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Tech News
A health influencer has announced that they drank from a radioactive jug daily for more than 250 days. Radium water products, which are similar, were banned in the U.S. nearly a century ago due to health risks. The influencer's claim raises concerns about the safety of such practices.
Marking 15 years since Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, a retrospective recalls his influence on technology and retail. It draws on Ron Johnson's new book 'Shop Different,' which recounts how Jobs and Johnson developed Apple's retail philosophy, including Johnson's proposal that Apple should 'love its customers.' The piece also notes Jobs later used the phrase 'We love our users' during the 2010 'antennagate' press conference.
A recent report by the American Association for Cancer Research reveals that 71% of cancer patients in the US now survive at least five years post-diagnosis, compared to 49% in the late 1970s. Notable improvements include lung cancer, where five-year survival rates have risen from 13% to 29%, and childhood leukemia, with survival rates for young patients increasing from 57% to 90%. These advances are attributed to better surgical methods, radiation therapy, and targeted medicines.
A study published in The Lancet Oncology estimates that 2.3 million new cancer cases globally in 2024, roughly one in eight, were caused by infections. H. pylori accounted for the largest share at 760,000 cases, followed by HPV with 750,000, then HBV, EBV and HCV. More than three-quarters of these infection-linked cancers occurred in low- and middle-income countries, with Eastern Asia alone responsible for 990,000 cases, or 42% of the global total.
Researchers critiquing a series of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health studies say they replicated and expanded the same statistical methodology used to link nuclear power plants to elevated cancer rates. Applying that methodology to other landmarks, they found it also attributes huge numbers of cancer deaths to Costco warehouses, private colleges, Harvard itself, and even Major League Baseball stadiums. The critics argue this shows the method produces spurious correlations regardless of the landmark chosen, undermining the original nuclear-cancer papers published in Environmental Health, Nature Communications, and other journals between December and this year.
New research reports that colorectal cancer diagnosed in people aged 20 and under tends to be more aggressive and is often caught later than in adults. The findings indicate these pediatric and adolescent cases may represent a biologically distinct form of the disease rather than simply an early-onset version of adult colorectal cancer.
At last week's American Association for Cancer Research conference on Pancreatic Cancer in San Diego, scientists discussed combining early-detection methods with a strategy called cancer interception, which treats abnormally growing tissue before it becomes cancerous. The meeting followed the FDA's August approval of daraxonrasib (Rasonque), a drug shown to suppress pancreatic tumors, which researchers say has renewed optimism for applying interception to this historically hard-to-treat cancer.
Revolution Medicines has developed daraxonrasib, described as the first drug able to broadly target a key genetic driver behind pancreatic cancer. The compound is reported to work against a range of mutations previously considered difficult to treat with a single therapy.
Researchers led by Zeng et al., publishing in Nature, report that tumours spreading to the dura—the brain's outer membrane—recruit bone-degrading osteoclast cells. These osteoclasts damage nearby meningeal lymphatic vessels, which normally drain fluid from around the brain, and weaken local immune defences against the tumour.
The OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit created in October 2025 during OpenAI's governance restructuring, has begun distributing part of its committed $25 billion in philanthropic funding. Recent grants include a $125 million package for open health and life-sciences data, covering $40 million for a University of North Carolina cancer vaccine project, $500,000 to repurpose data from failed biotech firms, and $15 million for research on drug transport across biological membranes, following an earlier $100 million commitment to Alzheimer's disease research. Jacob Trefethen, the foundation's head of life sciences, says this is an early phase of a broader, faster-moving funding effort.
A study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, published in The Lancet Oncology, estimates that infectious agents caused about 2.3 million new cancer cases worldwide in 2024, or roughly one in eight of all cases. Helicobacter pylori bacteria accounted for the largest share at 760,000 stomach cancer cases, mostly in eastern Asia, followed by HPV with nearly 750,000 cases concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, and hepatitis B and C viruses linked to many liver cancer cases. Researchers also expanded their list of infection-linked cancers by 16 additional types.
Researchers led by Conery et al., writing in Nature, report a strategy for treating lung cancers driven by mutated kinase enzymes that destroys the target protein entirely rather than merely inhibiting its activity. The approach is aimed at cancers that develop resistance to existing kinase inhibitors after acquiring mutations near the drug's binding site. Twenty-eight kinase inhibitors are already FDA-approved across nine molecular lung cancer subtypes, but many patients eventually relapse due to such resistance mutations.