A cancer vaccine works, and storks return to England after 600 years

The trial enrolled 1,137 patients with stage IIB through IV melanoma that had already been surgically removed, randomizing them two-to-one to receive either intismeran alongside Merck's Keytruda or Keytruda alone, for about a year, with nobody, doctors included, knowing who got what 180. The vaccine itself is built from the patient's own cancer: researchers compare the genetic sequence of a person's tumor cells to their healthy cells, pick out up to 34 tumor-specific mutations, and encode them into synthetic mRNA 180. The companies say both recurrence-free survival and distant metastasis-free survival improved by a statistically significant, clinically meaningful margin, though full numbers are still pending. A five-year Phase 2 readout from June already showed a 49 percent reduction in the risk of recurrence or death, and a 59 percent reduction in the risk of the cancer spreading elsewhere 180.

It's one entry in a growing list. In 2017, DNA testing on a celebrated Viking warrior grave in Birka, Sweden, found the remains belonged to a woman too, a result some archaeologists initially tried to argue their way around. The scholarly assumption that prehistoric power was reliably male doesn't stretch back to antiquity at all; it dates to the late 1800s, when British researchers overrode 1860s historians who had noticed the classical record was full of politically powerful women. One influential 1972 description of hillforts characterized them as places for trading "stock and women," as if the two were the same category of asset 21.

That's the fastest star ever recorded. It swoops about ten times closer to the black hole than S2, the previous record-holder used to test Einstein's predictions near Sgr A*, meaning S301 threads even deeper into the warped spacetime the black hole drags around with it. The discovery, from the GRAVITY+ collaboration and published in Nature, gives astronomers a sharper probe than they've ever had for measuring the black hole's spin, and eventually for testing whether it obeys the "no hair" theorem that says black holes should be describable by nothing more than mass, spin, and charge 93.

It's the largest single-site psychedelic neuroimaging dataset ever collected. Rather than just watching the brain's connectivity blur into chaos, as most prior studies (averaged across groups) suggested, researchers tracked individual brains through five separate activities: rest, guided meditation, music, and a short film. What they found was structure, not noise: brain activity reorganized into patterns that lined up with what each person was actually doing and experiencing in the moment 211.

The same stretch of river recently welcomed back the beaver, missing even longer, since roughly the era of the Magna Carta, 800 years ago. The £300,000 translocation was funded by the Veolia Environmental Trust, and organizers timed it to a recent sighting of wild storks flying over the site, hoping the newly released birds will draw them down to settle and breed 234.

Their weekly routine is unglamorous: cleaning the Hokersar wetland outside Srinagar, running school tours, printing pamphlets. Thirteen-year-old member Alimah Hamid is finishing a book for local schools, cataloging more than 50 migratory bird species with their habitats, so kids there grow up knowing what's flying overhead 245.

Two separate 2026 tracking reports, one from big-city police chiefs and one from the Council on Criminal Justice sampling 36 major cities, show the decline still running: homicides down 31 percent versus 2019, robbery down 41 percent, carjackings cut in half. Criminologist Jeff Asher is now forecasting a 2026 national rate of 3 to 3.8 per 100,000, which would smash the old record, in a country whose population has grown by more than 170 million people since that 1950s low 255.

People with high social anxiety who happened to hold this belief reported feeling less mentally drained by socializing than anxious people who assumed impressions stay fluid and constantly need managing. In the lab experiment, manipulating that belief directly changed how depleted participants felt afterward and how well they performed socially 132.