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NASA’s Roman Space Telescope has taken its first test observation with its planet-imaging instrument. It confirmed that the coronagraph could produce a focused image in space. Revealing faint planets beside bright stars will require further tests of the instrument’s ability to suppress starlight. Roman’s coronagraph optical bench during assembly in September 2022. Archive photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech. There is a useful question to ask of any telescope’s first observation: what, exactly, was being tested?

At California’s Cajon Pass, the stress on neighboring faults may help determine whether an earthquake stops or spreads across a junction. A computer model explores that possibility, without predicting when the next earthquake will happen. Cajon Pass, California. Archive photo: Don Becker / USGS (public domain). A freight train winds through a narrow valley. Power lines cross overhead. Cajon Pass carries transport and utility connections through a landscape crossed by the San Andreas Fault.

Semaglutide reduced important kidney-related outcomes in a large trial of people with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. A smaller, newer study's main MRI measures showed no significant difference. Secondary findings offered possible mechanisms. MRI scanner; representative image. Photo: Sergei.Verzilin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Resized. A medicine can help patients before researchers have a complete account of how it helps.

Adults assigned diet drinks or water maintained similar weight loss after two years in a weight-management program. That finding does not show that a drink alone caused the weight loss, or settle the broader health questions about sweeteners. A beverage comparison can sound like a simple shopping decision. Before turning it into one, it helps to ask what else the participants were doing.

Retatrutide produced substantial weight loss in a Phase 3 trial involving adults with type 2 diabetes. The highest dose had two reported estimates: 18.8% and 20.8%. They describe different questions about treatment, rather than conflicting findings. Someone deciding what a medicine might offer needs more than its largest percentage. They need to know what happened when treatment did not go exactly to plan. That is where this trial becomes particularly useful to read.

A new urine-RNA test found most localized bladder cancers in a research study. It has not yet shown that patients can safely skip cystoscopy. Its more interesting promise is that urine may reveal something about a tumor's behavior as well as its presence. A cup of urine would be an easier way to check for cancer than an instrument passed into the bladder. The appeal is obvious.

A new study found that sugar-rich foods were linked to greater disruption of the gut microbiome during broad-spectrum antibiotic treatment. But it was conducted mainly in hospitalized blood-cancer patients undergoing stem-cell transplantation—not in otherwise healthy people taking a short course at home.

Give a machine-learning model four minutes of speech and it may find traces of age in the way you pause, choose words and shape your voice. A new study suggests that the gap between how old someone sounds to the model and how old they actually are also overlaps with several measures of brain and biological aging. That is the intriguing result. The important correction is that the model did not predict who would later develop dementia.

A tumor biopsy can be extraordinarily informative. It can also be geographically narrow: a needle enters one lesion and removes one small piece of a cancer that may be evolving across several organs. Researchers in Spain have now shown that blood can sometimes reveal a wider set of possible immune targets. In a proof-of-concept study of eight people with metastatic cancer, they searched one blood sample for both tumor-specific neoantigens and T cells capable of recognizing them.

Ask what chewing tobacco does to the body and most people picture the mouth: damaged gums, white patches and oral cancer. A new global analysis points to a less familiar part of the toll. Stroke accounted for more than three times as much chewing-tobacco-attributable health loss as lip and oral cavity cancer. The difference was substantial: 55.9 disability-adjusted life years, or DALYs, per 100,000 people for stroke, compared with 17.4 for lip and oral cavity cancer.