What are the genetic origins of early-onset obesity?
Studying a cohort of young adults in China, researchers in Science TranslationalMedicine performed deep sequencing and identified a loss-of-function variant in the gene TUB that impairs sensitivity to leptin.
Rare human TUB variants impair leptin sensitivity through disruption of STAT3 activation, leading to hyperphagic obesity.
There are documentaries about history, and then there are documentaries about the people who were quietly in the room when history happened.
STARMAN, the new film from Academy Award–nominated director Robert Stone, belongs firmly in the latter category. It chronicles the life of Gentry Lee—NASA scientist, mission architect, science communicator, and one of those rare figures whose career seems to map directly onto the modern Space Age.
If the Space Age began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik, then Gentry Lee—born in 1942—has lived his entire adult life shaped by humanity’s reach beyond Earth. More than a witness to that history, Lee has been in the room for many of its defining moments.
As a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lee served as Director of Science Analysis and Mission Planning for the Viking mission to Mars and the Galileo probe to Jupiter, missions that transformed our understanding of the solar system. Alongside this work, he collaborated with Carl Sagan on PBS’s landmark series COSMOS, narrated Discovery Channel’s ARE WE ALONE?, and co-authored four novels with legendary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.
A Zelig-like figure at the crossroads of interplanetary science and science fiction, Gentry Lee has been everywhere—and worked with everyone—who helped define how we imagine space.
Now the subject of STARMAN, Lee guides us through a lifetime of curiosity, wonder, and exploration. The film is both entertaining and illuminating—and our conversation with him reflects that same spirit.
The research of artificial intelligence is undergoing a paradigm shift from prioritizing model innovations over benchmark scores towards emphasizing problem definition and rigorous real-world evaluation. As the field enters the “second half,” the central challenge becomes real utility in long-horizon, dynamic, and user-dependent environments, where agents face context explosion and must continuously accumulate, manage, and selectively reuse large volumes of information across extended interactions. Memory, with hundreds of papers released this year, therefore emerges as the critical solution to fill the utility gap. In this survey, we provide a unified view of foundation agent memory along three dimensions: memory substrate (internal and external), cognitive mechanism (episodic, semantic, sensory, working, and procedural), and memory subject (agent- and user-centric). We then analyze how memory is instantiated and operated under different agent topologies and highlight learning policies over memory operations. Finally, we review evaluation benchmarks and metrics for assessing memory utility, and outline various open challenges and future directions.
New in the RedJournal: replanned TROG 12.01 unilateral cases to define guidelines for unilateral RT planning with maximal midline and contralateral sparing. @TROGfightcancer RadOnc HNcsm.
Unilateral radiotherapy (URT) is an effective treatment strategy in selected patients with lateralized tonsil cancer. However, there is a lack of established planning guidelines for URT treatment leading to suboptimal optimization of contralateral and midline organs at risk (OARs). This study aimed to re-optimize URT plans to maximize sparing of midline and contralateral OAR’s while maintaining target coverage, providing dosimetric guidelines for URT planning.
Neutrophils are known as first responders to threatening infections and feature prominently in the microenvironment of tumors to resist cancer progression. Though neutrophils have been linked to the growth of multiple cancers, such as lung and breast, these cells can assume multiple functional states.
In a new study published in Cancer Cell titled, “ CCL3 is produced by aged neutrophils across cancers and promotes tumor growth,” researchers from Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne have discovered a gene expression program executed by tumor-associated neutrophils (TANs) and a corresponding biomarker that uniformly support cancer cell survival and tumor progression across human and murine tumors.
Results demonstrate that TANs characterized by this conserved genetic program are a central variable of the tumor microenvironment (TME) linked to cancer progression. The authors also identify an associated marker, CCL3, as key to supporting cancer growth.
A vaccine designed to fight HPV-driven head and neck cancers has shown promising results in a lab study in human tissues and mice.
If proven effective in humans, the therapeutic shot could complement standard cancer therapies, and its design may help scientists build better vaccines for other diseases.
Narges Alipanah-Lechner & team perform multi-omics analysis of patients with ARDS, revealing 4 molecular signatures associated with death, all characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction.
1Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy, and Sleep Medicine, Department of Medicine, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
2Division of Clinical and Translational Research, Department of Anesthesia, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
3Cardiovascular Research Institute, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.
Vold et al. studied two SNAP-25 variants with different clinical severity. Variants destabilize the SNARE complex and reduce binding to the Munc18-1:VAMP2:syntaxin-1 acceptor complex, with correlated effects on neurotransmitter release. Effects of co-expression of variant and wild-type SNAP-25 were modeled by assuming the co-existence of both species in a ring of SNARE complexes.