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Snap has reached a settlement in a lawsuit alleging its Snapchat platform contributed to social media addiction, resolving the case shortly before it was set to go to trial. Terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.
Amazon provides a standard 30-day free trial of Prime that converts to a paid subscription unless canceled, with no guaranteed waiting period for repeat trials. The company also offers Prime for Young Adults, giving six months free to those 18-24 or enrolled students before charging $7.49 monthly or $69 annually, and Prime Access at $6.99 monthly after a 30-day trial for SNAP or Medicaid recipients and others meeting income requirements.
Researchers deliberately infected 45 volunteers with a weakened dengue strain to study why second infections with a different strain often turn severe, publishing their findings in Science Translational Medicine. The study, co-authored by NIAID epidemiologist Leah Katzelnick, points to antibodies formed against an earlier dengue strain reacting poorly to a new one, a pattern that has also complicated vaccine rollouts, including one in the Philippines in 2016.
A Cell publication details results from HuidaGene's first-in-human trial of a CRISPR base-editing gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, confirming that one boy died after receiving a high dose. The study found the treatment edited some target genes in the four participants but produced only limited therapeutic effect, while the boy who died suffered a severe immune reaction beginning with abdominal pain and fever within 24 hours of dosing.
Moderna and Merck said their experimental melanoma vaccine showed strong results in a late-stage clinical trial, nearly halving patients' risk of cancer recurrence or death. The companies are now preparing to seek regulatory approval, with the treatment potentially reaching patients as early as 2027.
Google engineers Thomas Nattestad and Natalia Markoborodova announced an experimental HTML-in-Canvas API, now available via origin trial, that lets developers draw DOM content directly into a 2D canvas or a WebGL/WebGPU texture. The API aims to keep that embedded UI interactable and accessible while retaining browser features such as text selection, translate, dark mode and autofill.
Guinea-Bissau's Council of Ministers reaffirmed on October 16 that it will not allow a clinical trial led by Danish researcher Christine Stabell Benn of Bandim Health Project, which was to be funded by the US and would have withheld the newborn hepatitis B vaccine dose from half its infant participants. The rejection followed a judicial police raid on Bandim Health's offices in which vaccines were seized, though Stabell Benn noted the raid came after the government's decision.
Researchers examined fossilized skull fragments, teeth and jaws to pinpoint facial features characteristic of Denisovans, including a low sloping forehead, a massive brow ridge, rectangular eye sockets, flat cheeks and a moderately raised nose bridge. The study also highlighted a flattened, elongated skull shape as a hallmark of the species, published in Nature.
Startup Radical Numerics published a self-authored technical paper describing an AI-engineered bacteriophage used to treat a human patient's bacterial infection. The paper was not peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, and the company declined to share clinical details or identify the patient or doctors involved, citing proprietary concerns.
Researchers ran a randomized controlled trial across 176 Honduran villages in Copán Department, enrolling 24,702 people who agreed to monthly health-worker visits, randomization and repeated surveys over 22 months. Within a subset of 110 villages assigned to random-targeting arms, dosage of the intervention varied from 0% (control) to 100% of residents, allowing researchers to study how varying levels of treatment altered village-level social network structure.
PopVax dosed the first participants in a Phase 1 trial of PVX-001, a broadly protective COVID-19 vaccine candidate, in Melbourne on 31 August 2026. The trial will enroll 36 healthy adults to test safety and immune response breadth; as of 6 October, 14 participants had been dosed with no serious adverse events reported. The vaccine uses PopVax's own protein design, mRNA-VLP architecture, and fridge-stable lipid nanoparticle delivery, built in-house over 4.5 years, and will be open-sourced once the trial concludes.
Rolling Stone reports that CDC director's office staff instructed the agency's budget office in late September to earmark $1.6 million for a vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau that was suspended in January after being widely criticized as unethical. The trial, which would expose newborns to hepatitis B risk, is to be run by Danish researchers Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby, who are currently under investigation by Danish authorities for alleged scientific misconduct. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.