When is cancer not cancer? It's an unexpected question that has stirred the world of cancer treatment in recent years, most notably now with prostate cancer. WSJ: A growing number of doctors are advocating what might seem like an unusual position: That low-grade prostate cancers that grow very slowly or not at all shouldn't be called cancer or carcinoma. The reason, they say, is that those words scare men, their families and sometimes even their doctors into seeking more aggressive treatment than patients need -- leaving men with debilitating side effects -- rather than pursuing a carefully monitored wait-and-see approach.

A name change wouldn't be unprecedented. Certain other forms of thyroid, cervical and bladder cancers have been reclassified, sometimes partly to avoid scaring people about cancers that are unlikely to spread. "The word 'cancer' engenders so much anxiety and fear," says Dr. Laura Esserman, a professor of surgery and radiology at the University of California, San Francisco and director of its Breast Care Center, who is advocating for a type of lower-risk breast cancer to be renamed. "Patients think if I don't do something tomorrow, this is going to kill me. In fact, that's not true."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute's top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop. The accusations come from data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud. On January 2, David posted on his research integrity blog, For Better Science, a long list of potential data manipulation from DFCI researchers. The post highlighted many data figures that appear to contain pixel-for-pixel duplications. The allegedly manipulated images are of data such as Western blots, which are used to detect and visualize the presence of proteins in a complex mixture.

DFCI Research Integrity Officer Barrett Rollins told The Harvard Crimson that David had contacted DFCI with allegations of data manipulation in 57 DFCI-led studies. Rollins said that the institute is "committed to a culture of accountability and integrity," and that "every inquiry about research integrity is examined fully." The allegations are against: DFCI President and CEO Laurie Glimcher, Executive Vice President and COO William Hahn, Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine Irene Ghobrial, and Harvard Medical School professor Kenneth Anderson. The Wall Street Journal noted that Rollins, the integrity officer, is also a co-author on two of the studies. He told the outlet he is recused from decisions involving those studies.

Testing a person's blood for a type of protein called phosphorylated tau, or p-tau, could be used to screen for Alzheimer's disease with "high accuracy," even before symptoms begin to show, a new study suggests. CNN: The study involved testing blood for a key biomarker of Alzheimer's called p-tau217, which increases at the same time as other damaging proteins -- beta amyloid and tau -- build up in the brains of people with the disease. Currently, to identify the buildup of beta amyloid and tau in the brain, patients undergo a brain scan or spinal tap, which often can be inaccessible and costly. But this simple blood test was found to be up to 96% accurate in identifying elevated levels of beta amyloid and up to 97% accurate in identifying tau, according to the study published Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology.

"What was impressive with these results is that the blood test was just as accurate as advanced testing like cerebrospinal fluid tests and brain scans at showing Alzheimer's disease pathology in the brain," Nicholas Ashton, a professor of neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and one of the study's lead authors, said in an email. The study findings came as no surprise to Ashton, who added that the scientific community has known for several years that using blood tests to measure tau or other biomarkers has the potential to assess Alzheimer's disease risk. "Now we are close to these tests being prime-time and this study shows that," he said. Alzheimer's disease, a brain disorder that affects memory and thinking skills, is the most common type of dementia, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Gummy vitamin supplements have surged in popularity, with sales projected to double to $14 billion by 2027. However, experts warn that the candy-like taste and texture increase risks of overdosing, especially among children, as calls to Poison Control for melatonin overdoses have jumped 530% in a decade. Formulating vitamins into gummies also leads to faster nutrient degradation from heat, light and moisture than pills. Testing shows gummy vitamins often contain far more or less of ingredients than labels state. While some sweetness makes supplements appealing, gummies mimic candy too closely at the expense of safety and reliability. The Atlantic: A recent analysis of melatonin and CBD gummies yielded similar results: Some contained as much as 347 percent the amount of those substances stated on the label. Because the FDA generally does not regulate supplements as drugs, such wild variability is accepted in a way that it isn't for actual pharmaceuticals. (In 2020, the FDA granted the first-ever Investigational New Drug Application for a gummy medication, though no such product appears to have come to market.) "If you have something that you need a specific amount of every time you take it, gummies are not the way to go," says Pieter Cohen, a doctor at Cambridge Health Alliance, in Somerville, Massachusetts, and the lead author of the melatonin-CBD research. Taking too much of a supplement is generally not as dangerous as taking too much of a prescription drug, but, as Breuner noted, many supplements taken in sufficient excess can still be toxic. When I asked Cooperman what advice he had for people trying to navigate all of this, his answer was simple: "Don't buy a gummy."

