing. It relies on special quantum states that are expected to be more resistant to local disturbances.

Physicists at the University of Cologne have now observed quantum states that behave as predicted in a material system considered promising for this approach.

Their findings, published under the title “Tunneling spectroscopy of topological insulator Josephson junctions” in Science Advances, support a theoretical description of how superconductivity interacts with the surface of a topological insulator.