💡 Warp News #326
🦾 AI text online has not increased factual errors. 🎗️ Now cancer vaccines are coming. 🧤 Residue from lab gloves has inflated microplastic counts in the environment.
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Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.
🎗️ Are we winning the war on cancer?
Using the body’s own defenses against cancer—immunotherapy—was a major medical breakthrough and was rightly awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018.
Today, there are more than 2,500 drugs and programs in development or use based on cancer immunotherapy.
More and more mortality curves for different cancers are starting to look like this one for stomach cancer.
Now another weapon is arriving: cancer vaccines.
A cancer vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize cancer cells. Tumors carry distinctive markers on their surface that set them apart from healthy cells. The vaccine presents these markers to the immune system, enabling it to identify and attack those specific cells.
Another type of vaccine aims to prevent cancer in people with a high inherited risk of developing the disease.
You can read more in this week’s article: Cancer vaccines are coming.
Combine this with what I wrote a few weeks ago about GLP-1 drugs, which not only help people lose weight but also appear to improve health across multiple areas, including reducing the risk of certain cancers.
Taken together, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that we may be winning the war on cancer—gradually transforming it from one of the leading causes of death into a much smaller threat.
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
🧤 Residue from lab gloves has inflated microplastic counts in the environment
Earlier measurements of microplastics in the environment have been too high. The cause is residue from common lab gloves that was counted as plastic. Now researchers have developed a way to separate glove residue from actual microplastics.
🦾 AI text online has not increased factual errors
The researchers found no statistical link between more AI text and more factual errors online. Fears that writing styles, source links, and meaningful content would deteriorate were not confirmed in the measurements either.
🤑 Swedes have become three times wealthier and also more equal in the 21st century
Median wealth rose by nearly 400 percent between 1999 and 2020. The richest 10 percent reduced their share of total wealth from 67 to 57 percent. The share of adults with no net wealth fell from 21 to 16 percent.
🧬 A single gene-therapy dose could replace daily cholesterol medication
A single dose of the gene therapy VERVE-102, given as an infusion, lowered harmful cholesterol as much as today's medications do with repeated treatment. At the highest dose, harmful cholesterol fell by an average of 62 percent.
🤖 The AI that solves unsolved problems now works on healthcare, power grids, and industry
A year ago, Warp News reported on AlphaEvolve, an AI system from Google DeepMind that finds new algorithms in mathematics and computer science. Now Google has reported what the system has accomplished over the past year, in everything from genomics to power grids and data processing.
🎗️ Now cancer vaccines are coming
The immune system can now be used to treat several types of cancer, and more than 2,500 immunotherapies are in development. Cancer vaccines have also started to show results in clinical trials, against melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and brain tumors, among others.
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