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Does Catching a Cold Slow Lung Cancer Metastasis?

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The lungs and cancer

The lungs as a common site for cancer metastasis

Cavallini James/BSIP/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Studies indicate that respiratory infections may temporarily inhibit the spread of cancer to the lungs
from other body parts. Recent experiments involving the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—known for causing cold-like symptoms and infecting nearly all children by age two—demonstrated its ability to hinder breast cancer cell colonization in the lungs. This suggests that the activation of infection-fighting proteins during such infections might be leveraged for therapeutic purposes.

According to research, the majority of cancer fatalities result from the metastasis of tumor cells from their original locations. Although early-stage cancer can often be treated effectively through surgery or radiation, once it metastasizes, treatment challenges increase significantly, with low success rates. As highlighted by David Withers from the University of Oxford, this presents a major clinical hurdle.

The implications of respiratory infections, including influenza and COVID-19, on cancer metastasis are captivating researchers, especially given the lungs’ susceptibility as a common site for such spread.

In mouse studies, RSV successfully triggered an immune response that inhibited the migration of breast cancer cells to the lungs. Cecilia Johansson from Imperial College London remarked, “This finding is remarkable, as it represents a novel aspect of viral impact on cancer.”

The research team infected 23 mice with RSV, while 16 healthy mice were used as controls. Following a 24-hour period, all mice received injections of breast cancer cells. After 28 days, lung tumor nodules in the RSV-infected mice were reduced by 65 to 70 percent compared to controls.

However, the size of the nodules that formed remained similar in both groups, indicating that the virus did not significantly impede cancer cell proliferation once they were established in the lungs. This aligns with previous studies showing that the viruses associated with swine flu and COVID-19 could activate dormant cancer cells after they have metastasized to the lungs.

Johansson and her team subsequently explored the role of type I interferon, a protein within lung cells that inhibits viral replication. Their findings revealed that this protein makes it considerably more challenging for cancer cells to develop new tumors.

To determine whether administering type I interferon could replicate the effects of RSV, researchers provided another group of mice with interventions, receiving doses of interferon prior to cancer cell injection. Initial results suggested that interferon was “slightly” more effective than the viral infection at limiting tumor cell ingress into the lungs.

“The study indicates that the type I interferon response, typical of acute viral infections, induces significant alterations in the lung epithelium,” explained Withers. “Although still in the preclinical phase, these results uncover exciting avenues to potentially enhance patient protection against metastasis.”

Researchers speculate that multiple mechanisms contribute to how type I interferon prevents tumor cell dissemination. Their focus remained on one particularly impactful method involving galectin-9, a protein produced in response to these interferons.

Johansson is optimistic that these findings could eventually lead to new drugs designed to thwart the spread of breast cancer and other tumors to the lungs. She stated, “Despite being early preclinical findings, we can test these strategies to develop new treatments against cancer without relying on viral infections.”
Claire Bennett from University College London did not participate in the study.

While the theoretical approach posits that the same strategy could thwart cancer spread to the lungs from various body sites, Johansson underlines the need for further investigation. She emphasizes that delivering type I interferon intranasally may create harmful airway inflammation.

The research team aims to conduct additional studies to deepen the understanding of interferons’ effects on cancer propagation. “We aspire to explore whether we can emulate this effect using IFN-inducing agents and how to effectively target the lung epithelium and stroma,” Johansson concluded. “Our goal is to eventually translate these findings into human studies and identify therapeutic targets in clinical settings, though that lies ahead.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Your Guide to Catching the Lyrid Meteor Shower Tonight

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Lyrid Meteor Shower

Lyrid Meteor Shower Streaking Through the Night Sky

Adventure_Photography/Getty Images

The Lyrid meteor shower will peak on the evening of April 22nd and early morning of April 23rd, but it can be observed anytime from April 16th to 25th. New Scientist‘s expert stargazers share insights on what to watch for. Listen to the audio below or find it in the podcast episode feed: The World, the Universe, and Us.

Meteors form when high-velocity debris from space collides with Earth’s atmosphere. These minuscule particles ignite due to the friction with air, creating brilliant flashes across the night sky.

