404 Media

2025-10-09 15:00:26

A New 'Nanoparticle Vaccine' Prevented Cancer In Mice, Study Says

Scientists have developed a unique nanoparticle vaccine that prevented the development of multiple forms of cancer in mice, reports a study published in Cell Reports Medicine on Thursday.

Eighty percent of mice that received the novel vaccine and were subsequently exposed to cancerous cells did not develop tumors and survived to the end of the 250-day long experiment. In contrast, all of the mice that received different vaccine formulations, or remained unvaccinated, developed tumors and none survived longer than 35 days.

It’s too early to know if this breakthrough will ever be applicable to human cancer prevention or treatment, but the successful demonstration in mice is a promising result for the team’s so-called “super-adjuvant” vaccine. This approach uses nanoparticles made of fatty molecules to deliver two distinct “adjuvants,” which are substances in vaccines that enhance an immune response.

“The results that we have are super exciting, and we're really looking forward to pushing forward to the next steps,” said Griffin Kane, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and first author on the paper, in a call with 404 Media. “But I think that the translation of these types of therapies from preclinical mouse models to the clinic is a very humbling experience for a lot of people and teams.”

“It’s these highlights that make it worth coming to work,” added Prabhani Atukorale, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and corresponding author on the paper, in the same call. “But I agree that the translation of these findings is key. We are not satisfied with simply publishing a paper. We want to get these into patients, and it is a humbling process because there are significant gaps.”
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Scientists have been working on nanoparticle-based drug designs for decades, and the field has experienced rapid progress in recent years alongside advances in nanotechnology and drug delivery pathways. Nanoparticles provide a stable platform for carrying vaccine components to key targets, increasing the efficiency of delivery to specific sites in the body and uptake by the immune system.

Atukorale’s team previously published a study on a similar vaccine that shrank and cleared tumors from mice. In their new study, the researchers adapted the nanoparticle design to achieve prophylactic protection from melanoma, pancreatic, and triple-negative breast cancer in mice, with support from the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at UMass Amherst, UMass Chan Medical School, and the National Institutes of Health.

Vaccines consist of two main components: antigens, which are substances that trigger an immune response, and adjuvants, which enhance the immune response. Like other cancer vaccines, the nanoparticle treatment delivers antigens that activate white blood cells in the immune system to help fight off specific types of tumors.

What’s new in this study is that the nanoparticles accommodated two distinct adjuvants that target different immune pathways known as STING (stimulator of interferon genes) and TLR4 (Toll-like receptor 4), which further boosts the immune response to introduced cancer cells.

Adjuvants often require very different drug delivery systems, but the nanoparticles, which are about 30 to 60 nanometers across, are big enough to house different adjuvants in their unique environments, while remaining small enough to enter lymph nodes where they can activate key immune cells.

“The big picture is that we need better adjuvants for our vaccines,” Atukorale said. “We think that we can build them using nanoparticles. This is an example in a tumor.”

One of the most exciting surprises from the study turned out to be the prolonged protection against the spread of cancer provided by the nanoparticle vaccine. The vaccinated mice that did not develop tumors during their first exposure to melanoma cells were then later injected with new metastatic cancer cells, and their immune systems fought those off too, preventing the development and spread of the tumors.

“There's long-term robust memory immunity,” said Kane.

Moreover, while the team focused on certain cancers in their experiment, the nanoparticle platform could deliver a range of specialized antigen-adjuvant combinations to target different types of tumors.

“We think that this is one of the true strengths of these strategies,” said Atukorale. “They will have much broader reach than many of the cancer-specific treatments out there.”

That said, Kane and Atukorale cautioned that their team’s work is still in early stages—and, of course, focused on mice and not people. They also noted that only a handful of cancer vaccines have been clinically approved out of thousands in development. While the new study represents an intriguing step forward, the dream of wide-ranging prophylactic cancer vaccines is many years away, assuming it can materialize at all.

“A lot of very elegant technologies have come out of labs and have not fully succeeded in patients,” Kane said. “We believe that we're building this technology towards something that would improve on what current cancer vaccines are able to deliver.”

