Saturday Citations: AI predicts cancer survival outcomes; Hubble spots a wandering black hole

This week, physicists at CERN reported the transmutation of lead into gold in the Large Hadron Collider, raising the possibility that a Science X alchemy vertical could be on the horizon. An international research collaborative developed a new method to identify bacteria within minutes. And researchers in California have identified tap water as another transmission pathway for E. coli bacteria.

Plus: Large brains and complex immune systems are associated with longer lifespan; Hubble spotted a roaming, massive black hole in another galaxy; and a deep-learning algorithm can make predictions of cancer survival outcomes from patient photographs:

Immune to DEATH

Does your giant Homo sapiens brain confer a longer lifespan? A new study by an international team suggests that longer lifespans in species with larger brains may be linked to developing more complex immune systems. The study looked at the maximum lifespan potential of 46 species, a better measure for this inquiry than average lifespan, which is affected by outside factors like predation and availability of food. They found that longer-lived species had a greater number of genes associated with the immune system than species with shorter lifespans.

The researchers observed that mammals with larger brains, like whales and dolphins, have lifespans of many decades while mammals with smaller brains, like mice, only live for one or two years. However, two species with smaller brains, bats and mole rats, also have much longer lifespans; the study found that their genomes had more genes associated with the immune system.

Dr. Benjamin Padilla-Morales from the University of Bath says, “Bigger-brained species don’t just live longer because of ecological reasons; their genomes also show parallel expansions in genes linked to survival and maintenance. This shows that brain size and immune resilience seem to have walked hand-in-hand in the evolutionary journey toward longer lives.”

Upstart black hole trolls rival

Ordinarily, inactive black holes are stealthy, camouflaged against the blackness of space by their light-entrapping event horizons. But Hubble recently spotted a roaming, massive black hole in a galaxy 600 million light-years away when it shredded a passing star. And it’s a weird object—at 1 million solar masses, it’s massive, but doesn’t reside at the center of its host galaxy. That galaxy actually has its own central, 100-million-solar-mass black hole with its own periods of activity and inactivity, and it probably doesn’t appreciate being upstaged by an itinerant gravity well.

Its location makes the find remarkable: It’s the first observation of a black hole tidal disruption event offset from the center of a galaxy. One additional observation is that the wandering black hole currently resides only 2,600 light-years away from the central supermassive black hole, comprising a distance only one-tenth of the distance between Earth and Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.

Ryan Chornock, associate adjunct professor at UC Berkeley, says, “Tidal disruption events hold great promise for illuminating the presence of massive black holes that we would otherwise not be able to detect. Theorists have predicted that a population of massive black holes located away from the centers of galaxies must exist, but now we can use TDEs to find them.”

AI will judge you, but for oncological reasons

Researchers at Mass General Brigham developed a deep learning algorithm called FaceAge that can predict biological age and cancer survival outcomes from a photo of your face. Published in The Lancet Digital Health, the study found that patients with cancer have a higher FaceAge than cancer-free patients, and generally appear to be about five years older than their chronological age.

They trained FaceAge on 58,851 photos of presumed healthy individuals sourced from public data sets. After training, they tested the algorithm with photos of 6,196 cancer patients using photos taken routinely at the start of cancer treatment therapy. In the cancer patient cohort, older FaceAge compared to chronological age was associated with worse survival outcomes, particularly for those who appeared to be 85 or older.

Significantly, the researchers recruited 10 clinicians to predict short-term life expectancy from 100 photos of patients and found that their estimates were no better than a coin flip. However, after providing the volunteers with FaceAge information on the subjects in the photos, their predictions of short-term survival improved significantly.

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