The Road Map.

Weekend News Items, Part One.

“Most mornings I learn more from New Items than I do from all of the traditional papers I read combined.” — Michael Blair, Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School and former presiding partner, Debevoise & Plimpton.

---

---

1. Stanford Report:

Using a series of more than 1,000 X-ray snapshots of the shapeshifting of enzymes in action, researchers at Stanford University have illuminated one of the great mysteries of life – how enzymes are able speed up life-sustaining biochemical reactions so dramatically. Their findings could impact fields ranging from basic science to drug discovery, and provoke a rethinking of how science is taught in the classroom.

“When I say enzymes speed up reactions, I mean as in a trillion-trillion times faster for some reactions,” noted senior author of the study, Dan Herschlag, professor of biochemistry in the School of Medicine. “Enzymes are really remarkable little machines, but our understanding of exactly how they work has been lacking.”

There are lots of ideas and theories that make sense, Herschlag said, but biochemists have not been able to translate those ideas into a specific understanding of the chemical and physical interactions responsible for enzyme’s enormous reaction rates. As a result, biochemists don’t have a basic understanding and, therefore, have been unable to predict enzyme rates or design new enzymes as well as nature does, an ability that would be impactful across industry and medicine.

“Using these detailed ensembles of enzyme states, we’ve been able to quantify and rigorously explain in chemical detail what features in enzymes provide catalysis and by how much,” said the study’s first author, Siyuan Du, a doctoral student in Herschlag’s lab. Their study appears in the Feb. 13 issue of the journal Science. (Sources: stanford.edu, science.org, italics mine)

---

2. Financial Times/Nature Communications:

Scientists have discovered a way to predict which cancers are most likely to spread around the body, widening a path to potential new treatments to halt the most aggressive forms of the disease.

Researchers found some malignant cells changed shape in response to biological structures around them, making it easier for them to break out to seed fresh tumors elsewhere.

The work highlights a growing focus on the chemical targeting of surrounding tissues as part of efforts to stop cancerous cells expanding to other organs. This process of spread, known as metastasis, is a feature of many cancer deaths because it makes the disease much harder to treat.

“Our research has uncovered the road map that cancer cells follow to break out of a tumor, enabling it to cause a secondary tumor elsewhere in the body,” said Victoria Sanz-Moreno, professor of cancer cell and metastasis biology at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, who led the study.

“Now that we understand this road map, we can look to target different aspects of it, to stop aggressive cancers from spreading.”

The study, published in Nature Communications on Friday, is the product of almost 10 years’ work on how cancer cells interact with surrounding biological support structures known as the extracellular matrix. This physical framework for cells, which the researchers describe as a kind of a biological “scaffolding”, influences how tumors develop. (Sources: ft.com, nature.com)

---

3. Meta's AI research team has demonstrated a breakthrough in decoding brain activity, successfully reconstructing typed sentences from brain recordings. Working with scientists at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in Spain, Meta's Fundamental AI Research Lab (FAIR) has published two studies that advance our understanding of how the human brain processes language. The research builds on previous work from French neuroscientist Jean-Rémi King, which focused on decoding visual perceptions and language from brain signals. The system achieved up to 80 percent accuracy at the character level, often managing to reconstruct complete sentences from brain activity alone. While impressive, the technology still has limitations - MEG requires participants to remain still in a shielded room, and additional studies with brain injury patients are needed to prove clinical usefulness.(Sources: ai.meta.com, the-decoder.com, italics mine)

---

4. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI will release its Grok 3 chatbot tomorrow, with the billionaire describing it as the “smartest AI on Earth.” The product will go live with a demonstration at 8 p.m. Pacific time, Musk said in a post on X. Musk teased the planned launch of Grok 3 chatbot during a video conference at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Thursday, calling it an AI model that would outperform every competing tool that’s been released so far. The model was trained on synthetic data and is capable of reflecting on mistakes that it makes by going back and forth through the data to achieve logical consistency, Musk said. (Source: bloomberg.com)