Nanoparticles and microparticles for drug and vaccine delivery - PMC

Nanoparticles are polymeric particles in the nanometer size range whereas microparticles are particles in the micrometre size range. Both types of particle are used as drug carriers into which drugs or antigens may be incorporated in the form of ...

^{pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov}

404 Media

2025-10-09 14:33:06

Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship Around America

Over the last few years, some of our more meaningful (and unfortunately bleakest) reporting has been on the many ways in which the right wing has systematically targeted libraries, schools, authors, and educators over the things they teach, specifically with regard to the teaching of systemic racism, LGBTQ+ issues, science, and sex education. These targeting efforts have led to a widespread, highly successful effort to ban books, restrict curricula, harass and oust teachers and librarians, and broadly censor the educational system. This movement has leveraged these successes to seize power not just in city councils and local school boards but has succeeded in making censorship and “anti wokeness” one of the dominant political ideologies in the United States.

We have successfully gained access to public records that show, for example, how a local group in Idaho successfully got a police officer to go hunting for “obscene” books at the public library, the playbook behind getting "Drag Storytime" library events canceled, how superintendents in Florida couldn’t figure out how to comply with the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and have spoken to numerous librarians, scientists, and professors to learn how educational freedom, free access to information, and historic archives are under attack. Today—which happens to be the fourth day of Banned Books Week—we are proud and excited to announce that we will be continuing and ramping up this work over the next year with the help of a grant from our friends and colleagues at government transparency nonprofit Muckrock, with support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. (We’re also excited to partner with Muckrock on this new piece of limited edition merch it made for Banned Books week).

From our proposal: “Book banning and educational censorship (the banning of LGBTQIA+ studies, the study of slavery and systemic racism, the war on “DEI” and trans people) has become a political cudgel and core rallying point for the current administration. These bans have been pushed through by organized groups such as Moms for Liberty and high-profile politicians, and impact the daily lives, careers, and future prospects of students, their families, and teachers, while simultaneously managing to become a core part of the culture war. These documents about censorship are themselves difficult to obtain and are at risk of being memory holed and forgotten about without a systematic effort to obtain, publish, and archive them. This project will show how censorship works and will shed light on the sheer scale of these censorship efforts, at a time when public trust in the government is at an all-time low.”

Over the next few weeks, we will be filing hundreds of public records requests with state, local, and federal governments and school districts with the hope of unearthing more information about the groups, politicians, and monied interests that have been pushing book bans and educational censorship on American public schools and libraries. As we get these documents back over the course of the next few months, we will be making them available to the public through Document Cloud, with the hopes of creating an enduring archive of public records about educational censorship in the United States. We will also, of course, be reporting on the documents we get back and will be turning them into articles that you can read on 404 Media.

As always, we will need some help from our readers. We need help deciding what to look for, which school districts and cities to seek public records from, and need leads on where we should point our reporting efforts. During the height of the pandemic, many city councils made their meeting minutes and meeting transcripts searchable, so we have a good sense of the types of organizations and communities that have been most severely affected by educational censorship and book bans, and have a good idea of where to get started. But if you are a librarian, teacher, educator, parent, local politician, or activist who is aware of systemic efforts to ban books, censor curricula, defund libraries, or otherwise attack educational freedom, please let us know by emailing jason@[url=https://web.brid.gy/404media.co]404 Media[/url] or by reaching out to Jason securely over Signal at jason.404. And if you want to further support this work, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber or by donating to our tip jar.

Tip Jar

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-09 13:02:20

National Guardsman Planned American Caliphate on Discord, Sent 3D Printed Guns to Al Qaeda, Feds Say

The FBI accused a former National Guardsman living in Tulsa, Oklahoma of trying to sell 3D printed guns to Al Qaeda. According to an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department in September, 25-year-old Andrew Scott Hastings used a Discord server to plan a Caliphate in America and shipped more than 100 3D printed machine gun conversion kits to an undercover FBI operative who claimed he had contacts in the terrorist organization.
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The Army Times first reported the story after the DOJ unsealed the charging documents. According to the court records, Hastings first landed on the radar of authorities in 2019 when a co-worker at an Abuelo’s restaurant in Tulsa called the police to report he’d been talking about blowing things up. When the cops interviewed Hastings, he told them he was just interested in chemistry and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. In 2020, the cops interviewed his mom. “Hastings’ mother, Terri, told TPD that her son was on the [autism] spectrum, was socially active online, and had converted to Islam.”

