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Guselkumab demonstrates superior efficacy in clinical trials, offering new hope to Crohn’s disease patients

In a major advance for patients with Crohn’s disease, a new study led by researchers at Mount Sinai Health System found that guselkumab, a medication with a mechanism of action that is new to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) treatment, outperformed an established standard of care in promoting intestinal healing and symptom relief.

These findings from two pivotal Phase III known as GALAXI 2 and 3, published in The Lancet, provided the basis for the recent Food and Drug Administration approval of guselkumab (brand name Tremfya) for the treatment of moderately to severely active Crohn’s disease.

Crohn’s disease affects roughly 780,000 people in the United States and often requires a lifetime of management. Despite numerous available biologic medications, many patients fail to achieve sustained remission. Guselkumab blocks the interleukin-23 (IL-23) pathway, a key driver of chronic intestinal inflammation.

Earth Could Be in a Massive Cosmic Bubble That’s Warping the Universe, Astrophysicists Reveal

A cosmic void could be distorting how we see the universe expand. Sound from the Big Bang may hold the clues. According to astronomers, Earth and the entire Milky Way galaxy might be located within a vast, low-density region of space—essentially a cosmic void—that causes the universe to expand mo

MIT’s new AI can teach itself to control robots by watching the world through their eyes — it only needs a single camera

This framework is made up of two key components. The first is a deep-learning model that essentially allows the robot to determine where it and its appendages are in 3-dimensional space. This allows it to predict how its position will change as specific movement commands are executed. The second is a machine-learning program that translates generic movement commands into code a robot can understand and execute.

The team tested the new training and control paradigm by benchmarking its effectiveness against traditional camera-based control methods. The Jacobian field solution surpassed those existing 2D control systems in accuracy — especially when the team introduced visual occlusion that caused the older methods to enter a fail state. Machines using the team’s method, however, successfully created navigable 3D maps even when scenes were partially occluded with random clutter.

Once the scientists developed the framework, it was then applied to various robots with widely varying architectures. The end result was a control program that requires no further human intervention to train and operate robots using only a single video camera.

What ever-growing incisors can teach us about genetic disease

Teeth may seem like static fixtures, but a new collaboration between engineers and clinicians is proving just how dynamic, informative and medically significant our teeth can be.

In a study, published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, engineers and dentists come together to uncover how teeth, as , hold key information for understanding rare craniofacial disorders that develop during childhood.

Kyle Vining, Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and in Preventive and Restorative Science at Penn Dental Medicine, leads this interdisciplinary team, which includes Yuchen (Tracy) Jiang, a former master’s student in MSE, Kei Katsura, a pediatric dentist and KL2 postdoctoral research scholar at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Institute of Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at Penn, and Elizabeth Bhoj, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in Penn Medicine and the Division of Human Genetics at CHOP.

A new way to wobble: Scientists uncover mechanism that causes formation of planets

Instead of a tempest in a teapot, imagine the cosmos in a canister. Scientists have performed experiments using nested, spinning cylinders to confirm that an uneven wobble in a ring of electrically conductive fluid like liquid metal or plasma causes particles on the inside of the ring to drift inward. Since revolving rings of plasma also occur around stars and black holes, these new findings imply that the wobbles can cause matter in those rings to fall toward the central mass and form planets.

The scientists found that the wobble could grow in a new, unexpected way. Researchers already knew that wobbles could grow from the interaction between plasma and magnetic fields in a gravitational field. But these new results show that wobbles can more easily arise in a region between two jets of fluid with different velocities, an area known as a free shear layer.

“This finding shows that the wobble might occur more often throughout the universe than we expected, potentially being responsible for the formation of more solar systems than once thought,” said Yin Wang, a staff research physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and lead author of the paper reporting the results in Physical Review Letters. “It’s an important insight into the formation of planets throughout the cosmos.”

Approach improves how new skills are taught to large language models

Researchers have developed a technique that significantly improves the performance of large language models without increasing the computational power necessary to fine-tune the models. The researchers demonstrated that their technique improves the performance of these models over previous techniques in tasks including commonsense reasoning, arithmetic reasoning, instruction following, code generation, and visual recognition.

Large language models are artificial intelligence systems that are pretrained on huge data sets. After pretraining, these models predict which words should follow each other in order to respond to user queries. However, the nonspecific nature of pretraining means that there is ample room for improvement with these models when the user queries are focused on specific topics, such as when a user requests the model to answer a math question or to write computer code.

“In order to improve a model’s ability to perform more specific tasks, you need to fine-tune the model,” says Tianfu Wu, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of computer engineering at North Carolina State University.

Gene essential for vitamin D absorption could help unlock treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases

Vitamin D is not only an essential nutrient, but also the precursor of the hormone calcitriol, indispensable for health. It regulates the uptake of phosphate and calcium necessary for bones by the intestines, as well as cell growth and the proper function of muscles, nerve cells, and the immune system.

Now, researchers have shown for the first time in Frontiers in Endocrinology that a particular gene called SDR42E1 is crucial for taking up vitamin D from the gut and further metabolizing it—a discovery with many possible applications in precision medicine, including .

“Here we show that blocking or inhibiting SDR42E1 may selectively stop the growth of cancer cells,” said Dr. Georges Nemer, a professor and associate dean for research at the University College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, and the study’s corresponding author.

Gene editing offers transformative solution to saving endangered species

Gene editing technologies—such as those used in agriculture and de-extinction projects—can be repurposed to offer what an international team of scientists is calling a transformative solution for restoring genetic diversity and saving endangered species.