Science

The most exciting popular science reads this month explore everything from symbiosis to hormones, while Alice Roberts takes on an editor-in-chief role in her latest book

From dementia to heart attacks, hearing loss has been linked to a wide range of effects across the body, and the condition is on the rise. Fortunately, we're learning how best to safeguard this crucial sense and how we might be able to reverse the damage

Computer simulations have uncovered a new manganese compound that could exist deep in Earth’s mantle and may be connected to the process that gave our atmosphere oxygen

3I/ATLAS has caused quite a stir over the last year, inviting astronomers to update what they know about other solar systems as well as our own. However, this third interstellar visitor may have an unexpected impact on our understanding of dark matter. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at the University of Hamburg, attempts to calculate the impact that the presence of large amounts of interstellar objects (ISOs) would have on our calculation of dark matter in our galaxy.

Last night on the NBC News (and also on the same station the night before) I heard a report on a new cancer drug touted as being almost miraculous. The drug was called daraxonrasib, was described as working by blocking a mutated promoter of tumor growth in people with metastatic pancreatic cancer—a notoriously fatal disease (the median survival period after diagnosis of this stage is about 3-6 months, and the five-year survival rate is 3.2%).  But the news confused survival time with survival rate, saying something like “the drug doubles the survival rate. . . .from 6 months to 13.2 months”. (I may have gotten the figures wrong as I’m working from memory.)  I knew that something was wrong, as metastatic pancreatic cancer is almost always fatal, so the survival rate, which the percentage of people still alive after a specified period of time (often five years), cannot be expressed in months. 

Sure enough, this mistake, expressing the effects as a doubling of survival rate, was not only misleading, but widespread.  It’s easy to find similar errors in the press; just google the drug name and “survival rate”:

From CBS News (click all screenshots to read):

An excerpt (all excerpts are indented). I’ve put the confusing bits in bold:

A new, experimental medication nearly doubled overall survival rates for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, according to the results of a study published Sunday.

Researchers say the findings are a significant marker of progress toward treating a notoriously deadly type of cancer, for which there have historically been limited effective options for therapies.

The drug is called daraxonrasib and it blocks a mutated protein that fuels tumor growth in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases — a target that had eluded treatment for decades.

“While not curing the cancer, it is a very large step forward,” said Dr. Zev Wainberg, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped lead the study.

The research team found that taking the medication, as a daily pill, reduced the risk of death by 60% for patients with metastatic, or spreading, pancreatic cancer who had previously received treatment. That was compared with survival rates of patients receiving standard chemotherapy, according to UCLA Health.

It randomly assigned the experimental drug or more chemotherapy to 500 patients whose metastatic cancer had quit responding to prior treatment. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented Sunday at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

Those taking daraxonrasib lived for a median of 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for chemotherapy recipients. While that may seem like a small improvement, Wainberg said it marked the first drug to show a substantial advantage over chemotherapy.

 Note that while CBS says that it reduces the risk of death by 60%, there are NO DATA showing that. The risk of death is again nearly 100%, though survival time increases by a bit more than two. Also, “survival rates” have not been doubled. There are no data on that, at least not in the article. 

From USA Today:

Excerpt:

An experimental drug nearly doubled the overall survival rates of pancreatic cancer patients, according to the results of its latest clinical trial.

The drug, daraxonrasib, targets the gene mutation behind most pancreatic cancer diagnoses.

In the phase 3, randomized trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 31, researchers found patients who received the drug lived a median of 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for those who received chemotherapy.

They use “rate” but give “times.”

It’s easy to find similar conflations. This one, less excusable because of the venue, is from The Clinical Trial Vanguard:

They give the results correctly but characterize them as showing “death risk”:

A 60% reduction in the risk of death—HR 0.40—in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer is not a number the oncology community has seen before, in any phase 3 trial, in any line of therapy. That is the threshold RASolute 302 crossed. Revolution Medicines enrolled 500 patients, randomized them between once-daily oral daraxonrasib and investigator’s choice of standard cytotoxic chemotherapy, and watched median overall survival reach 13.2 months on the experimental arm versus 6.6 months on chemotherapy in the RAS G12 mutant population. Doubling median OS in second-line pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a disease where incremental gains have defined ambition for decades, reframes what the endpoint space for this indication even looks like.

Nope; the chance of dying within a year or two remains about the same, I’d guess.

. . . and a post from someone on Facebook (I won’t give a name), touting a “60% reduction in the risk of death”. That’s wrong: the risk of death is probably still about 100%

The BBC gets it right, however:

This is correct:

A pill has been found to almost double the survival time for advanced pancreatic cancer patients, with experts describing the trial as a game changer.

The drug, called daraxonrasib, appears to be a breakthrough in managing a disease that has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers.

It helps prevent the spread of cancer by locking onto and shutting off the mutated KRAS gene, which is in more than 90% of pancreatic tumours and spurs cancer growth.