According to Terri, odd incidents piled up. She said that someone mailed Hastings a Quran, that he’d once received an order of chicken wings paid for by someone in Indonesia, and that he’d once threatened his family with a can of gasoline. “She also mentioned an incident in the family home where Hastings became enraged when she cooked bacon, and thereafter called someone she described as his ‘handler,’” according to court records.

The charging documents said the FBI got involved in 2024 because of a Discord server called “ARMY OF MUHAMMAD.” Discord cooperated with the FBI investigation and granted access to some of Hastings’ records to authorities. The FBI alleged that Hastings met with several other people on the Discord server and plotted terror attacks against Americans. At this time, Hastings worked for the National Guard as an aircraft powertrain repairer and held a SECRET-level national security clearance.

The charging documents detailed Hastings' alleged plot to establish a caliphate in the US via Discord. “[T]he most important theater right now is cyberspace…we need an actionable plan we can start work on--something slow and Ling(sic) term not hasty and slapdash,” Hastings allegedly said on Discord. “I think it would be best if we create a channel and I’ll list a physical training routine.”

“If we get 9-10 guys maybe inshaAllah we can …we could put headquarters in the USA cuz yk [you know] if we are fighting them the military is prohibited from operations on the homeland only ntnal [sic] guard and agencies can operate within borders…[y]ou need to contest air land and cyberspace…what my plan addresses is how to contest all of these at once while providing more aid than harm we can do in collateral and taking out targets of higher strength.”

According to the FBI’s version of events, Hastings talked about moving the group off of Discord and onto Signal because he believed Discord wasn’t secure. He also bragged about police interrogating him about explosives and “claimed to have made a firearm and discussed making a nuclear rocket.”

“We don’t want democracy lol,” he said on Discord, according to court records. “We want caliphate”

Hastings talked about other groups he was in contact with on Signal, offered to make training videos about weapon handling, and told others on the Discord server that he knew how to make firearms and was willing to ship them to like-minded militants. “I already have some small arms components partially finished and nearly ready to issue,” he said, according to the charging document. “I’ll send one photo but wanna remain kinda anonymous.”

The FBI said it slipped an “Online Covert Employee” (OCE) into Hastings’ life on March 26, 2025. Posing as a person on eBay, the FBI employee told Hastings he had contacts with Al Qaeda. “The OCE then recommended they move the conversation to Telegram or Signal, the latter of which Hastings said did not even have ‘a backdoor,’ meaning it could not be hacked or intercepted by law enforcement.”

The issue, of course, is that Hastings was speaking with an FBI employee. Over the next few months, Hastings spoke with the OCE about using a 3D printer to manufacture weapons for them with the eventual goal of getting them in the hands of Al Qaeda. Hastings allegedly told the OCE that he’d been discharged from the military and needed to make money.

In the summer of 2025, the FBI alleged that Hastings started mass printing Glock parts and switch conversion kits for Al Qaeda. “Hastings told the OCE he was moving out of his parent’s home in July 2025 after they complained about the noise and smell created when he 3D printed weapons,” the court documents said. The FBI allegedly has video of Hastings at a post office shipping multiple packages that summer that authorities said contained more than 100 3D printed switches, two 3D printed lower receivers for a Glock, and one 3D printed Glock slide.

The FBI has charged Hastings with attempting to provide material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations and illegal possession or transfer of a machinegun. The Justice Department considers every single 3D conversion kit Hastings shipped an individual machinegun, even when they’re not installed.

Former Guardsman charged with trying to provide weapons to al-Qaida

A 25-year-old former Army National Guardsman faces federal charges that he attempted to provide al-Qaida with 3D-printed weapons.

^{Todd South (Army Times)}

fbusc

2025-10-09 12:33:55

Qual è il modo più semplice per passare da miglia a chilometri?

