A woman with advanced breast cancer which had spread around her body has been completely cleared of the disease by a groundbreaking therapy that harnessed the power of her immune system to fight the tumours.
It is the first time that a patient with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully treated by a form of immunotherapy that uses the patient’s own immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells that have formed in the body.
The 49-year-old woman was selected for the radical new therapy after several rounds of routine chemotherapy failed to stop a tumour in her right breast from growing and spreading to her liver and other areas.
Doctors who cared for the woman at the US National Cancer Institute in Maryland said woman’s response had been “remarkable”: the therapy wiped out cancer cells so effectively that the patient has now been free of the disease for two years.
The Standard Model. What dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings.
More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Yet its name suggests that if you can afford a few extra dollars a month you should buy the upgrade. As a theoretical physicist, I’d prefer The Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything. That’s what the Standard Model really is.
Many recall the excitement among scientists and media over the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. But that much-ballyhooed event didn’t come out of the blue – it capped a five-decade undefeated streak for the Standard Model. Every fundamental force but gravity is included in it. Every attempt to overturn it to demonstrate in the laboratory that it must be substantially reworked – and there have been many over the past 50 years – has failed.
In short, the Standard Model answers this question: What is everything made of, and how does it hold together?
You know, of course, that the world around us is made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms. Chemist Dmitri Mendeleev figured that out in the 1860s and organized all atoms – that is, the elements – into the periodic table that you probably studied in middle school. But there are 118 different chemical elements. There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium … and 114 more.
Physicists like things simple. We want to boil things down to their essence, a few basic building blocks. Over a hundred chemical elements is not simple. The ancients believed that everything is made of just five elements – earth, water, fire, air and aether. Five is much simpler than 118. It’s also wrong.
By 1932, scientists knew that all those atoms are made of just three particles – neutrons, protons and electrons. The neutrons and protons are bound together tightly into the nucleus. The electrons, thousands of times lighter, whirl around the nucleus at speeds approaching that of light. Physicists Planck, Bohr, Schroedinger, Heisenberg and friends had invented a new science – quantum mechanics – to explain this motion.
That would have been a satisfying place to stop. Just three particles. Three is even simpler than five. But held together how? The negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons are bound together by electromagnetism. But the protons are all huddled together in the nucleus and their positive charges should be pushing them powerfully apart. The neutral neutrons can’t help.
What binds these protons and neutrons together? “Divine intervention” a man on a Toronto street corner told me; he had a pamphlet, I could read all about it. But this scenario seemed like a lot of trouble even for a divine being – keeping tabs on every single one of the universe’s 10⁸⁰ protons and neutrons and bending them to its will.
Expanding the zoo of particles
Meanwhile, nature cruelly declined to keep its zoo of particles to just three. Really four, because we should count the photon, the particle of light that Einstein described. Four grew to five when Anderson measured electrons with positive charge – positrons – striking the Earth from outer space. At least Dirac had predicted these first anti-matter particles. Five became six when the pion, which Yukawa predicted would hold the nucleus together, was found.
Then came the muon – 200 times heavier than the electron, but otherwise a twin. “Who ordered that?” I.I. Rabi quipped. That sums it up. Number seven. Not only not simple, redundant.
By the 1960s there were hundreds of “fundamental” particles. In place of the well-organized periodic table, there were just long lists of baryons (heavy particles like protons and neutrons), mesons (like Yukawa’s pions) and leptons (light particles like the electron, and the elusive neutrinos) – with no organization and no guiding principles.
Into this breach sidled the Standard Model. It was not an overnight flash of brilliance. No Archimedes leapt out of a bathtub shouting “eureka.” Instead, there was a series of crucial insights by a few key individuals in the mid-1960s that transformed this quagmire into a simple theory, and then five decades of experimental verification and theoretical elaboration.
