Moderna's personalized mRNA cancer therapy, developed with Merck, reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence and spread when used in combination with the U.S. drugmaker's blockbuster treatment Keytruda in a late-stage ​trial.

The interim results showed statistically significant improvement versus Keytruda alone...

"It is a big deal for the field in general. If this trial was negative, the field of mRNA-based ​cancer therapies and cancer vaccination may never have recovered. With this positive study, there is hope (and likely ​investment to follow) that these approaches may change the way we treat cancer more broadly."...

"Expect the vaccine for melanoma to enter the market in 2027...

...manufacturing personalized vaccines at scale could be expensive and complex. Investors should therefore watch for next important steps, which will be detailed clinical results, ⁠regulatory progress ​and evidence that the technology works across other cancers."...

...Historically, scientists have viewed the cosmos as akin to a rock—complex, perhaps even beautiful, but formed through arbitrary events. Evolutionary cosmologists instead argue that universes, like living organisms, grow and reproduce, spinning off new universes with small variations from their progenitors. In doing so, these cosmic offspring are refined across generations into forms that maximize the number of universes yet to be born. Since the Big Bang, our universe, like any developing child, has been unfurling into an optimal shape.

Under this view, the universe is not a rock. It is an egg...

Smolin’s work was, in turn, inspired by physicists Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler, who proposed that singularities inside black holes, the places where matter is crushed into a point of infinite density, might expand to produce new universes that follow different physics from the universes that produced them. Every universe—including our own—would, under this logic, have emerged from a Big Bang within a black hole.

Smolin realized that this hypothetical process would allow universes to reproduce, in a way, by making more black holes. And if those new universes could inherit the physics of their parents with small differences—just as new organisms inherit the genes of their parents with small differences—then universes could also evolve with each generation. Specifically, a form of cosmic natural selection would favor universes that make as many black holes as possible. Less fertile universes could persist, but they would produce far fewer offspring. So over time, an increasingly high proportion of universes would be optimized for black hole production—which would imply that our universe, given the odds, is one of those...

New results from the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) suggest that gluons, the gluelike particles that hold quarks together inside protons, play a central role in the conservation of baryon number, an essential part of a particle’s quantum identity. The findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that baryon number is carried by a Y-shaped “junction” of gluons connecting the proton’s three main quarks, challenging a long-held view that baryon number is solely carried by those three quarks...

“Since the big bang, the number of protons and neutrons all together never changes as a function of time,” Lewis said. “The reasons for this conservation are not well understood. It’s one of the mysteries of the universe, related to why we have more matter than antimatter.” ...

According to the STAR team’s study, when the protons that make up nuclei collide at RHIC, the quark-connecting “gluon junction” or “baryon junction” can be stopped much more easily than the three quarks; all its energy is transformed into new baryons that spray out in perpendicular directions while the quarks it usually connects continue to fly down the beampipe...

...The setup starts with an idea from last year. Certain exotic forms of dark matter, arranged in a halo with a particular relationship between pressure and density, can produce black holes with no singularity at the center. These are so-called "regular black holes," where the equations stay sensible all the way to the center. Tan and Wang asked what happens if you drop an ordinary neutron star into the middle of one of these halos...

...The crucial point in this model is that nothing collapsed. The gravity making the horizon comes from the star and the halo combined, with the dark matter contributing roughly as much mass as the star itself...

...The dark matter densities this requires are far greater than anything astronomers actually expect dark matter to reach. This is not a claim about objects out there in the sky, but more of a thought experiment with the mathematics filled in. It says the inside of a black hole need not be the end of physics. There is at least one solution in which it's a place, with something in it...

...1. The Qatari Jet:...

...2. Corner-Cutting on Presidential Security...

...3. A Desperate Cover-up and Attack on Freedom of the Press...

...4. The Secret Flight — A Decoy and a Cover-up...

...5. The Still-Real Nuclear Risk and Failure of the War with Iran:... "he has left a standing order that if he’s killed Iran is to be obliterated by US nuclear missiles."

UK-based engineer Tom Stanton has successfully built a trebuchet that can send projectiles flying at supersonic speeds...

In the video, the projectile reached 776 mph (1,248 kph) or nine miles per hour faster than the speed of sound. The proof may be in the numbers but the loud crack and echo of the sonic boom did confirm that history was made that day.

...Their challenge was to understand the muon’s chains of emission and reabsorption in extreme detail. In particular, how much do the particles associated with each of nature’s four fundamental forces participate in these chains?

The calculation is straightforward for three of nature’s four forces. Gravity is so weak that physicists can ignore it outright. And both the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force can be deduced using a standard technique.

The strong force, however, is not so easy to deal with...

In his doctoral thesis in 2018, Keshavarzi helped hone an alternative way of understanding the strong force, called the data-driven method. In this method, physicists don’t try to predict how often muons will emit and absorb groups of quarks. They go out and measure it...

The approach resembles what happens in weather forecasting. While it is possible, in principle, to understand the weather by keeping track of the precise contour of every breeze in the atmosphere, in practice that task is absurd...

Likewise, it’s too hard for physicists to keep track of every strong-force interaction between every pair of quarks. So physicists use a technique called lattice QCD (short for quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong force), to use a big grid to simulate the overall behavior of quarks.

In 2014, a collaboration among researchers in Budapest, Hungary; Marseille, France; and Wuppertal, Germany — the BMW group — started on a project to use lattice QCD to calculate the muon g-factor...