Usa Fibonacci!

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ...

2 miglia sono circa 3 chilometri
3 miglia sono circa 5 chilometri
...
21 miglia sono circa 34 chilometri

e più la distanza diventa lunga, più l'approssimazione è corretta.

Perché la serie di Fibonacci tende al rapporto aureo 1.618 che è molto vicino al rapporto 1 miglio = 1.609 chilometri

#sapevatelo

404 Media

2025-10-08 19:10:39

Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses

Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.

“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”

💡
Do you work at Apple or Google and know anything else about these app removals? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

Mark said the app was removed on October 3. At the time of writing, the Apple App Store says “This app is currently not available in your country or region” when trying to download Eyes Up.

The website for Eyes Up which functions essentially the same way is still available. The site includes a map with dots that visitors can click on, which then plays a video from that location. Users are able to submit their own videos for inclusion. Mark said he manually reviews every video before it is uploaded to the service, to check its content and its location.

“I personally look at each submission to ensure that it's relevant, accurately described to the best I can tell, and appropriate to post. I actually look at the user submitted location and usually cross-reference with [Google] Street View to verify. We have an entire private app just for moderation of the submissions,” Mark said.

Screenshots of Eyes Up.

The videos available on Eyes Up are essentially the same you might see when scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X. They are a mix of professional media reports and user-generated clips of ICE arrests. Many of the videos are clearly just re-uploads of material taken from those social media apps, and still include TikTok or Instagram watermarks. Mark said the videos are also often taken from Reddit or the community- and crime-awareness app Citizen too.

Many of the videos from New York are footage of ICE officials aggressively detaining people inside the city’s courts, something ICE has been doing for months. Another is a video from the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), which represents more than 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups. Another is an Instagram video showing ICE taking “a mother as her child begs the officers not to take her,” according to a caption on the video. The map includes similar videos from San Diego, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, which are clearly taken from TikTok or media reports, including NBC News.

“Our goal is to preserve evidence until it can be used in court, and we believe the mapping function will make it easier for litigants to find bystander footage in the future,” Mark said.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told 404 Media “Like any other government agency, DHS is required to follow the law. The collection of video evidence is a powerful tool of oversight to ensure that the government respects the rights of citizens and immigrants alike. People have a right to film interactions with law enforcement in public spaces and to share those videos with others.”

“If DHS is concerned that the actions of their own officers might inflame public opinion against the agency, they should work to increase oversight and accountability at the agency — rather than seek to have the evidence banned,” he added.

Apple removed ICEBlock, another much more prominent app, on Thursday from its App Store. The move came after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. A statement the Department of Justice provided to 404 Media said the agency reached out to Apple “demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.” Fox says authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September in which a detainee was killed, searched his phone for various tracking apps before attacking the facility.

Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “we are determined to fight this.”

ICEBlock allowed people to create an alert, based on their location, about ICE officials in their area. This then sent an alert to other users nearby.

Apple also removed another similar app called Red Dot, 404 Media reported. Google did the same thing, and described ICE officials as a vulnerable group. Apple also removed an app called DeICER.
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Yet, Eyes Up differs from those apps in that it does not function as a real-time location reporting app.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about Eyes Up’s removal.

Mark provided 404 Media with screenshots of the emails he received from Apple. In the emails, Apple says Eyes Up violates the company’s guidelines around objectionable content. That can include “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. Professional political satirists and humorists are generally exempt from this requirement.”

The emails also say that law enforcement have provided Apple with information that shows the purpose of the app is “to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

The emails are essentially identical to those sent to the developer of ICEBlock which 404 Media previously reported on.

In an appeal to the app removal, Mark told Apple “the posts on this app are significantly delayed and subject to manual review, meaning the officers will be long gone from the location by the time the content is posted to be viewed by the public. This would make it impossible for our app to be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

“The sole purpose of Eyes Up is to document and preserve evidence of abuses of power by law enforcement, which is an important function of a free society and constitutionally protected,” Mark’s response adds.

Apple then replied and said the ban remains in place, according to another email Mark shared.

The app is available on Google's Play Store.

Update: this piece has been updated to include comment from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.