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As Earth makes its annual journey around the sun, it intersects clouds of dust and debris left by comets and asteroids, boosting the number of meteors sighted. This cyclical pattern is what allows meteor showers to recur at similar times each year.

The Lyrid meteor shower is attributed to the long-period comet C/1861 G1, also known as Thatcher. Discovered in 1861, Thatcher completes its orbit every 415 years and is expected to return to our solar system around 2278.

To observe a meteor shower, you don’t need to focus on a specific area of the sky. Each meteor is named after the constellation from which it appears to radiate—in this case, the constellation Lyra, located in the Northern Hemisphere and home to the bright star Vega.

If you’re situated in the Northern Hemisphere, keep an eye out for the constellation Lyra. Although not visible from the Southern Hemisphere, meteors can shoot across the sky in any direction, so facing east may yield sightings of shooting stars.

Lyra will be visible in the east shortly after sunset in the Northern Hemisphere. For optimal meteor viewing, it’s best to keep an eye on the sky as it starts to darken; however, the closer you get to dawn, the brighter the sky will become.

One effective way to locate Lyra is by identifying the Summer Triangle, a prominent asterism formed by three bright stars that appear overhead around midnight during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer. In late April, at midnight, these stars will rise near the eastern horizon, with Vega being the highest and located within Lyra.

Regardless of the sky’s clarity, you could catch sight of 10 to 18 meteors per hour during the Lyrid meteor shower.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Study: Flamingos Utilize Beaks and Flexible Legs to Generate Water Tornadoes for Catching Prey

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A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Georgia Tech has uncovered that flamingos are not mere passive filter feeders; instead, they are active predators that employ flow-guided traps to catch nimble invertebrates.

Flamingos feed by dragging their flattened beaks forward along the shallow lake bottom. To enhance feeding efficiency, they stomp their feet to stir up the bottom, create swirling vortices with their heads, and repeatedly slap their beaks to catch food like brine shrimp. Image credit: aztli ortega.

“Flamingos are predators actively seeking out moving animals underwater. The challenge they face is how to concentrate these prey items to attract and capture them.”

“Consider how spiders spin webs to catch insects. Flamingos utilize vortices to trap creatures such as brine shrimp.”

Dr. Ortega Zimenez and his team conducted the study using Chilean flamingos (Phoenicopterus chilensis) sourced from the Nashville Zoo, where they were kept in aquariums for several weeks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbkrxu7n6kw

Utilizing high-speed cameras and particle image velocity measurements, the researchers documented and analyzed feeding behaviors, employing flow visualization techniques involving fine food particles and oxygen bubbles.

They discovered that the birds use their floppy, swaying feet to disturb the bottom sediment and propel themselves forward in a swirling motion. Additionally, the flamingos convulse their heads upward like plungers while creating mini-tornados to draw food from the water’s surface.

As the birds keep their heads inverted in a watery vortex, their angled beaks create small vortices that direct sediment and food into their mouths, enhancing their feeding efficiency.

The unique structure of the flamingo’s beak, with its flattened shape and angled front, enables a technique known as skimming. This involves the bird extending its long, S-shaped neck to push its head forward while rapidly beating its beak, generating a sheet-like vortex (von Karman vortex) that captures prey.

“These complex active feeding behaviors challenge the long-held belief that flamingos are merely passive filter feeders,” noted Dr. Ortega Zimenez.

“While they may appear to be filtering only passive particles, these birds are actively preying on moving organisms.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdziufdf3ka

The authors also applied computational fluid dynamics to simulate the 3D flow around the beak and feet of the flamingos.

They confirmed that the vortices indeed concentrate particles, similar to experiments that used a 3D printhead with aggressively swimming shrimp and passively floating brine shrimp eggs.

“We observed that when we placed 3D printed models in the water to replicate skimming, they generated symmetrical vortices along the sides of the beak, cycling particles in the water effectively,” Dr. Ortega Zimenez shared.