Perhaps the rise of gummy supplements was inevitable. The supplement industry has become so big in part because it can promote its products as, say, boosting the immune system or supporting healthy bones, without subjecting them to the strict regulatory demands imposed on pharmaceuticals. Supplements blur the line between food and drug, and gummy supplements -- designed and marketed on the premise that healthy stuff can and should taste as good as candy -- only intensify that blurring. Cohen, for one, thinks the distinction is worth preserving. Calcium supplements should not go down as easy as Haribos. That may be a bitter pill to swallow, but not everything can taste like candy.

NASA announced Friday that it finally got a canister of asteroid dust open, four months after it parachuted down through the Earth's atmosphere into the Utah desert. The Guardian reports: The space administration announced Friday that it had successfully removed two stuck fasteners that had prevented some of the samples collected in 2020 from the 4.6bn-year-old asteroid Bennu, which is classified as a "potentially hazardous" because it has one in 1,750 chance of crashing into Earth by 2300. Most of the rock samples collected by Nasa's Osiris-Rex mission were retrieved soon after the canister landed in September, but additional material remaining inside a sampler head that proved difficult to access.

After months of wrestling with the last two of 35 fasteners, scientists in Houston managed to get them dislodged. "It's open! It's open!" Nasa's planetary science division posted on Twitter/X. The division also posted a photograph of dust and small rocks inside the canister. According to the Los Angeles Times, the team designed custom tools made from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel to pry it open -- all without the samples being contaminated by Earthly air. Nasa said it will now analyze the nine-ounce sample.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Doctors are now being encouraged to consider more blood testing for PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals," according to guidance released (PDF) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The federal agency is recommending providers have a discussion with their patients regarding consumer and environmental exposures to large levels of the chemicals, and if blood testing may be of benefit.

"This information is intended for individuals and communities around the country, who are concerned about exposure to PFAS to have productive conversations with their medical providers" Dr. Aaron Bernstein, Director of CDC's National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), told ABC News. "Over 90% of people in this country have been exposed to PFAS and many, many communities around the country there have been very high exposures. And we've learned more and more in recent years about how exposures to PFAS may increase risk for many disease" he added.

The new guidance advises providers to consider an individual's exposure history; the results of PFAS testing from a patient's water supply, food sources, or other exposures; and whether those results can inform regarding ways to reduce future exposures. Most Americans are exposed to PFAS through drinking water, according to Bernstein, who also notes that many municipal water agencies are already testing for PFAS, and those test results are typically publicly available. [...] While blood tests for PFAS may help guide exposure reduction or provide psychological relief to patients, such tests do not help identify the source of exposure, nor can they be directly linked to a health condition. There are also currently no approved medical treatments available to reduce PFAS in the body, according to the CDC. "A PFAS level is one piece of data that needs to be taken in a broader context. We need to understand the individual's health history, their family history, what other exposures they may have that might increase the risk of diseases that can also be associated with PFAS," Bernstein said.

"What is clear is that this is an evolving landscape [...] we are at a point in time that both the science around PFAS, the accessibility of testing, and what is being tested for is changing. We are committed at CDC to stay on top of it and update this information as needed."

Japan has become the fifth country in the world to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon, using precision technology that allowed it to touch down closer to its target landing site than any mission has before. However the spacecraft might have survived on the lunar surface for just a few hours due to power failure. Nature: Telemetry showed that the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, touched down in its target area near Shioli crater, south of the lunar equator early Saturday morning, four months after lifting off from the Tanegashima Space Centre, off the south coast of Japan. [...] According to [Hitoshi] Kuninaka (VP of Kanegawa-based Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), SLIM has very likely achieved its primary goal -- to land on the Moon with an unprecedented accuracy of 100 metres, which is a big leap from previous ranges of a few to dozens of kilometres. SLIM carried vision-based navigation technology, which was intended to image the surface as it flew over the Moon, and locate itself quickly by matching the images with onboard maps.

