FDA just approved a drug that doubles survival time for late-stage pancreatic cancer

Happy Thursday. Pancreatic cancer has one of the lowest survival rates of any cancer — just 3% of patients survive five years. A new drug called daraxonrasib has doubled survival time for patients whose cancer survived chemotherapy. When the results were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago in May, the doctors and scientists in the room stood up and applauded. Some were crying.

We also have scientists who used fossil wing patterns and AI to recreate the actual chirps of Jurassic grasshoppers from 165 million years ago, an arthritis drug that's restoring hair in alopecia patients, and Ford's largest factory, which has had 20,000 honeybees and a full bird sanctuary living on its roof since 2002.

Dive in.

—Stephanie S

Pancreatic cancer is among the most lethal diagnoses in medicine. Only 3% of patients survive five years after diagnosis, and the standard treatment — grueling chemotherapy — fails to stop the cancer in many of them. For decades, the protein that drives pancreatic cancer's survival, called KRAS, was considered untargetable because of its smooth surface. Nothing could grab it. Then Revolution Medicine found a way.

Daraxonrasib works by gluing other molecules together in a configuration that allows the combined structure to grab and block KRAS before it can sustain the tumor. In a phase 3 clinical trial of patients whose cancer had survived chemotherapy, the drug doubled median survival time from 7 months to more than 13. The FDA reviewed the results and granted approval in just 35 days. The drug is now largely covered by insurance.

When the trial results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago in May, the physicians and scientists in the room rose and applauded. Some were in tears. "I have not seen anything like that before in trials we have run in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Brian Wolpin of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who led the study. "I just kept repeating, 'Wow.'"

The implications extend well beyond pancreatic cancer. KRAS also drives colon and lung cancer, and dozens of KRAS-inhibiting drugs are now being tested across multiple cancer types. In rare cases, daraxonrasib has had curative effects: one man enrolled in the trial in 2022 whose cancer had spread to his lymph nodes is alive today with tumors that can no longer be detected on scans.

The fossils were found in Inner Mongolia: nine different species of Orthoptera, the insect order that includes crickets and grasshoppers, preserved from the Middle Jurassic period approximately 165 million years ago. What made them extraordinary was not just their age but their condition. The sound-producing structures on their wings, the ridges and scrapers that these insects rub together to make their mating calls, were so clearly preserved that scientists could reconstruct the actual pitches and rhythms of the sounds they made.

Thorin Jonsson and his team at the University of Graz in Austria, working with colleagues from the universities of Lincoln, Bristol, Beijing, and Tempe, used AI-assisted analysis to translate the fossil wing structures into specific hertz values for each species. The results revealed a Jurassic soundscape far more acoustically diverse than anyone expected, ranging from low-pitched rumbles like modern crickets to high-frequency calls like modern leafhoppers. One species, Sigmaboilus peregrinus, was communicating in the ultrasonic range above 20 kilohertz.

That last finding upended a long-standing theory. Ultrasonic stridulation in insects was previously thought to have evolved as a response to bat predation. But bats did not exist yet 165 million years ago. The oldest sound ever recreated by science belongs to an insect that was already sophisticated enough to communicate beyond human hearing, millions of years before there was anything to hide from. A YouTube video of the recreated calls is linked in the full story.

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When Henry Ford first acquired the land along the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan in 1915, he reportedly wanted to turn the 2,000-acre stretch into a bird sanctuary. Instead it became River Rouge, Ford's largest and most complex factory, a sprawling 600-acre industrial site that has been producing vehicles for more than a century. Then in 2002, the final assembly building got a roof that Henry Ford might have recognized.

The living roof covers 454,000 square feet, once the largest turf roof in the world. Its layers of porous concrete, soil, drought-resistant sedum, and freely-growing wild plants keep the building 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in winter and 10 degrees cooler in summer. It absorbs rainwater into underground chambers, releasing it slowly and solving a flooding problem that had long affected the surrounding area. Within five days of installation, killdeer birds had built nests on it.

More than two decades later, the roof is a biodiversity hotspot. Twenty thousand honeybees live up there, along with populations of birds, insects, and butterflies that treat the top of a working automobile factory as habitat. The site had required a $2 billion environmental cleanup at the end of the 20th century to remove decades of industrial contamination. The honeybees did not get the memo about what kind of place this used to be.

Alopecia areata is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system mistakenly attacks hair follicles, causing them to stop producing hair. It affects roughly 2% of the world's population, can cause complete scalp hair loss, and has historically been difficult to treat. A large new clinical trial suggests that upadacitinib, a drug already approved for rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory conditions, may offer meaningful relief.