Quarks. They come in six varieties we call flavors. Like ice cream, except not as tasty. Instead of vanilla, chocolate and so on, we have up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. In 1964, Gell-Mann and Zweig taught us the recipes: Mix and match any three quarks to get a baryon. Protons are two ups and a down quark bound together; neutrons are two downs and an up. Choose one quark and one antiquark to get a meson. A pion is an up or a down quark bound to an anti-up or an anti-down. All the material of our daily lives is made of just up and down quarks and anti-quarks and electrons.
Simple. Well, simple-ish, because keeping those quarks bound is a feat. They are tied to one another so tightly that you never ever find a quark or anti-quark on its own. The theory of that binding, and the particles called gluons (chuckle) that are responsible, is called quantum chromodynamics. It’s a vital piece of the Standard Model, but mathematically difficult, even posing an unsolved problem of basic mathematics. We physicists do our best to calculate with it, but we’re still learning how.
The other aspect of the Standard Model is “A Model of Leptons.” That’s the name of the landmark 1967 paper by Steven Weinberg that pulled together quantum mechanics with the vital pieces of knowledge of how particles interact and organized the two into a single theory. It incorporated the familiar electromagnetism, joined it with what physicists called “the weak force” that causes certain radioactive decays, and explained that they were different aspects of the same force. It incorporated the Higgs mechanism for giving mass to fundamental particles.
Since then, the Standard Model has predicted the results of experiment after experiment, including the discovery of several varieties of quarks and of the W and Z bosons – heavy particles that are for weak interactions what the photon is for electromagnetism. The possibility that neutrinos aren’t massless was overlooked in the 1960s, but slipped easily into the Standard Model in the 1990s, a few decades late to the party.
Discovering the Higgs boson in 2012, long predicted by the Standard Model and long sought after, was a thrill but not a surprise. It was yet another crucial victory for the Standard Model over the dark forces that particle physicists have repeatedly warned loomed over the horizon. Concerned that the Standard Model didn’t adequately embody their expectations of simplicity, worried about its mathematical self-consistency, or looking ahead to the eventual necessity to bring the force of gravity into the fold, physicists have made numerous proposals for theories beyond the Standard Model. These bear exciting names like Grand Unified Theories, Supersymmetry, Technicolor, and String Theory.
Sadly, at least for their proponents, beyond-the-Standard-Model theories have not yet successfully predicted any new experimental phenomenon or any experimental discrepancy with the Standard Model.
After five decades, far from requiring an upgrade, the Standard Model is worthy of celebration as the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything.
Astronomers have found the fastest-growing black hole ever seen in the universe, and they’re calling this one a monster with an appetite. It’s growing so fast it can devour a mass the size of the sun every two days.
Researchers at Australian National University first discovered this supermassive black hole, also known as a quasar, when data from a telescope called the SkyMapper flagged it as an object of potential interest. Then they used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to determine how far away it was. They found that it took more than 12 billion years for the light from this massive black hole to reach Earth. It’s the brightest quasar that can be seen in visual or ultraviolet light.
“The heat radiation from the matter falling into the black hole, which is the light we see, is a few thousand times brighter than our own Milky Way galaxy,” Christian Wolf, the lead researcher on the university’s team of astronomers, wrote in an email to CNN.
The discovery of this massive black hole calls the existing science about black holes into question. Black holes have a speed limit that determines how fast they grow, which is proportional to their mass.
On April 25, California law enforcement announced the possible capture of a long-sought serial killer. Shortly after, it was reported that police had used public DNA databases to determine his identity.
This extraordinary event highlights that when you send off a cheek swab to one of the private genome companies, you may sacrifice not just your own privacy but that of your family and your ancestors.
In a time of widespread anxiety over the misuse of social media, Americans should also be concerned over who has access to their genetic information.
For-profit genome testing companies like 23andMe make money, in part, by selling anonymized genomic data. Many people may not realize that re-identifying genomes – that is, identifying an individual from their genetic profile – is a relatively straightforward process. In one study, researchers could re-identify five of 10 people, as well as their families.