In 2021, on the same day that Fermilab released its updated muon g–2 measurement, the BMW group’s result appeared in the journal Nature.

According to the BMW group’s lattice calculation, Fermilab’s muons were wobbling exactly as they should...

So why does the data-driven method indicate otherwise?

...The discrepancies point either to signs of unknown particles meddling with the quarks, or to overlooked details generating the mistaken impression that quarks are misbehaving...

“There are four decades of measurements that preceded that, that were all done in different ways, that were all done by different people, that were all done by different experiments, that all paint a completely different picture,” Keshavarzi said. “There is so much still left to do.”

...Primordial black holes (PBHs) are only hypothetical, but they generate a lot of interest. If they're real, they formed immediately after the Big Bang from direct collapse of dense clumps of subatomic matter, without the need for any stellar progenitor. Researchers have long thought that they could be the prime component, or even the only component, of dark matter...

This schematic shows a PBH passing through a white dwarf. As it passes through, its gravitational force creates tidal heating in the middle of the white dwarf. Once the material reaches the threshold temperature of <~0.5 billion Kelvin, it triggers uncontrolled nuclear burning. If the region burning is big enough, then thermonuclear runaway will trigger a Type Ia supernova. Image Credit: Kavli IPMU/Gemini AI (Banana Pro)...

...In April 2018, a team led by Oxford planetary physicist Patrick Irwin reported the first clear detection of hydrogen sulfide gas sitting above Uranus’s main cloud deck...

Hydrogen sulfide is the same colorless, toxic gas that gives rotten eggs their smell, and people can detect it at very low concentrations, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry...

On an infrared camera, a warm object normally stands out clearly against cooler surroundings. Researchers have now built a three-dimensional cloak that bends heat around an object, erasing its thermal outline while protecting the space inside from temperature extremes...

This approach could eventually improve heat control around microchips and sensitive electronic components. It may also help protect equipment in severe environments or reduce the thermal signatures used to locate people and machinery...

They printed a precise aluminum lattice in 3D to create highly conductive pathways through the cloak. Aluminum moves heat readily, allowing energy to travel quickly through selected regions. The remaining spaces were filled through mold casting with a rubbery material that transfers heat much more slowly.

Together, the materials created a controlled thermal route. Some sections accelerated heat flow while others restricted it, steering energy around the space occupied by the concealed object...

...In electronic systems, the cloak might redirect heat away from vulnerable components or prevent nearby heat sources from interfering with delicate devices.

It could also help protect equipment exposed to extreme temperatures. Security and defense applications are another possibility, including reducing the infrared signatures that allow thermal cameras to distinguish people or machinery from their surroundings...

...Concealing an object that produces its own heat presents a more difficult problem because that energy would continue building inside the protected region and could eventually reveal its location...

The researchers now plan to investigate smart, multifunctional cloaks capable of performing those active tasks. Such devices could eventually do more than hide a thermal signature by deliberately controlling where heat gathers, how it spreads, and where it leaves the protected region...

Early on the morning of July 24, Ukrainian forces attacked more Wildberries logistics centers — this time in Crimea, the Leningrad region, and St. Petersburg. In Russia’s northwest, drones damaged two separate warehouse complexes, in Shushary and Utkina Zavod. Authorities did not report any injuries. Nikolai (name changed), a St. Petersburg resident who was near the site of the drone strike in Shushary, told Meduza what happened after the attack...

People had expected this and said so openly: “It’s strange that we haven’t been hit yet.” If Wildberries was under attack, then all the big logistics centers would be destroyed, St. Petersburg’s included. It was only a matter of time...

When the internet shutdown happened last year, everyone was furious and complained. Then they got used to it very quickly: “Fine, whitelists it is. Fine, VPNs it is. We’ll each buy 300,000 VPNs and find the best one.”

Then came the gasoline crisis: at first people were horrified, and now it’s eased off. The same thing is happening with Wildberries: the fire in Elektrostal caused a sensation; it was some kind of super-event. But now everyone is very calm about it.

The deeper questions worry people far more: whether martial law will be imposed, whether there will be a mobilization. I can’t say people are out on the street talking about it on every corner, but you hear these conversations when you’re sitting in a bar or someplace like that. It worries men and women alike. Some are already making plans — voting, for instance, and then leaving the country right away, just in case.

One year on from the first-ever collisions of oxygen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the main LHC Collaborations – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – have each reported signs of the state of matter known as quark–gluon plasma (QGP) originating from these collisions.

QGP is a state of matter that forms under intense pressure and at temperatures over 100 000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun. Under these extreme conditions, composite particles break down into quarks and the gluons that ordinarily hold them together. Scientists believe that this was the state of the Universe in the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang...

It was previously thought that colliding heavy ions such as lead – which is over 200 times heavier than the protons typically collided at the LHC – was the only way to create the conditions necessary to form QGP. But recently this premise has been thoroughly challenged, including earlier this year when the ALICE Collaboration, which specialises in the study of this extreme state of matter, reported a new sign of QGP from proton–proton and proton–lead collisions. And last year, the LHC Collaborations opened up a new probe of QGP when they found the first hints of QGP from oxygen–oxygen collisions. Now, having searched even more deeply, the LHC experiments have seen multiple signs of QGP formation in oxygen–oxygen and neon–neon collisions...