Radically different
Nature Medicine, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04340-7
In this phase 1/2 trial, patients with Ewing sarcoma received trabectedin and low-dose irinotecan at concentrations known to inhibit the activity of the transcription factor EWS::FLI1, leading to encouraging clinical response rates.
Nature Medicine, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04331-8
Analyses of epidemiological, clinical and molecular data from a prospective cohort of 3,100 patients with esophageal carcinoma suggest intestinal metaplasia as a single precancer pathway preceding the disease.
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02265-5
Integrating spatial and single-cell data from 100 patients, the authors define conserved cellular communities and communications in glioblastoma, revealing distinct mesenchymal-like tumor subtypes and predominant neurogliomal synapses that shape tumor progression.
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02256-6
The authors characterized the spatial origin of Drosophila medulla neurons, completing their previous characterization of the temporal and Notch origins of these neurons and allowing them to correlate patterning of progenitors and neuronal type-specific features.
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Good morning. What do you eat in the last days of cooler weather, as spring is about to kick in? I want one more good soup or stew before moving on to greener, more seasonal pastures.
In an attempt to win European approval for the controversial medicine, Roche said Thursday it would run another trial of the Duchenne muscular dystrophy gene therapy Elevidys.
The Swiss company’s move comes after European regulators last year gave a negative review to the therapy, saying it had failed to demonstrate long-term benefits for patients with the degenerative muscle condition. Roche has rights to the therapy outside the U.S., where it is marketed by its developer, Sarepta Therapeutics.
Roche said the Phase 3 trial will generate the type of evidence that could lead to a resubmission with European officials and to applications with regulatory agencies in other parts of the world. The study will evaluate the safety and efficacy of Elevidys versus placebo over 72 weeks in roughly 100 boys at the early stages of the disease.
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Most of the recent conversations about the Food and Drug Administration have centered around the rejection of drugs for rare diseases that might have been approved had regulatory flexibility been applied.
This week, the FDA flexed its regulatory authority to approve the first medicine to treat focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, or FSGS, a rare disease in which scar tissue builds up in the filtering units of the kidneys, eventually leading to organ dysfunction and failure.
WASHINGTON — Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a delicate task ahead of him as he heads to Capitol Hill to testify about the fiscal 2027 budget request: Stick to the White House’s script on Make America Healthy Again “wins” while avoiding politically divisive topics like vaccines.
How he navigates lawmakers’ questions over at least seven hearings will test whether the secretary can stay on message before he embarks on a midterms tour to shore up support for the MAHA movement and the White House’s agenda.
Thursday’s hearings are Kennedy’s first since a heated Senate health committee appearance in September, where tempers rose as Kennedy defended his firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez.
Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell.
The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-handedly purchased something like 80% of all contracted carbon removal. If you’re looking for someone to pay you to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Microsoft is probably who you’re after.
The company has said that it is not permanently ending its carbon removal purchases (though it didn’t directly answer further questions about this apparent pause). But with this flurry of news, there’s a lot of fear in the industry—so, it’s worth talking about the state of carbon removal, and where Big Tech companies fit in.
Carbon removal aims to reliably pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and permanently store it. There’s a wide range of technologies in this space, including direct air capture (DAC) plants, which usually use some kind of sorbent or solvent to pull carbon dioxide from the air. Another important method is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), in which biomass like trees or waste-derived biofuels are burned for energy, and scrubbing equipment captures the greenhouse gases.
There was a huge boom of interest in carbon removal technologies in the first half of this decade. One UN climate report in 2022 found that nations may need to remove up to 11 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year by 2050 to keep warming to 2 °C above preindustrial levels.
One nagging problem is that the economics here have always been tricky. There’s a major potential public good to pulling carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. The question is, Who will pay for it?
So far, the answer has been Microsoft. The company is by far the largest buyer of carbon removal contracts, and it’s the only purchaser that has made megatonne-scale purchases, says Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, a public-benefit corporation that analyzes the carbon removal sector. “Microsoft has had a huge importance, especially for getting large-scale projects off the ground and showing there is demand for large deals,” Höglund said via email.
Microsoft has pledged to become carbon-negative by 2030 and to remove the equivalent of its historic emissions by 2050. Progress on actually cutting emissions has been tough to achieve though—in the company’s latest Environmental Sustainability Report, published in June 2025, it announced emissions had risen by 23.4% since 2020.