It remains unclear if the car-sized, 200-kilogram spacecraft actually touched down in the planned, two-step manner with its five legs. Unlike previous Moon landers, which used four legs to simultaneously reach a relatively flat area, SLIM was designed to hit a 15-degree slope outside Shioli crater first with one leg at the back, and then tip forward to stabilize on the four front legs. Observers suggest that SLIM might have rolled during its touch-down, preventing its solar cells from facing the Sun. Kuninaka said not enough data were available to establish the probe's posture or orientation. However, if some sunlight is able to reach the solar cells there is a chance that SLIM could come back to life.

The world's first routine vaccine programme against malaria has started in Cameroon, in a move projected to save thousands of children's lives across Africa. From a report: The symbolic first jab was given to a baby girl named Daniella at a health facility near Yaounde on Monday. Every year 600,000 people die of malaria in Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Children under five make up at least 80% of those deaths. Cameroon is offering the RTS,S vaccine free of charge to all infants up to the age of six months old.

Patients require a total of four doses. Health officials say these will be given at the same time as other routine childhood vaccines to make it easier for parents. It comes after successful pilot campaigns in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi - where the vaccine caused a 13% drop in malaria deaths in children of eligible age, says Unicef. The jab is known to be effective in at least 36% of cases, according to US researchers, meaning it could save over one in three lives. While the rollout is undoubtedly a relief and a life-saver, its relatively low efficacy rate means that it is not a "silver bullet," argues Willis Akhwale at End Malaria Council Kenya.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: After decades of study and testing, a potential vaccine for cancer may be on the horizon. Dr. Thomas Wagner, founder of Orbis Health Solutions, is using the body's own immune system to fight the disease, with each shot personalized to the patient, according to ABC News.
From the article: Typically, cancer cells evade a person's immune system because it is recognized as that person's cells. Wagner developed a tumor lysate particle only (TLPO) vaccine that uses a person's tumor cells to identify particular parts that are then presented back in the body using the vaccine in a way that can stimulate their immune system to gain the ability to detect these cancer cells like an infection, allowing the immune system to fight the cancer itself.

"People used to ask me the question, 'When will there be a cure for cancer?' And I've been doing this for 60 years and I could never answer that question," Wagner said. "Until recently, until the last three or four or five years." Wagner believes this type of cancer treatment could be a key to finding the long-awaited cure for cancer, all cancers, if paired with early detection.

Wagner's TLPO cancer vaccine has been tested in hundreds of patients with advanced forms of melanoma in Phase 2 clinical trials. The most recent data presented at an academic conference showed nearly 95% of people given only the vaccine were still alive three years after starting treatment and 64% were still disease-free. Among the most advanced forms of melanoma, disease-free survival after three years for people with stage III disease was 60% in the vaccine-only group, compared to about 39% in the placebo group. Disease-free survival for those with stage IV disease was about 68% in the vaccine-only group, and zero in the placebo group.

The most common side effects were redness or pain at the injection site, fever and fatigue after the injection – similar to other vaccines that stimulate an immune response.

Based on this data and other studies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has greenlit Wagner's vaccine to start a Phase 3 clinical trial. It will be a three-year endeavor with a goal to enroll 500 people and is planned to launch sometime this year, Riley Polk, president of Orbis Health Solutions, told WLOS, an ABC News affiliate in Asheville, North Carolina.
Polk's own father was told there were no treatment options left for his lung cancer, according to the article. That was more than 10 years ago, and "His father opted to try Wagner's cancer vaccine and lived 10 more years before dying from something unrelated to cancer." Polk gives ABC News this quote.

"You can tell me a lot of things, but you can't tell me [the vaccine] doesn't work."

"Good news..." NASA posted Saturday night on X. "We've reestablished contact with the Mars Helicopter..."

After a two-day communications blackout, NASA had instructed its Perseverance Mars rover "to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity's signal" — and apparently they did the trick. "The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout" during the helicopter's record-breaking 72nd flight.

Slashdot reader Thelasko shared this report from NPR: Communications broke down on Thursday, when the little autonomous rotorcraft was sent on a "quick pop-up vertical flight," to test its systems after an unplanned early landing during its previous flight, the agency said in a status update on Friday night. The Perseverance rover, which relays data between the helicopter and Earth during the flights, showed that Ingenuity climbed to its assigned maximum altitude of 40 feet, NASA said.

