Since its release in November of 2022, the use of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) has proliferated throughout many disciplines, providing writing assistance for everything from speeches to contracts. So, it may not be surprising that some scientists might utilize ChatGPT to quicken the pace at which they publish their research.
Adjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy has yet to square off against neoadjuvant immunotherapy in a head-to-head trial. Even if that trial doesn’t happen, post hoc analyses of ATOMIC and the neoadjuvant NICHE-2 studies may clarify whether a one-size-fits-all approach is appropriate and help determine which patients benefit more from one approach over the other, according to Christopher Lieu, MD, an investigator in the ATOMIC study.
The ATOMIC study showed that adding adjuvant immunotherapy to standard-of-care chemotherapy following resection reduced the risk for disease recurrence or death by 50% compared with chemotherapy alone in the 355 patients with stage III colon cancer with mismatch repair deficiency (dMMR), who received adjuvant atezolizumab along with fluorouracil, leucovorin, and oxaliplatin (FOLFOX) chemotherapy, providing those in the pro-adjuvant camp with important data. In addition, 3-year disease-free survival (DFS) was 86.4% with the combination compared with 76.6% with chemotherapy alone. The results of this trial were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2025.
Experts debate which patients with stage III dMMR colon cancer will benefit from the two treatment approaches.
Emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, drones, and humanoid robotics, are rapidly transforming industries and revolutionizing transportation, logistics, and other sectors, driven by decreasing costs, economic incentives, and significant investments.
Questions to inspire discussion.
Emerging Technologies 🚁 Q: How are drones revolutionizing delivery services? A: Drones are delivering millions of goods with insane energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and convenience, exemplified by Google’s Wing program partnering with Walmart and DoorDash, and Zipline saving half a million lives delivering medicine worldwide. 🤖 Q: What roles can humanoid robots fill in the workforce?
Serendipitously and for the first time, an international research team led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory formed solid binary gold hydride, a compound made exclusively of gold and hydrogen atoms.
The researchers were studying how long it takes hydrocarbons, compounds made of carbon and hydrogen, to form diamonds under extremely high pressure and heat.
In their experiments at the European XFEL (X-ray Free-Electron Laser) in Germany, the team studied the effect of those extreme conditions in hydrocarbon samples with an embedded gold foil, which was meant to absorb the X-rays and heat the weakly absorbing hydrocarbons. To their surprise, they not only saw the formation of diamonds, but also discovered the formation of gold hydride.
In the subatomic universe of quantum physics, you can achieve things considered impossible in our flesh-and-blood physical world. Things like superposition, entanglement, and even teleportation all seem possible when things go quantum. Now, scientists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and University of Vienna are adding a kind of time travel to the list.
In a series of papers published on preprint servers and in various online journals (including Optica, arXiv, and Quantum), researchers including ÖAW’s Miguel Navascués and University of Vienna’s Philip Walther explain the possibility of speeding up, slowing down, and even reversing the flow of time within a quantum system.
New research has uncovered a novel mechanism that may help explain why some people with cancer respond remarkably well to immunotherapy while others don’t.
Researchers from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and UNSW Sydney have uncovered that less active versions of a gene called NOD2, in combination with radiotherapy or immunotherapy, may help supercharge the immune system’s ability to attack cancer.
The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could pave the way for more personalized and effective immunotherapy treatments against a range of cancers.
A new preclinical study has found exposure to nanoplastics may contribute to the rapid progression of Alzheimer’s disease and subsequent spread from the brain to other key organs such as the liver, heart and gut.
The research, “Cerebral to Systemic Representations of Alzheimer’s Pathogenesis Stimulated by Polystyrene Nanoplastics,” is published in the journal Environment & Health.
The study, co-led by Monash University and South China University of Technology, investigated how environmental-level polystyrene nanoplastic exposure influences the progression of Alzheimer’s disease from the brain to other parts of the body. Studies in mice revealed that nanoplastic-induced neurological damage is not confined within the brain, but expands systemically through the gut–liver–brain axis.
Current methods for cancer diagnosis are based on identifying biomarkers — molecules that reveal a particular state or process in the body – produced by the tumor or associated proteins. Not surprisingly, these markers are more abundant once the tumor has already developed significantly. And the more advanced the tumor, the more difficult it is to find effective treatment options.
Now, a research team has developed a test that can detect early-stage solid tumors with just a blood sample. In addition, the test also provides information relevant to the choice of treatment.
To achieve this early detection, the team focused the test not on the markers produced by the tumor, but on the body’s defensive reaction to the cancer. Since the 19th century it has been known that the emergence of cancer cells causes changes in the immune system, and it was also known that these changes are more intense in cancer’s earliest stages. But they had never been used for diagnosis. The new study focuses on them, specifically on the changes in blood proteins derived from cancer’s disruption of the immune system.
But this approach posed a problem to the team: human blood contains more than 5,000 proteins, which makes it extremely difficult to analyze. So they used bioinformatics analysis and narrowed the scope of the study to five amino acids: lysine, tryptophan, tyrosine, cysteine and cysteine not bound to disulphide bonds.
They then subjected the sample to reactions that emit fluorescence when light is applied to them — fluorogenic reactions — and revealed the exact concentration of each of these amino acids in the plasma. Using the artificial intelligence tool machine learning, they identified patterns in these concentrations that could be translated into diagnostic signals.
As they explain in the published article, they applied this technique to samples from 170 patients and were able to identify 78% of cancers with a 0% false positive rate.
Researchers at EPFL and Harvard University have engineered a chip that can convert between electromagnetic pulses in the terahertz and optical ranges on the same device. Their integrated design could enable the development of devices for ultrafast telecommunications, ranging, spectroscopy, and computing.
Terahertz radiation describes a band of waves on the electromagnetic spectrum with frequencies higher than microwaves (which are used in telecommunications technologies like Wi-Fi) but lower than infrared light (used in lasers and fiber optics). Their short wavelengths mean that terahertz (THz) signals can transmit large amounts of data very fast, but connecting THz radiation to existing optical and microwave technologies has been extremely challenging.
In 2023, researchers in the Laboratory of Hybrid Photonics came one step closer to bridging this gap when they created an extremely thin photonic chip made of lithium niobate that, when connected to a laser beam, produced finely tailorable THz waves. Now, the team has reported a novel design that not only generates THz waves but detects incoming ones as well by converting them to optical signals.