The phase 3 randomized trial enrolled 1,399 participants aged 12 to 64, all of whom had lost at least 50% of their scalp hair at the start of the study. After 24 weeks on upadacitinib, 44% of those taking the lower 15mg dose had achieved 80% or more scalp and eyebrow coverage. Among those taking the 30mg dose, 55% reached the same threshold. Between 13% and 22.5% of participants got all of their scalp hair back entirely, depending on the dosage. Results began appearing as early as week 8.

No deaths were reported and no novel side effects emerged. Many participants also scored meaningfully higher on quality of life measures including assessments of depression. The trial was funded by a company that produces upadacitinib, a conflict of interest the authors acknowledged and that GNN noted warrants further independent study before the drug becomes a standard alopecia treatment. But for the 2% of the population who know exactly what this condition costs them, the results are worth knowing about.

⚒️ Denmark: A family doing yard work in northern Denmark unearthed what experts are calling the largest trove of Viking silver ever discovered in Denmark, including hundreds of coins and jewelry pieces dating back more than 1,000 years. GNN World.

💊 Global: A large real-world study found that semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, was associated with nearly 40% fewer asthma attacks and 20% fewer COPD flare-ups compared to other diabetes treatments. ERS Congress 2026, Imperial College London.

🧠 USA: Duke University biomedical engineers created an injectable biomaterial scaffold that helped stroke-damaged brains grow new blood vessels, support nerve regrowth, and restore movement in mice, by recruiting the body's own immune cells. Published in Cell Biomaterials.

🏛️ UK: New research has confirmed that ancient builders deliberately hauled 25-tonne stones at least 18 kilometers from Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire to build Britain's tallest prehistoric stone row, the Devil's Arrows, using isotopic fingerprinting to finally solve the mystery. Curtin University and University of York, Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

☄️ Global: ALMA telescope data revealed that interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS contains exceptionally high levels of methanol, with ratios up to 120 times that of hydrogen cyanide, making it the most methanol-rich comet ever studied and suggesting it formed under conditions radically different from our solar system. American University, ALMA Observatory.

On September 10, 1960, Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia ran the Rome Olympics marathon in 2 hours, 15 minutes, and 16 seconds, barefoot, through the streets of the ancient city by torchlight. He set a world record. He won by a comfortable margin. It was Africa's first Olympic gold medal, and it was won by a man who competed without shoes because his pair had given him blisters during training and he had simply decided not to wear any.

Four years later in Tokyo, Bikila became the first person in history to successfully defend an Olympic marathon title, winning again in world record time, this time wearing shoes. He was the greatest marathon runner of his era, and one of the most remarkable athletes the Olympics has ever produced.

Other notable September 10 events:

1989: Hungary opened its borders to allow East Germans to flee to Austria, 37 years ago today, an act of defiance by Foreign Minister Gyula Horn that directly triggered the flood of emigrants that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall two months later.

2008: The Large Hadron Collider was powered up at CERN, 18 years ago today, the largest machine ever built, 17 miles of tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, operated by 10,000 scientists from 100 countries, where the Higgs boson was discovered four years later.

1991: Nirvana released "Smells Like Teen Spirit," 35 years ago today, the song that propelled Nevermind to the top of the charts and marked the moment alternative rock permanently entered the mainstream.

1972: Dan Gable won Olympic gold in wrestling at the Munich Games, 54 years ago today, defeating six opponents without conceding a single point, a feat never repeated in Olympic wrestling history.

— Sir Edmund Hillary

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🧬 Fighting Cancer With Engineered Immune Cells: Scientists are adapting CAR-T cell therapy, which has already transformed the treatment of blood cancers, to work against solid tumors, engineering T-cells that can navigate dense tumor tissue, resist the chemical signals that tumors use to suppress immune attacks, and persist long enough to do real damage, opening a new front in cancer medicine.

🔬 Sensors Sharper Than Anything We've Built: Quantum sensors that exploit the properties of individual subatomic particles are being developed for medical imaging with sensitivity far beyond anything conventional MRI or PET scanners can achieve, with the eventual goal of detecting early-stage disease at the scale of single molecules rather than clusters of damaged cells.

🌊 Solar Power That Saves Water Too: Floating solar panels being installed on the surfaces of reservoirs and hydroelectric dams simultaneously generate electricity and reduce water evaporation from the surface below, combining two renewable energy benefits in a single installation that also uses no land and leaves the water available for its original purpose.

🔭 Reading the Magnetic Skeleton of the Universe: Astronomers are now mapping magnetic fields across enormous regions of space using polarized radio waves, revealing that these invisible fields play a fundamental role in how galaxies form, how cosmic rays travel across vast distances, and how matter clumps together into the structures we see throughout the universe.

🌱 Breeding Better Crops in Weeks Instead of Years: Agricultural scientists are using intense artificial light and precisely controlled environments to compress a full plant generation from months to weeks, allowing drought resistance, heat tolerance, and disease resistance to be bred into food crops in years rather than the decades traditional plant breeding requires.

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