During its planned descent, the helicopter and rover stopped communicating with each other...
Even before it came back online, RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) pointed out that the Mars copter has done this before. "Batteries dieing, resulting in a communications re-set, If I remember correctly."

Space.com also noted additional alternatives: "Perseverance is currently out of line-of-sight with Ingenuity, but the team could consider driving closer for a visual inspection," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages both robots' missions, said via X on Friday.

Ingenuity has stayed aloft for more than 128 minutes and covered a total of 11 miles (17.7 kilometers) during its 72 Mars flights, according to the mission's flight log.

"It's ridiculous just how virulent some of these bacteria get over time," says Dwayne Roach, assistant professor of bacteriophages, infectious disease and immunology at San Diego State University.

But now CNN says doctors are fighting multi-drug-resistant superbugs with "nature's oldest predators — tiny tripod-looking viruses called phages designed to find, attack and gobble up bacteria." The microscopic creatures have saved the lives of patients dying from superbug infections and are being used in clinical trials as a potential solution to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance...

In labs around the country, phage scientists are taking research and discovery to the next level... [Yale scientists] are busy mapping which phages and antibiotics are most symbiotic in the fight against a pathogen. Roach's San Diego State lab is investigating the body's immune response to phages while developing new phage purification techniques to prepare samples for intravenous use in patients. Currently, clinical trials are underway to test the effectiveness of phages against intractable urinary tract infections, chronic constipation, joint infections, diabetic foot ulcers, tonsillitis and the persistent, reoccurring infections that occur in patients with cystic fibrosis. The chronic infections common in cystic fibrosis are typically due to various strains of drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa — the same pathogen responsible for Horton's ear infection and the artificial tears outbreak.

A number of labs are developing libraries of phages, stockpiled with strains found in nature that are known to be effective against a particular pathogen. In Texas, a new facility is taking that a step further — speeding up evolution by creating phages in the lab. "Rather than just sourcing new phages from the environment, we have a bioreactor that in real time creates billions upon billions of phages," said Anthony Maresso, associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "Most of those phages won't be active against the drug-resistant bacteria, but at some point there will be a rare variant that has been trained, so to speak, to attack the resistant bacteria, and we'll add that to our arsenal," Maresso said. "It's a next-generation approach on phage libraries." Maresso's lab published a study last year on the treatment of 12 patients with phages customized to each patient's unique bacterial profile. It was a qualified success: The antibiotic-resistant bacteria in five patients were eradicated, while several more patients showed improvements.

"There's a lot of approaches right now that are happening in parallel," Roach said. "Do we engineer phages? Do we make a phage cocktail, and then how big is the cocktail? Is it two phages or 12 phages? Should phages be inhaled, applied topically or injected intravenously? There's a lot of work underway on exactly how to best do this...." Genetically engineering phages would allow scientists to target each person's unique mix of antibiotic-resistant pathogens instead of searching sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria to find just the right phage for the job.

Along with phage libraries, genetic engineering is also a key to churning out phages in mass, to distribute on a wider scale. In Russia and the country of Georgia, where phage therapy has been used for decades, patients can buy phage cocktails off the shelf in pharmacies.

"A familiar shadow looms in a fresh image of the heart of the nearby galaxy M87," reports Science magazine.

"It confirms that the galaxy harbors a gravitational sinkhole so powerful that light cannot escape, one generated by a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun." But compared with a previous image from the network of radio dishes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the new one reveals a subtle shift in the bright ring surrounding the shadow, which could provide clues to how gases churn around the black hole. "We can see that shift now," says team member Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam. "We can start to use that." The new detail has also whetted astronomers' desire for a proposed expansion of the EHT, which would deliver even sharper images of distant black holes.

The new picture, published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from data collected 1 year after the observing campaign that led to the first-ever picture of a black hole, revealed in 2019 and named as Science's Breakthrough of the Year. The dark center of the image is the same size as in the original image, confirming that the image depicts physical reality and is not an artifact. "It tells us it wasn't a fluke," says Martin Hardcastle, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire who was not involved in the study. The black hole's mass would not have grown appreciably in 1 year, so the comparison also supports the idea that a black hole's size is determined by its mass alone. In the new image, however, the brightest part of a ring surrounding the black hole has shifted counterclockwise by about 30 degrees.

