A melanoma vaccine that actually worked, and corneas grown from one donor

The vaccine, called intismeran autogene, starts with a biopsy of a patient's own tumor, sequenced and compared against their healthy blood cells to find up to 34 mutated surface proteins unique to that cancer. The mRNA coding for those proteins gets injected into muscle, the same way the Covid vaccines worked, and the body starts making the actual mutant proteins itself, training the immune system to recognize them 87. Personalized cancer vaccines have been a two-decade-long promise with a mixed track record. This is the first time one has produced positive results in a trial this large.

Precise Bio, a regenerative medicine company split between Israel and North Carolina, has found a way to stretch a single donor's corneal tissue into hundreds of implants: they culture the cells in the lab, then 3D-bioprint them into a transparent, layered structure that resembles a healthy cornea. Last year a patient received the first-ever corneal implant made entirely from lab-grown human cells, and a Phase I safety trial is now underway 49.

Human brain development normally unfolds over almost two decades, which is part of why it's so hard to study. But these organoids matured on the same schedule a real human brain would, hitting developmental milestones, including signs of postnatal development, in roughly the right order and at roughly the right pace. Their neurons formed working connections and kept firing electrical signals for at least two years straight, sustained by a nutrient fluid the researchers suspect was the key to keeping them alive this long 188.

Researchers studying the cricket Loxoblemmus equestris and the bat Scotophilus kuhlii found there's a second channel nobody had noticed: smell 217. The crickets avoid the bat's body odor outright, and the researchers traced the active ingredient to limonene, the same compound that gives citrus its scent. In the lab, limonene alone was enough to trigger avoidance. In the field, crickets exposed to it went quieter, calling less to avoid drawing attention 217.

By the traditional model, that should have wiped out what those mice had learned. It didn't. Once the mice woke up, they still remembered tasks they'd learned before hibernating, and the synaptic spines that had shrunk away regrew in their original spots. A small number of especially stubborn synapses survived the hibernation entirely, clustering together, and the more of these surviving clusters a mouse had, the better it performed on the old task after waking 568.

Founded in 1956 by five coworkers as a stove factory, Mondragón is now the largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives on Earth: over 70,000 employees across 92 cooperatives, sharing profits between them. Its reach is genuinely strange to picture all at once: a grocery chain with hundreds of stores, a university, Spain's only defibrillator manufacturer, its largest bicycle maker, tech in a third of Europe's solar panels and 60 percent of the world's trains 723.

Vegan butter offered the single biggest discount, 48 percent cheaper than the dairy version, followed by burgers at 31 percent and chicken pieces at 29 percent. Every product that beat its animal-based counterpart on price was a supermarket's own private-label brand, credit both to deliberate pricing strategy and to inflation hitting meat and dairy harder 581.

It's part of a broader shift: for decades, "passive acoustic monitoring," leaving microphones running for weeks in places humans can't easily stay, has revealed entire soundscapes in oceans and forests. Now researchers are pointing that same technique underground 839.