Humans share about 99 percent of their DNA bases with one another. The few differences that exist are often sufficient to figure out who’s related to whom.
The genome has been something of a disappointment medically. Physicians generally can’t do much with the information that a given patient has, say, a 3 percent greater risk of dementia. But those data are potentially very useful to insurance companies and employers trying lower their risk.
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, a federal law passed in 2008, prevents insurance companies and employers from forcing people to undergo genetic testing. But it doesn’t necessarily prevent bad actors from using dark-web databases and advanced analytics to give themselves a commercial edge.
There have been no reports yet of companies doing this. But we live in an age in which it seems the possible becomes probable on an almost daily basis.
The financial services industry offers a cautionary tale for the customers of the genome industry. Banks are highly regulated and supposed to provide state-of-the-art protection, yet they have been hacked.
Compared to financial institutions, genome companies are lightly regulated. Eventually one or more of them will be hacked or even caught selling “risk profiling” services to third parties.
With respect to police and prosecutors, the situation is somewhat different. In the end, they must submit their work to the courts. It’s possible that setting up a fake account on an ancestor DNA website, as the California police reportedly did, constitutes unreasonable search and seizure.
Given the large financial rewards and the behavior of other industries, millions of American families should likely consider their genomic privacy as already compromised. If the genome of one of your relatives is in one of these databases, then essentially so is yours.
In the uncommon circumstance that a whole family has not one member who has yet to send off a cheek swab, that family might want to consider opting out of this whole thing until society sorts out risks, benefits and privacy protections.
Most people, however, will have to wait and hope they will not be harmed by a genomic revolution that has provided them with little benefit.
Flooding public spaces with far-UVC light, a type of ultraviolet light that’s harmless to humans, could finally spell the end of seasonal flu epidemics. Germicidal UV tube. Image via Wikimedia. Continuous but low doses of far-ultraviolet C light (far-UVC) will kill airborne flu viruses while leaving human cells unscathed, new research has found. Continue reading “Far-ultraviolet lamps could eradicate airborne viruses in public spaces — with no risk to us”→
Under the law, each vehicle that is being tested is required to have a human driver in the driver’s seat as it is being operated. Each vehicle is also required to carry at least $5 million in liability insurance.
Up until the law was signed, testing of self-driving vehicles was banned because New York law requires there be at least one hand on the steering wheel of a vehicle in operation at all times.
New York joins several other states that have passed laws to allow testing of self-driving vehicles, including Arizona, California, Florida, and Pennsylvania. As more and more states allow testing of these vehicles – and looking to the future when they may actually become part of commuters’ daily lives – the question of liability in the event of a traffic accident has become a legal issue open for debate and one that needs to be determined once and for all.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Society of Automotive Engineers, there are six different levels of automation in self-driving vehicles. If a vehicle is at level two, one, or zero, then it is considered to be operated by the human sitting in the driver’s seat. Any level above two, then it is the vehicle that is behind the operation.
Many legal analysts predict that as self-driving vehicles become part of society, vehicle manufacturers will begin to bear accident fault responsibility. This will create the need for more specific tort legislation to be passed, as well new regulation in the insurance industry.
Upon hearing of the passage of the self-driving vehicle testing bill, Attorney Goldstein commented, “It is important for all accident attorneys to become very familiar with the new law – as well as keep themselves well informed of this developing industry – in order to be fully prepared to successfully represent a victim who has been injured in a self-driving vehicle accident.”
After five decades, far from requiring an upgrade, the Standard Model is ![Quasar QSO [HB89] 1256+280](https://i0.wp.com/farm1.staticflickr.com/865/39962460130_37a005f385.jpg?resize=500%2C382 "Quasar QSO [HB89] 1256+280")
Most people, however, will have to wait and hope they will not be harmed by a genomic revolution that has provided them with 