That could be because of random churning in the disk of material that swirls around the black hole's equator. It could also be associated with fluctuations in one of the jets launched from the black hole's poles — a sign that the jet isn't aligned with the black hole's spin axis, but precesses around it like a wobbling top. That would be "kind of exciting," Markoff says. "The only way to know is to keep taking pictures...."

[T]he team wants to add more telescopes to the network, which would further sharpen its images and enable it to see black holes in more distant galaxies.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

"The discovery of a second ultra-large structure in the remote universe has further challenged some of the basic assumptions about cosmology," writes SciTechDaily: The Big Ring on the Sky is 9.2 billion light-years from Earth. It has a diameter of about 1.3 billion light-years, and a circumference of about four billion light-years. If we could step outside and see it directly, the diameter of the Big Ring would need about 15 full Moons to cover it.

It is the second ultra-large structure discovered by University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) PhD student Alexia Lopez who, two years ago, also discovered the Giant Arc on the Sky. Remarkably, the Big Ring and the Giant Arc, which is 3.3 billion light-years across, are in the same cosmological neighborhood — they are seen at the same distance, at the same cosmic time, and are only 12 degrees apart on the sky. Alexia said: "Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe. And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important — but what exactly?

"One possibility is that the Big Ring could be related to Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). BAOs arise from oscillations in the early universe and today should appear, statistically at least, as spherical shells in the arrangement of galaxies. However, detailed analysis of the Big Ring revealed it is not really compatible with the BAO explanation: the Big Ring is too large and is not spherical." Other explanations might be needed, explanations that depart from what is generally considered to be the standard understanding in cosmology...

And if the Big Ring and the Giant Arc together form a still larger structure then the challenge to the Cosmological Principle becomes even more compelling... Alexia said, "From current cosmological theories we didn't think structures on this scale were possible. "
Possible explanations include a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or the effect of cosmic strings passing through...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

The Hubble Space Telescope's discovery of GN-z11 in 2016 marked it as the most distant galaxy known at that time, notable for its unexpected luminosity despite its ancient formation just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Now, in a paper published in Nature, astrophysicist Roberto Maiolino proposes that this brightness could be due to a supermassive black hole, challenging current understanding of early black hole formation and growth. NPR reports: This wasn't just any black hole. First -- assuming that the black hole started out small -- it could be devouring matter at a ferocious rate. And it would have needed to do so to reach its massive size. "This black hole is essentially eating the [equivalent of] an entire Sun every five years," says Maiolino. "It's actually much higher than we thought could be feasible for these black holes." Hence the word "vigorous" in the paper's title. Second, the black hole is 1.6 million times the mass of our Sun, and it was in place just 400 million years after the dawn of the universe. "It is essentially not possible to grow such a massive black hole so fast so early in the universe," Maiolino says. "Essentially, there is not enough time according to classical theories. So one has to invoke alternative scenarios."

Here's scenario one -- rather than starting out small, perhaps supermassive black holes in the early universe were simply born big due to the collapse of vast clouds of primordial gas. Scenario two is that maybe early stars collapsed to form a sea of smaller black holes, which could have then merged or swallowed matter way faster than we thought, causing the resulting black hole to grow quickly. Or perhaps it's some combination of both. In addition, it's possible that this black hole is harming the growth of the galaxy GN-z11. That's because black holes radiate energy as they feed. At such a high rate of feasting, this energy could sweep away the gas of the host galaxy. And since stars are made from gas, it could quench star formation, slowly strangling the galaxy. Not to mention that without gas, the black hole wouldn't have anything to feed on and it too would die.

Keith Cooper reports via Space.com: A European Space Agency (ESA) probe has found enough water to cover Mars in an ocean between 4.9 and 8.9 feet (1.5 and 2.7 meters) deep, buried in the form of dusty ice beneath the planet's equator. The finding was made by ESA's Mars Express mission, a veteran spacecraft that has been engaged in science operations around Mars for 20 years now. While it's not the first time that evidence for ice has been found near the Red Planet's equator, this new discovery is by far the largest amount of water ice detected there so far and appears to match previous discoveries of frozen water on Mars.

