DISCOVER THE FUTURE
Science is doing its thing.
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Lei Zhang’s group at Shenzhen Bay Laboratory reports in Science that PD-1–responsive colorectal tumors contain a spatial niche of helper T cells that arrive from lymph nodes. In mice, an OX40 agonist plus PD-1 blockade pushed that peripheral supply line and slowed tumor growth.
Google Research said on Nov. 13 that its /teamwork-LEAP multi-agent system autonomously produced a 1.8-million-line Lean formalization of the Weil conjectures over about 28,800 subagent calls, formalized the Birkhoff conjecture for the first time, fixed a gap in a recent proof and helped prove the Courtade-Kumar conjecture.
On Nov. 14 in Binzhou, Shandong, COMAC’s CE-25A completed its first piloted intelligent flight. COMAC said the test lasted 57 minutes and 46 seconds, including 16 minutes and 38 seconds in the air over 60.4 kilometers. The 19-seat, 10-ton electric aircraft is being developed to transport-category rules, and China’s aviation regulator has accepted its type-certificate application.
A Zhejiang University team led by Haoxing Xu reports in Science that TMEM184B and TMEM184C are the transporters that move calcium into lysosomes, answering a question open since 1991. The proteins refill lysosomal calcium without energy or acid, and a TMEM184B mutation linked to a neurodevelopmental disorder breaks the transport.
Google DeepMind released PARDIG and SatWeave, the open weather datasets behind its WeatherNext 3 model. SatWeave stitches six geostationary satellites into an hourly global view; PARDIG uses AI trained on sparse space radar to map rainfall worldwide every 15 minutes at about 10 km, back to 1999. Both are free under CC BY 4.0.
A team at Curtin University's node of ICRAR in Australia reports in Nature Astronomy a radio source, GPM J071507−114153: a white dwarf that pulses roughly every 7.9 minutes while orbiting a Sun-like G-type star about every 1.3 days. It is the first time such radio pulses have been traced to a white dwarf with a Sun-like partner, adding a new clue to the puzzle of long-period radio transients.
At its DTC 2026 conference on Nov. 13, TCL CSOT CEO Zhao Jun said gaming monitors with inkjet-printed OLED screens reached mass-production shipments this year after 13 years of R&D. The company's 29.5 billion yuan t8 printed-OLED plant in Guangzhou has topped out and is scheduled to light its first panels next May and reach mass production in the fourth quarter of 2027.
Boston Dynamics' November 9 demonstration uses a wheeled humanoid as a research platform, not a commercial product.
At 19:00 Beijing time on Nov. 12, the European Space Agency published Euclid’s first major data set, DR1-Foundation: about 13 months of observations covering an area of sky equal to 9,500 full Moons, with more than 900 million galaxies, some 15,000 strong-lens candidates, and about 1.7 million GB of data. The rest of Data Release 1 is due in mid-2027.
Mitsubishi Electric said on Nov. 10 that, with help from Japanese carrier KDDI, it built "Liqutenna," an antenna that uses tap water to send and receive signals. An 800 MHz prototype connected to mobile devices in KDDI's indoor test environment with no difference in performance from a typical metal antenna. Mitsubishi calls it a telecom-industry first and is aiming it at shops, restaurants and historic buildings where metal antennas are hard to place. No launch date or price has been announced.
China's drug regulator has approved Eli Lilly's orforglipron (sold in China as 穆优达), TMTPost reported on Nov. 12, making it the first oral GLP-1 drug approved in China for weight loss. It's a once-a-day pill for adults with obesity, or overweight adults with a weight-related health problem. The US approved it in April. Pricing, insurance coverage and launch timing in China weren't reported.
Xinhua reported on Nov. 11 that China Mobile and partners used 230-gigabaud technology to send a real-time 1.6 Tb/s signal on a single wavelength over 960 km of standard G.652.D backbone fiber, the company's longest such run. It hints that existing fiber could be upgraded just by swapping equipment, but vendors, error rates and a commercial timeline weren't disclosed.
At 19:41 Beijing time on Nov. 11, a Long March 2D rocket launched four Pathfinder satellites for China's Tanyuan space science program. Satellite A carries five instruments, while three others fly in formation to test low-frequency interferometric imaging for future missions such as Hongmeng and Kuafu-2. The Chinese Academy of Sciences plans four science missions over the next three to five years.
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope published the first direct image of a black hole, the bright ring around M87's center. Critics have long wondered whether that ring was an artifact of sparse data and image processing. On November 12, four researchers at Australia's CSIRO said a new method called GenDIReCT, which was not told what a black hole should look like, reanalyzed the public data and recovered a ring of almost the same size and shape. The work is published in Nature.
Motor neuron disease, also called ALS, has no cure, and existing treatments for rare genetic forms cover under 3% of cases. The other 97% share a failure of a protein called TDP-43, which normally proofreads genetic material. On November 11, King's College London described a Nature study showing that when TDP-43 fails, a single error in the UNC13A gene breaks communication between neurons — and that an antisense oligonucleotide drug restored that communication in human neurons in the lab. This is not a therapy already proven in patients.
All-solid-state batteries have long been stuck on two problems: promising sulfide materials can react with lithium metal, and they often need high pressure to work, which is hard to do in a car. On November 11, QuantumScape announced Osprey, an open all-solid-state platform, saying its cells have produced the first public data of a sulfide-based cathode cycling 1,000 times under just one atmosphere of pressure. It also cites a projected energy density of up to about 1,100 Wh/L. These are the company's laboratory results. Osprey is a long-term technology platform, not a mass-produced car battery.
On November 11, IBM announced plans for Nighthawk r3, a next-generation quantum processor designed to run 10,000 quantum operations accurately across 520 programmable qubits, and to link two of those chips into a system with more than 1,000 qubits in 2027. This is a roadmap; the release gave no availability date for r3. IBM also said partners including E.ON, Algorithmiq, and Q-CTRL have already run more than 34 billion circuits on the current Nighthawk r2, reporting speedups of up to 19 times. Those figures come from IBM and its partners.
For years, synthetic metamaterials have been made by repeating the same tiny unit, like tiles on a floor. On November 11, a team from MIT and Northeastern University described a different approach, in an open-access Nature paper: internal beams of many sizes, connected like the veins in a leaf or a dragonfly wing. Their 3D-printed samples held up better under compression and impact than conventional lattice or honeycomb designs, and could cushion a fragile object at the center, similar to a pomelo's rind. The work is still in the lab.
Going to Mars has usually meant waiting for Earth and Mars to line up, a launch window that comes around roughly every two years. NASA's twin ESCAPADE probes tried something different: launch in November 2025, park near Earth, then swing back past Earth, using its gravity plus their own engine burns to fling themselves toward Mars. On November 9, NASA said both had completed these 'powered Earth flybys' within two days, the first time NASA has sent spacecraft to Mars this way. They are due to enter Mars orbit in September 2027 and begin studying how the solar wind strips away Mars' atmosphere in June 2028.