Tomorrow's world
Every aspect of our daily lives will be transformed by technology, from sensors and robotics to nanotechnology — while a changing climate and emerging microbial threats reshape the risks we face.
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Tomorrow's world posts, most recent first.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
China's clean-heating pilots cut heating-season PM2.5 most in the pollution tails
An augmented synthetic control evaluation of 88 clean-heating pilot cities in northern China found heating-season PM2.5 fell by 3.01 \u00b5g/m\u00b3 on average but by 5.96 \u00b5g/m\u00b3 at the 99th percentile, with high-pollution days contributing almost half the modelled mortality difference.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Wildfire smoke accounted for 1.9% of deaths across ten countries and territories
A causal analysis of 47.8 million deaths in 1366 communities across ten countries and territories attributed 906 869 deaths to landscape fire PM2·5, with instrumental-variable estimates a median 56% higher than conventional association estimates.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Greenspace tracks lower pollution-related respiratory mortality, mainly via mediation
A systematic review of 14 good-quality cohort studies, mostly European, found residential greenspace associated with lower air-pollution-related respiratory mortality and better lung function, with the association appearing more consistently in mediation than in moderation analyses.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Québec's first universal nirsevimab season cut infant RSV hospitalisations by two-thirds
A province-wide evaluation of Québec's first universal nirsevimab campaign found RSV-associated hospitalisations in infants aged 0-5 months fell 66% (95% CI 58-71) in 2024-25, with acute bronchiolitis emergency visits down 35%.
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Item new peer-reviewed
An oral KRAS G12D inhibitor shrank tumours in a third of treated pancreatic cancers
In a phase 1 trial of 74 heavily pretreated patients with KRAS G12D-mutant advanced solid tumours, the oral inhibitor GFH375 produced confirmed responses in 35.1% of pancreatic cancers and 35.7% of non-small cell lung cancers, with median overall survival of 9.9 and 13.4 months respectively.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Wildfire PM2.5 exposure is linked to shorter survival in older US lung cancer patients
A SEER-Medicare cohort of 414,016 patients aged 65 or older with lung cancer linked residential zip-code estimates of wildfire-related and non-wildfire PM2.5 from 2008 to 2019 to all-cause mortality, separating the two sources of fine particulate exposure.
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Item new preprint
PCV20 lowered pneumococcal pneumonia admissions by a fifth in US adults aged 65 and over
In 34,009 US Veterans Affairs pneumonia hospitalisations with respiratory cultures taken between 2023 and 2025, the 20-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine was associated with 20.4% lower odds of culture-confirmed pneumococcal pneumonia among adults aged 65 and over.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Heat exposure raises COPD mortality by 26% and morbidity by 5% across 36 studies
A meta-analysis of 36 observational studies found heat exposure associated with a pooled risk ratio of 1.15 for COPD outcomes overall, 1.26 for mortality and 1.05 for morbidity, with heatwave and threshold definitions giving larger estimates than continuous temperature measures.
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Item new preprint
Canada's 2025/26 flu vaccine cut A(H3N2) subclade K illness by about a third
In Canada's sentinel outpatient network for 2025/26, vaccine effectiveness was 38% against A(H3N2) overall and 33% against the antigenically mismatched subclade K, 28% against A(H1N1)pdm09 and 55% against B/Victoria.
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Item new preprint
Long-run mortality from tropical cyclones concentrates in socially vulnerable counties
Among high-vulnerability counties in Texas, tropical cyclone exposure was associated with elevated all-cause mortality persisting long after landfall, whereas the effect in lower-vulnerability counties was not statistically significant.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Polygenic score for osteoporosis shows modest discrimination gain in Japanese adults
A Japanese-ancestry polygenic score for ultrasound-defined osteoporosis added little to discrimination beyond age and sex, but quintile stratification gave incidence rate ratios of 1.42 in the lowest and 0.70 in the highest quintile over a mean 3.5 years of follow-up.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Viral coinfections were not linked to severe COVID-19 in systematically tested children
Among 938 Canadian children hospitalised with COVID-19 at centres testing all acute respiratory admissions, the 18.6% with at least one other respiratory virus had no higher odds of severe disease (aOR 0.94, 95% CI 0.76–1.15).