"Excitingly, the radar signals match what we expect to see from layered ice and are similar to the signals we see from Mars' polar caps, which we know to be very ice rich," said lead researcher Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States in an ESA statement. The deposits are thick, extended 3.7km (2.3) miles underground, and topped by a crust of hardened ash and dry dust hundreds of meters thick. The ice is not a pure block but is heavily contaminated by dust. While its presence near the equator is a location more easily accessible to future crewed missions, being buried so deep means that accessing the water-ice would be difficult.

Geoffrey.landis writes: The Japan SLIM spacecraft has successfully landed on moon, but power problems mean it may be short mission. The good news is that the landing was successful, making Japan only the fifth nation to successfully make a lunar landing, and the ultra-miniature rover and the hopper both deployed. The bad news is that the solar arrays aren't producing power, and unless they can fix the problem in the next few hours, the batteries will be depleted and it will die. But, short mission or long, hurrah for Japan for being the fifth country to successfully land a mission on the surface of the moon (on their third try; two previous missions didn't make it). It's a rather amazing mission. I've never seen a spacecraft concept that lands under rocket power vertically but then rotates over to rest horizontally on the surface.

An anonymous reader shares a report: These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn't been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring. Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as "authentic," an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere "authentic" to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds. In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. "AirSpace" was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.

My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner's personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me -- who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram -- toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map. To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn't just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued.

Dan Rockmore, the director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College, writing for The New Yorker: Recently, statistical modelling has taken on a new kind of importance as the engine of artificial intelligence -- specifically in the form of the deep neural networks that power, among other things, large language models, such as OpenAI's G.P.T.s. These systems sift vast corpora of text to create a statistical model of written expression, realized as the likelihood of given words occurring in particular contexts. Rather than trying to encode a principled theory of how we produce writing, they are a vertiginous form of curve fitting; the largest models find the best ways to connect hundreds of thousands of simple mathematical neurons, using trillions of parameters.They create a vast data structure akin to a tangle of Christmas lights whose on-off patterns attempt to capture a chunk of historical word usage. The neurons derive from mathematical models of biological neurons originally formulated by Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, in a landmark 1943 paper, titled "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." McCulloch and Pitts argued that brain activity could be reduced to a model of simple, interconnected processing units, receiving and sending zeros and ones among themselves based on relatively simple rules of activation and deactivation.

The McCulloch-Pitts model was intended as a foundational step in a larger project, spearheaded by McCulloch, to uncover a biological foundation of psychiatry. McCulloch and Pitts never imagined that their cartoon neurons could be trained, using data, so that their on-off states linked to certain properties in that data. But others saw this possibility, and early machine-learning researchers experimented with small networks of mathematical neurons, effectively creating mathematical models of the neural architecture of simple brains, not to do psychiatry but to categorize data. The results were a good deal less than astonishing. It wasn't until vast amounts of good data -- like text -- became readily available that computer scientists discovered how powerful their models could be when implemented on vast scales. The predictive and generative abilities of these models in many contexts is beyond remarkable. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of understanding just how they do what they do. A new field, called interpretability (or X-A.I., for "explainable" A.I.), is effectively the neuroscience of artificial neural networks.

This is an instructive origin story for a field of research. The field begins with a focus on a basic and well-defined underlying mechanism -- the activity of a single neuron. Then, as the technology scales, it grows in opacity; as the scope of the field's success widens, so does the ambition of its claims. The contrast with climate modelling is telling. Climate models have expanded in scale and reach, but at each step the models must hew to a ground truth of historical, measurable fact. Even models of covid or elections need to be measured against external data. The success of deep learning is different. Trillions of parameters are fine-tuned on larger and larger corpora that uncover more and more correlations across a range of phenomena. The success of this data-driven approach isn't without danger. We run the risk of conflating success on well-defined tasks with an understanding of the underlying phenomenon -- thought -- that motivated the models in the first place.