SCOOP: Apple Quietly Made ICE Agents a Protected Class

Internal emails show tech giant used anti-hate-speech rules meant for minorities to block an app documenting immigration enforcement.

^{Pablo Manríquez (Migrant Insider)}

404 Media

2025-10-08 14:50:35

People Are Crashing Out Over Sora 2’s New Guardrails

Sora, OpenAI’s new social media platform for its Sora 2 image generation model, launched eight days ago. In the first days of the app, users did what they always do with a new tool in their hands: generate endless chaos, in this case images of Spongebob Squarepants in a Nazi uniform and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting or throwing Pikachus on the grill.

In little over a week, Sora 2 and OpenAI have caught a lot of heat from journalists like ourselves stress-testing the app, but also, it seems, from rightsholders themselves. Now, Sora 2 refuses to generate all sorts of prompts, including characters that are in the public domain like Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh. “This content may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content,” the app said when I tried to generate Dracula hanging out in Paris, for example.

When Sora 2 launched, it had an opt-out policy for copyright holders, meaning owners of intellectual property like Nintendo or Disney or any of the many, many massive corporations that own copyrighted characters and designs being directly copied and published on the Sora platform would need to contact OpenAI with instances of infringement to get them removed. Days after launch, and after hundreds of iterations of him grilling Pokemon or saying “I hope Nintendo doesn’t sue us!” flooded his platform, Altman backtracked that choice in a blog post, writing that he’d been listening to “feedback” from rightsholders. “First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls,” Altman wrote on Saturday.

But generating copyrighted characters was a huge part of what people wanted to do on the app, and now that they can’t (and the guardrails are apparently so strict, they’re making it hard to get even non-copyrighted content generated), users are pissed. People started noticing the changes to guardrails on Saturday, immediately after Altman’s blog post. “Did they just change the content policy on Sora 2?” someone asked on the OpenAI subreddit. “Seems like everything now is violating the content policy.” Almost 300 people have replied in that thread so far to complain or crash out about the change. “It's flagging 90% of my requests now. Epic fail.. time to move on,” someone replied.

“Moral policing and leftist ideology are destroying America's AI industry. I've cancelled my OpenAI PLUS subscription,” another replied, implying that copyright law is leftist.

A ton of the videos on Sora right now are of Martin Luther King, Jr. either giving brainrot versions of his iconic “I have a dream” speech and protesting OpenAI’s Sora guardrails. “I have a dream that Sora AI should stop being so strict,” AI MLK says in one video. Another popular prompt is for Bob Ross, who, in most of the videos featuring the deceased artist, is shown protesting getting a copyright violation on his own canvas. If you scroll Sora for even a few seconds today, you will see videos that are primarily about the content moderation on the platform. Immediately after the app launched, many popular videos featured famous characters; now some of the most popular videos are about how people are pissed that they can no longer make videos with those characters.

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OpenAI claimed it’s taken “measures” to block depictions of public features except those who consent to be used in the app. “Only you decide who can use your cameo, and you can revoke access at any time.” As Futurism noted earlier this week, Sora 2 has a dead celebrity problem, with “videos of Michael Jackson rapping, for instance, as well as Tupac Shakur hanging out in North Korea and John F. Kennedy rambling about Black Friday deals” all over the platform. Now, people are using public figures, in theory against the platform’s own terms of use, to protest the platform’s terms of use.

Oddly enough, a lot of memes for whining about the guardrails and content violations on Sora right now are using LEGO minifigs — the little LEGO people-shaped figures that are not only a huge part of the brand’s physical toy sets, but also a massively popular movie franchise owned by Universal Pictures — to voice their complaints.

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In June, Disney and Universal sued AI generator Midjourney, calling it a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" in the lawsuit, and Warner Bros. Discovery later joined the lawsuit. And in September, Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal sued Chinese image generator Hailuo AI for infringing on its copyright.

Disney, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures Sue Chinese AI Company

In recent months, studios have started to sue AI companies that allow users to generate images and videos of copyrighted characters. They characterize the alleged theft of their content as an existential threat to Hollywood.

^{Winston Cho (The Hollywood Reporter)}