Trains move through the world’s subway stations in a consistent pattern: arriving, stopping, and moving to the next stop—and repeated by other trains throughout the day. A new study by a team of NYU psychology and linguistics researchers finds that our brains work much the same way when processing several words at once—as we routinely do when listening to others speak.

A new clinical trials shows that pembrolizumab, a drug that utilizes the body’s immune system to target and eliminate cancer cells, appeared to reduce the risk of distant metastases for an aggressive form of skin cancer when given immediately after surgery, but did not significantly reduce the overall risk of recurrence, which was a co-primary endpoint of the trial. The randomized phase 3 trial called STAMP or EA6174, is the largest clinical study to date evaluating pembrolizumab as adjuvant therapy for Merkel cell carcinoma, an extremely aggressive disease, with fewer than half of patients surviving 5 years after diagnosis.