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Levetiracetam therapeutically targets GABAergic synapses in diffuse midline glioma

Nature Medicine, Published online: 17 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04646-6

Results of this study show in experimental models and data from patient cohorts that the antiseizure medication levetiracetam is associated with longer survival and reduced tumor growth in diffuse midline glioma, but not hemispheric high-grade glioma, by selectively dampening GABAergic synaptic signaling, independently of its canonical SV2A-mediated primary antiseizure mechanism.

Publisher Correction: A scoping review on the mental health harms of LLM-based chatbots

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 14 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-03240-x

Publisher Correction: A scoping review on the mental health harms of LLM-based chatbots

Omni Interaction Agent Technical Report

arXiv:2609.08977v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we present Gander, an end-to-end model that unifies omni perception, realtime interaction, and agentic capabilities within a single framework. In contrast to turn-based conventional paradigms, Gander continuously receives streaming inputs across multiple modalities, including video, speech, and text, enabling natural full-duplex interaction in both everyday conversations and complex workflow-oriented agent scenarios. Users can interrupt the model at any time, while the model can also proactively provide intermediate feedback or ask follow up questions. To natively support these capabilities, Gander adopts two key architectural designs: 1) It employs a Cerebellum-Brain collaborative framework, in which the Cerebellum is responsible for realtime interaction and omni conversational capabilities, while the Brain handles complex reasoning and higher-level agentic tasks. The two components interact continuously through tool calling and the agent orchestration runtime. 2) The Cerebellum is built upon a streaming Thinker-Talker architecture, user inputs and model outputs are further flattened into an ordered token stream at the chunk level, providing a unified representation for low latency, continuous interaction. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of Gander across four dimensions: conversational ability, omni understanding, interactive capability, and agentic intelligence. Internal human evaluations demonstrate that Gander maintains the natural and expressive spoken dialogue capabilities of SOTA open source models while achieving competitive performance in omni interaction. Gander also demonstrates robustness in challenging real-world scenarios, including background noise interference, multi-party interactions, and backchannel communication. We release Gander together with its models, code, and data to facilitate further research and development in the community.

Real-time breath metabolomics as catalyst for personalized lung cancer diagnostics: prospective matched case-control trial (LUCAbreath)

Transl Lung Cancer Res. 2026 Mar 23;15(3):57. doi: 10.21037/tlcr-2025-aw-1187. Epub 2026 Mar 18.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Exhaled breath analysis offers notable advantages as a non-invasive method for obtaining biological information from lung cancer patients. However, since the 1980s, its successful translation into clinical practice has remained elusive. The primary challenges include the low concentrations of metabolites in exhaled breath, complexities in breath collection methodologies, difficulties in process standardisation, limited molecular coverage across different methods, and challenges in compound identification and in understanding their molecular origin. Comprehensive reviews by Amann et al. [2011], Hanna et al. [2018], Schmidt et al. [2023], and Vadala et al. [2023] provide holistic insights into the dynamic field of lung cancer breath research. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of real-time secondary electrospray ionization high-resolution mass spectrometry (SESI-HRMS) in differentiating lung cancer patients from matched controls based on breath metabolomic profiles.

METHODS: This prospective matched case-control study analysed 178 patients. The study included treatment-naive lung cancer patients and controls matched (1:1) on age, sex, and smoking status. SESI-HRMS was used for real-time breath analysis. Data processing was conducted through a validated multistep analytical framework. Statistical evaluation incorporated multivariate techniques and machine learning algorithms. High-resolution mass spectral features were assigned following the Schymanski [2014] classification, enabling the identification of distinct metabolic alterations.

RESULTS: SESI-HRMS identified 3,750 exhaled breath features. T-tests revealed 608 features with significant differences in intensity (P≤0.05) between cases and controls, of which 18 features remained significant after multiple testing correction (q≤0.05). Prediction model achieved reasonable performances. Cancer vs. controls was predicted with an accuracy of 0.75, sensitivity and specificity of 0.80 and 0.71, respectively. Functional enrichment analysis highlighted distinct metabolic pathways for different histological cancer types, including de novo fatty acid metabolism in adenocarcinoma and glucose metabolism in squamous cell carcinoma.

CONCLUSIONS: Real-time SESI-HRMS breath analysis differentiated lung cancer patients with acceptable accuracy from matched controls and provides valuable metabolic insights in lung cancer. This non-invasive approach could complement existing methods like genome profiling and low-dose computed tomography, potentially enhancing early detection and personalised treatment strategies towards a multi-omics approach. Further research is warranted to validate these preliminary findings and to refine the identification of putative breath biomarkers.

PMID:41982695 | PMC:PMC13071693 | DOI:10.21037/tlcr-2025-aw-1187

High-fidelity collisional quantum gates with fermionic atoms

Nature, Published online: 08 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10356-3

A robust composite pair-exchange gate based on controlled interactions of fermionic atoms in an optical superlattice demonstrates high fidelities and long Bell-state lifetimes, marking an important step towards a fully digital fermionic quantum computer.

