A cancer vaccine finally proves itself, and gut bacteria build stronger muscles

It's the first time a personalized cancer vaccine has posted positive results in a final-stage trial. Here's how it works: doctors sequence a patient's tumor, compare it to their healthy cells, and pick up to 34 mutated proteins unique to that cancer. The vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize exactly those proteins, using the same mRNA platform that made the Covid vaccine 78. Trials are already underway for lung, kidney, and bladder cancers. Moderna's CEO Stéphane Bancel called it "a pivotal moment"; Dr. Lennard Lee at Oxford called it a "landmark moment for cancer vaccines" 675.

Older adults who carried it had 29% greater handgrip strength than those who didn't 23. When the team gave it to mice, the animals developed about 30% more grip strength and grew larger fast-twitch muscle fibers, the type used for sprinting and lifting. The bacterium was also simply rarer in the older group to begin with, which is its own small clue about what aging does to the gut. Researchers now think it could become a probiotic candidate specifically aimed at age-related muscle loss 23.

Precise Bio, a regenerative medicine company in Israel and North Carolina, took corneal tissue from a single organ donor and used laboratory culture techniques plus 3D bioprinting to produce hundreds of transparent, layered implants that resemble a healthy natural cornea. Last year one of those implants gave a patient the first-ever cornea made entirely of lab-grown human cells. A Phase I safety trial is underway now 38.

Among men who'd experienced more adversity growing up, oxytocin made them noticeably more generous with strangers. Among men who'd had easier childhoods, the same hormone did the opposite: it made them less generous. Same molecule, same dose, opposite effect, depending entirely on what happened to someone decades earlier 269.

One of the old pig buildings is now a 100-by-50-foot mushroom production facility with four grow rooms; the former waste lagoon is becoming a freshwater pond, and the family has been planting trees across the property. It took about two years of construction, mostly done by the Faaborgs themselves, without a guaranteed paycheck the whole time 555557.

That's down more than a third from the previous year, and 55.6% below the last decade's average. If the country's official annual figures follow the same trend, Brazil could post its lowest Amazon deforestation rate since monitoring began in 1988 680. The drop follows a sustained enforcement push under President Lula, including expanded protections for Indigenous land, which researchers point to as a key lever against illegal mining and logging.

Today it covers 96% of all shark and ray species traded for fins and 70% of those traded for meat. Seventy of the 180 species now on the list were added just last year, when the convention also banned commercial trade in manta and devil rays, the oceanic whitetip shark, and the whale shark outright 747.

Once the mice woke up, they still remembered tasks they'd learned before going under. The synaptic spines that had withered during hibernation regrew in their original spots. A small number of synapses that survived the whole ordeal formed clusters that seemed to act as anchors, and the more of those clusters a mouse had, the better it performed afterward 532. "It was astonishing," said study author Yu-Ju Lin of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. "Logically, if all our engram synapses were essential in memory retention as traditionally thought, memory should have massively deteriorated."