The trial, which included 500 patients in North America, Europe, and Asia, found the average survival time for patients on chemotherapy was 6.6 months, compared with 13.2 months for patients on daraxonrasib. It also caused fewer side-effects.

One other point: if “death risk” is meant to say “death risk over the course of the study,” then that might be accurate. But then the journalists must clarify it.

There are two points to be made, and they’re obvious. First, more than a few science/medicine journalists, including some writing on medical websites, don’t understand statistics, mistaking “rate” for “time”.  I asked a science-friendly doctor if this mistake is common, and he replied, “All the time. Sometimes, I’m not sure it’s an unintentional mistake.”

Which leads us to the second point: this kind of conflation could provide false hope for cancer patients and their families. Knowing that you will live, on average, 6½ months longer if you take the new drug is a very different thing from knowing that you will still die with near certainty. It’s easy for one to think—and this is what I thought when I heard the teaser on television—that the drug will reduce the chance of dying by half.  Seriously, journalists, please brush up on your statistics, for this one is not rocket science!

An exploration of how biological cooperation underpins all life - and why we’ve overlooked its power until now - makes thrilling reading, finds Penny Sarchet

Astronomers have finally cracked the mystery behind a strange class of repeating cosmic signals that has baffled scientists for years. Using Australia’s ASKAP radio telescope, researchers traced the bursts to a rare stellar duo in which a dense white dwarf is relentlessly siphoning material from a nearby red dwarf companion. As the stolen matter spirals inward, the system unleashes powerful radio waves and X-rays every 1.4 hours.

States default to a private organization run by acupuncturists and TCM practitioners to vet continuing education courses, with predictable results.

The post Acupuncture for Heart Attacks and more State-Sanctioned Pseudoscience first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A breakthrough hydrogen-production method could make clean fuel far cheaper and easier to generate. Researchers at the University of Birmingham developed a perovskite-based catalyst that splits water into hydrogen at much lower temperatures than existing technologies, potentially allowing factories, steel plants, cement works, and renewable energy sites to turn waste heat into valuable hydrogen.

Scientists have created a tiny chip that can generate, steer, and read light-based information all in one device, marking a major leap toward ultra-fast, energy-efficient computing. The breakthrough uses atomically thin materials and nanoscale structures to control a unique quantum property of light called the “valley” degree of freedom, allowing information to be encoded in new ways.

Scientists have created a tiny chip that can generate, steer, and read light-based information all in one device, marking a major leap toward ultra-fast, energy-efficient computing. The breakthrough uses atomically thin materials and nanoscale structures to control a unique quantum property of light called the “valley” degree of freedom, allowing information to be encoded in new ways.

The dwarf planet Ceres has a surface that seems to get more perplexing with each new study. A recent paper presented at EGU26 in Vienna only adds to its mystery.

The JWST found an abundance of overmassive black holes at high redshifts, pushing the limits of black hole (BH) science in the early Universe. Results have claimed that these BHs are significantly more massive than expected from the BH mass-host galaxy stellar mass relation derived from the local Universe. But new research shows they were just outliers in the normal range of masses that don't require any special causes.

Multi-billion dollar space telescope programs aren’t only feats of aerospace engineering. They also feature “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. Or at least statistics. They definitely feature those, as does all good observational astronomy. The problem with statistics is, in order to get a clear definitive answer, you need lots of samples. And, to put it mildly, it’s hard to find lots of samples of planets with alien life on them. And even harder to prove that the signals we think are caused by alien life aren’t caused by some other non-biological process. Or at least that’s the theory underpinning a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from David Kipping of Columbia University (and Cool Worlds YouTube fame).

The universe is full of fascinating structures, and some of the most striking take shape inside the giant clouds where stars are born. There, streams of gas appear to converge from all directions toward a dense central hub, like spokes meeting at the center of a wheel. New simulations show why this is, and why star formation overall is so inefficient.

People with advanced pancreatic cancer taking an experimental daily pill lived nearly twice as long as those receiving chemotherapy infusions

The physics of neutron stars are almost too fantastic to believe. Something the weight of two Suns compacted to a sphere the size of a city. Each teaspoon of its material would weigh billions of tons. If you’ve done any reading on the topic, you’ve heard these facts before. But despite the intense interest these extreme objects hold, we are still actively learning lots about them. One of the most pertinent outstanding questions is where is the line between becoming a neutron star and becoming a black hole when a star dies. A new paper by researchers at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Hungary describes what they believe to be a definitive answer to that question - between 2.2 and 2.3 solar masses.

Turmeric is heralded for its anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties, but columnist Alice Klein finds that the evidence for this is shaky. Taking high doses of its curcumin extract in supplement form can be risky

Mathematicians are stunned at the progress AI is making in solving advanced problems, leaving some questioning whether there will still be room for humans

Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence: could a computer convince a human it was human? We have begun conducting the same test on ourselves, writes Max Moser