Online now: Wu et al. reveal an inverse relationship between psoriasis severity and postprandial APOB48 levels in humans. Using a newly developed photoconvertible APOB knockin mouse and intestinal organoids, they show that IL-1β-producing macrophages drive APOB degradation and epithelial lipid accumulation, uncovering a novel link between psoriasis and intestinal inflammation comorbidity.
A protein already targeted by FDA-approved cancer drugs may also help the body fight influenza, according to new research from The Jackson Laboratory (JAX). Published in Cell Reports, the study found that Programmed Death-Ligand 1 (PD-L1), a protein best known for helping tumors evade immune attack, instead helped immunocompromised mice clear flu-infected lung cells and survive infection.
The findings challenge long-standing assumptions about PD-L1’s role in the immune system. While cancer therapies work by blocking PD-L1 to boost immune attack on tumors, the new research suggests that enhancing PD-L1 signaling may help the body control severe respiratory viral infections, especially in people with T cell immunodeficiencies such as those with HIV or immunosuppression after chemotherapy.
“This discovery suggests that a pathway targeted in cancer could also be useful in infectious disease, but in the opposite way. Cancer therapies block PD-L1, whereas in flu, enhancing it may strengthen host defense,” said Silke Paust, a JAX professor and immunologist who directed the research.
Despite denying any conscious awareness of the bar, the participant could answer correctly at a level well above chance. The participant even showed evidence of being able to pay attention to the bar – they were faster to respond when an arrow (placed in a healthy area of their visual field) correctly indicated the location of the bar.
The most popular interpretation (though not the only one) is that people with blindsight can see these objects, but not see them consciously. They see what is there, but it all goes on unconsciously, below their awareness.
The phenomenon of inattentional blindness seems to show you can see without the information crossing into your consciousness. Anyone can experience inattentional blindness. The phenomenon has been known about for a long time, but we can most easily get a handle on it by looking at a well-known experiment reported in 1999.
We’ve collected 22 million algebra yes/no questions. Your task is to design a “cheat sheet”—a highly optimized prompt—that can be given to a weak, open-source model to drastically improve its accuracy.
On behalf of the SAIR Foundation, our co-founder Terence Tao is thrilled to announce our inaugural competition: the Mathematics Distillation Challenge.
Mathematics is about more than just finding the right answers; it’s about understanding the process. While frontier AI models can solve complex problems with 95% accuracy, weaker open-source models often perform no better than random chance (50%). We want to bridge that gap.
The Challenge:
We’ve collected 22 million algebra yes/no questions. Your task is to design a \.
Patients with leptomeningeal metastasis (LM) have historically had few treatment options. Now, researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have found a combination of targeted therapies, tucatinib and trastuzumab, plus the chemotherapy drug, capecitabine, may improve symptoms and extend survival in some breast cancer patients with LM.
The Phase II study, published today in Nature Cancer, included 17 female patients with newly diagnosed LM and HER2+ breast cancer. Median overall survival (OS) in those treated with the combination therapy increased from a historical average of 4.4 months to 10 months. At the 18-month mark, 41% of patients were still alive. Under the combination treatment, disease progression also stalled, with a median of seven months before central nervous system progression, and 7 of 12 evaluable patients also had improved neurologic deficits.
“The combination achieved a clinically meaningful improvement in overall survival compared to historical controls,” said lead author Rashmi Murthy, M.D., associate professor of Breast Medical Oncology. “For these patients, who often face limited treatment options, our results represent a step forward, offering new hope in how we treat and manage leptomeningeal metastasis.”
Omachi and Lin et al. uncover an unexpected source of ectopic laminin-α2 deposition in the glomerular basement membrane in Alport syndrome. They show that laminin-α2 circulates in blood and deposits according to basement membrane integrity, revealing a trans-tissue route for extracellular matrix deposition in mammals.
While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are adept at answering countless questions, they often remain unaware of a user’s minor habits or previous conversational contexts. This is why AI, despite being deeply integrated into our daily lives, can still feel like a “stranger.” Overcoming these limitations, researchers at KAIST, led by Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo from the Graduate School of AI Semiconductors, have developed the world’s first AI semiconductor, dubbed “SoulMate,” which learns and adapts to a user’s speech style, preferences, and emotions in real-time—becoming a true “digital soulmate.”
This technology is being hailed as a core semiconductor breakthrough that will accelerate the era of “hyper-personalized AI”—moving beyond “AI for everyone” to an AI that learns and responds to an individual’s unique conversational style and preferences. The work is published in the proceedings of the 2026 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
Regulation and activation of UvrD-family DNA helicases/ translocases.
For the past few decades, the active form of superfamily 1A (SF1A) UvrDfamily helicases has been controversial due to the absence of structures of the active dimeric form of these enzymes.
A key interaction in the monomeric structures is between a regulatory domain (2B) and duplex DNA that was proposed to facilitate DNA unwinding but is likely inhibitory.
However, recent cryo-EM structures show that Mycobacterium tuberculosis UvrD1 forms a covalent dimer, with dimerization occurring between the 2B domains of each subunit, resulting in major reorientations of the 2B domains that prevent the 2B–DNA interaction, thus relieving its inhibitory effect.
The same dimerization interface is used in Escherichia coli UvrD dimers, suggesting that this is a general mechanism to activate most SF1A helicases.
Due to these insights, textbook descriptions of helicase mechanisms based on the monomeric structures require re-evaluation. sciencenewshighlights ScienceMission https://sciencemission.com/conundrum-resolved