The team’s findings will be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

____

Victor M. Ortega Zimenez et al. 2025. Flamingos use their L-shaped beak and morphing legs to induce vortex traps for prey capture. pnas 122 (21): E2503495122; doi: 10.1073/pnas.2503495122

Source: www.sci.news

Preventing Your Child from Catching a Cold: Strengthening with a New Approach

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“It is well known that the best way to prevent catching a cold is to stay in shape.” write Mariam Amankerdievna Sidikova Medical, Practice and Nursing JournalLest parents overdo it, she warns that only healthy children “can get stronger with hydrotherapy.”
While exercising may be your best bet, it’s not your only cold prevention strategy. Aman Keldievna, a researcher at Samarkand State Medical University in Uzbekistan, also recommends scrubbing. “Scrubbing should be done year-round,” she says. If done correctly, “scrubbing should begin with the arms, then the legs, chest, abdomen, and back.”
The hardening doesn’t have to be water-based: Amankerdievna also approves of air hardening. “Air hardening is a gentler factor and is allowed for children in any state of health,” she writes.
Sunbathing is another option, but hardening caused by sunlight can be problematic. “Sunbathing is only possible with the doctor’s permission,” says Amankerdievna.
We all know that
If you’re a good speed reader, it’s easy to keep up with all that’s known — just read the thousands of new research papers published every week — but not everyone is good at speed reading.
As a service to slow readers, the feedback aims to summarize some things that are officially well known, as evidenced by the scientific literature (see above), each of which is documented with a sentence beginning with “It is well known that…”
Here are some well-known examples:
Forgetful functors are well known. Cary Malkiewich and Maru Sarazola Writing in a preprint study: “It is well known that stable model structures on a symmetric spectrum cannot be transferred from stable model structures on a continuous spectrum via a forgetting function.”
It’s notoriously complicated. Frank Nielsen wrote in the Journal: entropy, Mentioned One is that “it is well known that the distorted Bhattacharya distance between probability densities of exponential families corresponds to a distorted Jensen divergence induced by a cumulant function between the corresponding natural parameters, and in the limiting case, the two-sided Kullback-Leibler divergence corresponds to the inverse two-sided Bregman divergence.”
Heinz Kohut’s paper on narcissism is well known. write In the journal Psychoanalysis, Self and Contextreminds us that “it is well known that Heinz Kohut’s work on narcissism led to a reevaluation of patients’ healthy self-esteem.”
Ronald Fagin and Joseph Halpern A new approach to belief updatingNote that “it is well known that conditional probability functions are probability functions.”
And Luca Di Luzio, Admir Greggio and Marco Nardeckia write: Physics Review Dassure us “It is well known The giant vector is yearning for ultraviolet (UV) completion.”
How many of these well-known things are known to most people? The answer to that question is unknown. If you know of any well-known things that are less well-known but should be brought to our attention, please submit them (along with documentation) to Well-known things, c/o Feedback.
Fascism Disease
Reader Jennifer Skillen shared in her feedback that thinking about thinking was what sparked her mother-son shared reading sessions, which began several years ago. The Very Hungry Caterpillar And now, embrace New Scientist, It also contains other, more mature content.
“The other day, I started reading the cancer section of “How Do You Think About…?” [New Scientist, 25 May, page 42]And my son said, ‘Mom, why don’t you just read it and replace the word cancer with the word fascist?’ And I did, because I was fine with anything that concerned my son,” Jennifer says.
“To my surprise, the article was still very readable even with the substitutions. It made sense, but was very entertaining. It seems that both cancer cells and fascist cells can respond to changes in their environment and divide rapidly.”
Feedback agrees, and offers some excerpts from the article so readers can judge for themselves: “Cancer cells compete for nutrients and only the fittest survive…Cancer cells have evolved to be the best cancer cells possible, which is usually bad news.”
Jennifer and her son were wondering about other word pair substitutions that readers might have spotted. New Scientist The article states that substitutions “add meaning, increase knowledge, and make things more interesting.”
terrible
The question “what’s in it?” has generated many surprises, sometimes involving eels. Rohit Goel and his colleagues from the Pondicherry Medical School in India have uncovered one such surprise.
writing American Journal of Forensic PathologyThe researchers said:Unusual examples “The discovery of an interesting post-mortem remains: the presence of a moray eel among the corpses.”
The research team said that to their knowledge, “this is the first time such a discovery has been reported.”
Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.
Do you have a story for feedback?
You can submit articles for Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedback can be found on our website.

Source: www.newscientist.com