Part of the problem is that, in many cases, we actually want to use models as replacements for thinking. That's the raison detre of modelling -- substitution. It's useful to recall the story of Icarus. If only he had just done his flying well below the sun. The fact that his wings worked near sea level didn't mean they were a good design for the upper atmosphere. If we don't understand how a model works, then we aren't in a good position to know its limitations until something goes wrong. By then it might be too late. Eugene Wigner, the physicist who noted the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," restricted his awe and wonder to its ability to describe the inanimate world. Mathematics proceeds according to its own internal logic, and so it's striking that its conclusions apply to the physical universe; at the same time, how they play out varies more the further that we stray from physics. Math can help us shine a light on dark worlds, but we should look critically, always asking why the math is so effective, recognizing where it isn't, and pushing on the places in between.

Researchers have developed a way to apply quantum measurement to something no matter its mass or energy. "Our proposed experiment can test if an object is classical or quantum by seeing if an act of observation can lead to a change in its motion," says physicist Debarshi Das from UCL. ScienceAlert reports: Quantum physics describes a Universe where objects aren't defined by a single measurement, but as a range of possibilities. An electron can be spinning up and down, or have a high chance of existing in some areas more than others, for example. In theory, this isn't limited to tiny things. Your own body can in effect be described as having a very high probability of sitting in that chair and a very (very!) low probability of being on the Moon. There is just one fundamental truth to remember -- you touch it, you've bought it. Observing an object's quantum state, whether an electron, or a person sitting in a chair, requires interactions with a measuring system, forcing it to have a single measurement. There are ways to catch objects with their quantum pants still down, but they require keeping the object in a ground state -- super-cold, super-still, completely cut off from its environment. That's tricky to do with individual particles, and it gets a lot more challenging as the size of the scale goes up.

The new proposal uses an entirely novel approach, one that uses a combination of assertions known as Leggett-Garg Inequalities and No-Signaling in Time conditions. In effect, these two concepts describe a familiar Universe, where a person on a chair is sitting there even if the room is dark and you can't see them. Switching on the light won't suddenly reveal they're actually under the bed. Should an experiment find evidence that somehow conflicts with these assertions, we just might be catching a glimpse of quantum fuzziness on a larger scale.

The team proposes that objects can be observed as they oscillate on a pendulum, like a ball at the end of a piece of string. Light would then be flashed at the two halves of the experimental setup at different times -- counting as the observation -- and the results of the second flash would indicate if quantum behavior was happening, because the first flash would affect whatever was moving. We're still talking about a complex setup that would require some sophisticated equipment, and conditions akin to a ground state -- but through the use of motion and two measurements (light flashes), some of the restrictions on mass are removed. [...] "The next step is to try this proposed setup in an actual experiment," concludes the reports. "The mirrors at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US have already been proposed as suitable candidates for examination."

"Those mirrors act as a single 10-kilogram (22-pound) object, quite a step up from the typical size of objects analyzed for quantum effects -- anything up to about a quintillionth of a gram."

The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Private equity firms are increasingly buying hospitals across the US, and when they do, patients suffer, according to two separate reports. Specifically, the equity firms cut corners, slash services, lay off staff, lower quality of care, take on substantial debt, and reduce charity care, leading to lower ratings and more medical errors, the reports collectively find. ArsTechnica: Last week, the financial watchdog organization Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) released a report delving into the state of two of the nation's largest hospital systems, Lifepoint and ScionHealth -- both owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Through those two systems, Apollo runs 220 hospitals in 36 states, employing around 75,000 people. The report found that some of Apollo's hospitals were among the worst in their respective states, based on a ranking by The Lown Institute Hospital Index. The index ranks hospitals and health systems based on health equity, value, and outcomes, PESP notes. The hospitals also have dismal readmission rates and government rankings.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) ranks hospitals on a one- to five-star system, with the national average of 3.2 stars overall and about 30 percent of hospitals at two stars or below. Apollo's overall average is 2.8 stars, with nearly 40 percent of hospitals at two stars or below. The other report, a study published in JAMA late last month, found that the rate of serious medical errors and health complications increases among patients in the first few years after private equity firms take over. The study examined Medicare claims from 51 private equity-run hospitals and 259 matched control hospitals. Specifically, the study, led by researchers at Harvard University, found that patients admitted to private equity-owned hospitals had a 25 percent increase in developing hospital-acquired conditions compared with patients in the control hospitals. In private equity hospitals, patients experienced a 27 percent increase in falls, a 38 percent increase in central-line bloodstream infections (despite placing 16 percent fewer central lines than control hospitals), and surgical site infections doubled.