Iron Physiology and Its Impact on Atopic Diseases: An EAACI Taskforce Report

Allergy. 2026 Apr 6. doi: 10.1111/all.70325. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Iron is essential for oxygen transport, energy metabolism, and immune regulation. Yet iron deficiency is the most common micronutrient disorder across all age groups, affecting nearly one quarter of the global population. Iron deficiency triggers nutritional immunity, a host defense mechanism that withholds and redistributes iron, contributing to increased morbidity and mortality. This review outlines normal iron physiology, distribution and absorption pathways and on the consequences of deficiency across body compartments, with particular attention to type 2-driven diseases. Beyond anemia, insufficient iron availability disrupts immune homeostasis by promoting type 2 inflammation, elevating IgE, and activating mast cells and eosinophils. Regulatory macrophages, the central hub of iron cycling, adopt an inflammatory, iron-sequestering state that reinforces malabsorption and redistribution. Epidemiology studies show higher iron-deficiency risk in allergic individuals; low maternal iron or early-life iron predisposes to eczema, wheeze, and asthma, while food-allergen elimination (notably cow's milk) further worsens anemia risk. Clinical evidence indicates that restoring iron status through diet, supplementation, or fortification lowers IgE levels, improves lung function, and alleviates symptoms of rhinitis, urticaria, and asthma. Iron may therefore represent a modifiable determinant of allergic disease development and severity. Integrating iron assessment and nutritional care into allergy management may reduce disease burden and slow the progression of allergic march.

PMID:41943501 | DOI:10.1111/all.70325

Determinants of the Uptake and Frequency of Use of a Web Portal Digital Health Intervention in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes and/or Coronary Heart Disease: Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: The targeted application and design of digital health interventions (DHIs) require an understanding of usage determinants. Usage includes uptake (initial use) and frequency (extent of use), but it is unclear whether both components are driven by the same determinants. Objective: This study aimed to examine the determinants of uptake and frequency of use and assess whether they differ. Methods: The investigated DHI was a web portal provided in an intervention for improving disease-related self-management. This study is a secondary analysis of intervention group data from a parallel-group randomized controlled trial. Eligibility criteria were being an adult and being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and/or coronary heart disease. Sociodemographic, psychological, and health-related variables were examined as determinants. Determinants were analyzed using simple and multiple regression models. Uptake was analyzed using logistic regression, and frequency was analyzed using negative binomial regression with robust SEs. Frequency was analyzed for those who used the DHI at least once. Except for sociodemographic variables, all other variables were standardized to a range from 0 to 1. For simple regression, inflation of the α error due to multiple testing was controlled via the approach of Benjamini and Hochberg, and for multiple regression, it was controlled via the significance of the complete multiple regression model. Results: Of 462 intervention group members, 199 (43.1%) used the web portal at least once. After controlling for inflation of the α error, simple regression for uptake yielded significant effects for higher education (B=0.56, 95% CI 0.18-0.95; =.004), openness (B=1.08, 95% CI 0.33-1.83; =.005), intention regarding physical activity (B=2.28, 95% CI 1.30-3.26;

Genomic history of early dogs in Europe

Nature, Published online: 25 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10112-7

Genome-wide analysis shows European dogs existed by 14,200 years ago, were already genetically distinct, received less Neolithic Southwest Asian admixture than humans did and contributed substantially to later European dogs.

A mechanism to initiate emergency type 2 myelopoiesis

Nature, Published online: 11 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10256-6

Myelopoiesis in response to a parasitic worm infection and the mechanism selective to this form of parasite are revealed.

Conditioned Activation Transport for T2I Safety Steering

arXiv:2603.03163v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their impressive capabilities, current Text-to-Image (T2I) models remain prone to generating unsafe and toxic content. While activation steering offers a promising inference-time intervention, we observe that linear activation steering frequently degrades image quality when applied to benign prompts. To address this trade-off, we first construct SafeSteerDataset, a contrastive dataset containing 2300 safe and unsafe prompt pairs with high cosine similarity. Leveraging this data, we propose Conditioned Activation Transport (CAT), a framework that employs a geometry-based conditioning mechanism and nonlinear transport maps. By conditioning transport maps to activate only within unsafe activation regions, we minimize interference with benign queries. We validate our approach on two state-of-the-art architectures: Z-Image and Infinity. Experiments demonstrate that CAT generalizes effectively across these backbones, significantly reducing Attack Success Rate while maintaining image fidelity compared to unsteered generations. Warning: This paper contains potentially offensive text and images.

High Accuracy, Less Talk (HALT): Reliable LLMs through Capability-Aligned Finetuning

arXiv:2506.04051v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) currently respond to every prompt. However, they can produce incorrect answers when they lack knowledge or capability -- a problem known as hallucination. We instead propose post-training an LLM to generate content only when confident in its correctness and to otherwise (partially) abstain. Specifically, our method, HALT, produces capability-aligned post-training data that encodes what the model can and cannot reliably generate. We generate this data by splitting responses of the pretrained LLM into factual fragments (atomic statements or reasoning steps), and use ground truth information to identify incorrect fragments. We achieve capability-aligned finetuning responses by either removing incorrect fragments or replacing them with "Unsure from Here" -- according to a tunable threshold that allows practitioners to trade off response completeness and mean correctness of the response's fragments. We finetune four open-source models for biography writing, mathematics, coding, and medicine with HALT for three different trade-off thresholds. HALT effectively trades off response completeness for correctness, increasing the mean correctness of response fragments by 15% on average, while resulting in a 4% improvement in the F1 score (mean of completeness and correctness of the response) compared to the relevant baselines. By tuning HALT for highest correctness, we train a single reliable Llama3-70B model with correctness increased from 51% to 87% across all four domains while maintaining 53% of the response completeness achieved with standard finetuning.
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