A group of scientists at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center has revealed a new genetic code that acts like a cancer ringleader, recruiting and deploying a gang of tumor cells to incite a biological turf war by invading healthy organs and overpowering the normal cells. This discovery — published today, Dec. 9, in Nature Biotechnology — could unveil an entirely different understanding of the origins of cancer within the body, as well as offer groundbreaking insight into new treatment strategies that could target the growth of tumors in their earliest stages. A group of scientists at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center has revealed a new genetic code that acts like a cancer ringleader, recruiting and deploying a gang of tumor cells to incite a biological turf war by invading healthy organs and overpowering the normal cells. This discovery — published today, Dec. 9, in Nature Biotechnology — could unveil an entirely different understanding of the origins of cancer within the body, as well as offer groundbreaking insight into new treatment strategies that could target the growth of tumors in their earliest stages.

Characterized by darkness and intense pressure, the ocean’s hadal zone seems uninhabitable, yet dozens of unique organisms call it home. Each species discovered there adds a crucial piece to the puzzle of how life has evolved and even thrives in one of Earth's most extreme environments.

A new study published in Systematics and Biodiversity highlights one of those species - the newly named Dulcibella camanchaca. This crustacean is the first large, active predatory amphipod from these extreme depths. The species was discovered by scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Instituto Milenio de Oceanografía (IMO) based at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile.  

Pretrained large-scale AI models need to ‘forget’ specific information for privacy and computational efficiency, but no methods exist for doing so in black-box vision-language models, where internal details are inaccessible. Now, researchers from Japan addressed this issue through an innovative strategy based on latent context sharing, successfully getting an image classifier to forget multiple classes it was trained on. Their findings could expand the use cases of large-scale AI models while safeguarding end users’ privacy.

The paper explores the unique properties of optically active crystals with screw symmetries. These crystals exhibit nonlocal super-dispersion, meaning their polarization rotation properties strongly depend on the wavelength. This nonlocal response allows for the development of a novel camera, the "Nonlocal-Cam." Unlike traditional cameras, the Nonlocal-Cam captures the spectral and polarimetric components of light, providing additional information about the scene. This technology has potential applications in various fields, including biology, machine vision, and remote sensing.

The development of an effective vaccine against the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has posed a significant challenge for decades due to the high genetic diversity of the virus. A research team led by Prof. Dr. Thomas Krey from the Institute of Biochemistry and the Center for Structural and Cell Biology in Medicine at the University of Lübeck, in collaboration with international partners, has now achieved a major breakthrough: using so-called “epitope-focused immunogens,” they were able to induce broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) in laboratory models for the first time. The promising results of the study were published in the renowned journal Science Advances.