Month: November 2017

Enlarge / After fecal transplants from responding humans, the gut cells of mice (blue) were flooded with cancer-fighting immune cells (red, green) (credit: Dr. Luigi Nezi])

New, potent cancer therapies can act like daggers pressed into the hindquarters of the immune system, prodding it to lunge at any cancerous cells in the body. When the drugs work, the immune system tramples tumors into oblivion. But they don’t always work—in fact, cancer drugs can fail 60 to 70 percent of the time. The drugs might not give the immune system a sharp enough sticking in every patient. But according to a pair of new studies, it may not be the immune system that needs a swift kick—it may be the gut.

Some intestinal-dwelling bacteria appear to corral and train immune cells to fight off cancer cells—prior to any spurring from cancer immunotherapies. Without such microbial priming, the drugs may only offer a futile prod. In both studies, published this week in Science, researchers found that the cancer patients who saw no benefit from the drugs (non-responders) were the ones who lacked certain beneficial gut bugs, particularly after taking antibiotics. Meanwhile, cancer patients who did respond to the drugs had bacteria that could prompt the immune system to release chemicals that get cancer-killing immune cells—T cells—to chomp at the bit.

When the researchers transferred the gut microbes from their human cancer patients into germ-free mice with cancer, the rodents mirrored the patients’ fates. That is, mice that got gut microbes from non-responding humans also did not respond to immunotherapies. But, the mice that got microbes from responders responded. And when researchers swapped responder gut microbes into non-responding mice, the mice converted and fought back the cancer.

Enlarge / An icon of exploration. (credit: NASA/JPL)

I've made no secret that the Voyager probes' journey through the outer Solar System was a major influence on my childhood. So I was shocked to find out that I had missed the airing of what may be the definitive story of their mission. I was fortunate enough to correct my mistake thanks to NYU's science journalism program. For anyone else at all interested in science, NASA, space, or the human side of science, this review serves as a warning: the story will be shown one more time on November 15. Do not miss it.

The story is a documentary called The Farthest, a name that focuses on Voyager 1's current fate as the only human-made object to have left the Solar System. But the movie follows both Voyagers from when they were just an idea struggling to get funding, through potentially mission-ending issues, and on to their status as the definitive exploration mission of the last century. And The Farthest does all that primarily through the words of the scientists who ran the mission and analyzed the data in real time as it came in.

The scientists are quirky, expressive, passionate, and fundamentally human, things that are lacking from most portrayals in popular culture. The film helps you come away with the sense that, even though nobody has seen or touched this hardware in decades, the Voyagers are fundamentally a story of human endeavor.

Enlarge / Close-up of an opened prescription bottle, labelled as containing the opioid hydrocodone, as a number of its pills lie on a white surface, March 14, 2017. (credit: Tom Kelley/Getty Images)

An 84-year-old doctor in New London, New Hampshire, appeared in state court Friday in an effort to regain her medical license, less than a week after closing her office on October 28.

State authorities claim that—because Dr. Anna Konopka doesn’t have a computer, much less know how to use one—her organizational skills are lacking, according to the Associated Press.

“The problem now is that I am not doing certain things on a computer,” she told the news service. “I have to learn that. It is time consuming. I have no time.”

Enlarge / T-Mobile and Sprint stores in Herald Square in New York City in 2011. (credit: Getty Images | Richard Levine )

T-Mobile USA and Sprint today finally gave a definitive answer about whether they will merge. The telecomm giants said that they have stopped negotiating and will remain independent entities. The wireless carriers "were unable to find mutually agreeable terms" and want to "put an end to the extensive speculation around a transaction," they said in a joint announcement.

Over the past few weeks, numerous merger updates have bubbled up from anonymous sources. Initially, the merger seemed to be a done deal. Merger talks then seemed to break down, only to be revived again a couple days ago.

But none of those rumors were confirmed by the companies' chief executives. That changed today when T-Mobile CEO John Legere and Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure both said that there won't be any deal.

Enlarge (credit: Science)

It's been one of the most contentious debates in anthropology, and now scientists are saying it's pretty much over. A group of prominent anthropologists have done an overview of the scientific literature and declare in Science magazine that the "Clovis first" hypothesis of the peopling of the Americas is dead.

For decades, students were taught that the first people in the Americas were a group called the Clovis who walked over the Bering land bridge about 13,500 years ago. They arrived (so the narrative goes) via an ice-free corridor between glaciers in North America. But evidence has been piling up since the 1980s of human campsites in North and South America that date back much earlier than 13,500 years. At sites ranging from Oregon in the US to Monte Verde in Chile, evidence of human habitation goes back as far as 18,000 years.

In the 2000s, overwhelming evidence suggested that a pre-Clovis group had come to the Americans before there was an ice-free passage connecting Beringia to the Americas. As Smithsonian anthropologist Torben C. Rick and his colleagues put it, "In a dramatic intellectual turnabout, most archaeologists and other scholars now believe that the earliest Americans followed Pacific Rim shorelines from northeast Asia to Beringia and the Americas."