On April 10, Heatmap News reported that Microsoft staff had told suppliers and partners that it was pausing future purchases of carbon removal, though it wasn’t clear whether the company would increase support for existing projects, or when purchases might resume. Bloomberg reported a similar story the next day. In one instance, Microsoft employees said that the decision was related to financial considerations, one source told Bloomberg.
In a statement in response to written questions, Microsoft said that it was not permanently closing its carbon removal program. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals. Any adjustments we make are part of our disciplined approach—not a change in ambition,” Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa said in the statement.
Whatever, exactly, is happening behind the scenes, many in the industry are nervous, says Wil Burns, Co-Director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. People viewed the company as the foundational supporter of carbon removal, he adds.
“This pause—whether it’s short term or whatever it is—the way it’s been rolled out is extremely irresponsible,” Burns says. The vast majority of firms looking to get carbon removal contracts are probably seeking Microsoft deals. So, while Microsoft has every right to change its plans, the company needs to be open with the industry now, he adds.
“I don’t think you can hold yourself out as the paragon of fostering carbon removal and then treat a nascent industry that disrespectfully,” Burns says.
Carbon removal companies were already in turmoil in the US, particularly because of recent policy shifts: Funding has been cut back, and recent changes at the Environmental Protection Agency were aimed at the government’s ability to target carbon pollution.
Now, if the largest corporate backer is shifting plans or taking a significant pause, things could get rocky.
Depending on the extent of this pause, the industry may need to survive on smaller purchases and hope for support from governments and philanthropy, Höglund says. But for carbon removal to truly scale, we need policymakers to create mandates so that emitters are responsible for either storing the carbon dioxide they produce or paying for it, Burns says.
“Maybe the upside of this is Microsoft has sent a wake-up call, that you just can’t rely on the kindness of strangers to make carbon removal scale.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so—we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to Indigenous burning practices to prevent wildfires. Biologists are realizing that flower-dotted meadows were ancient food-production landscapes that need harvesting or they’ll disappear. And the once endangered peregrine falcon now thrives in part thanks to nesting sites on skyscrapers and abundant urban prey: rats.
For decades (two, but that counts), I’ve been writing about how humans aren’t metaphysically different from any other species on Earth. Conservation can’t only be about fencing people out of protected areas. A lot of the time the real trick is not to withdraw from “nature” but to get better at being part of it.
Still, I recognize that living in harmony with nature sounds like a mushy idea. I was therefore stoked to participate in a meeting in Oxford, UK, that sought to build more precise tools to assess human-nonhuman relationships. Scientists have invented lots of measurements of environmental destruction, from parts per million of carbon dioxide to extinction rates to “planetary boundaries.” These have their uses, but they engage people mostly through dread. Why not invent metrics, we thought, that would engage people’s hopes and dreams?
It was harder than I expected. How do you quantify how good people in any given nation are at living with other Earthlings? Some of the metrics the group proposed seemed to me to be too similar to the older, more adversarial approach. Why tally the agricultural land use per person, for example? Environmentalists have typically seen farms as the opposite of nature, but they’re also potential sites for both edible and inedible biodiversity. Some of us were keen on satellite imagery to calculate things like how close people live to green space. But without local information, you can’t prove that people can actually access that space.
Eventually the 20 or so scientists, authors, and philosophers who met in Oxford settled on three basic questions. First, is nature thriving and accessible to people? We wanted to know if humans could engage with the world around them. Second, is nature being used with care? (Of course, “care” could mean lots of things. Is it just keeping harvests under maximum sustainable yield? Or does it require a completely circular economy?) And third, is nature safeguarded? Again, not easy to assess. But if we could roughly measure each of these three things, the numbers could combine into an overall score for the quality of a human-nature relationship.
We published our ideas in Nature last year. Though they weren’t perfect, green-space remote sensing and agricultural footprint calculations made the cut. Since then, a team in the United Nations Human Development Office has continued that work, planning to debut a Nature Relationship Index (NRI) later this year alongside the 2026 Human Development Report. Everyone loves a ranked list; we hope countries will want to score well and will compete to rise to the top.
Pedro Conceição, lead author of the Human Development Report, tells me that he wants the new index to shift how countries see their environmental programs. (He wouldn’t give me spoilers as to the final metrics, but he did tell me that nothing from our Nature paper made it in.) The NRI, Conceição says, will be critical for “challenging this idea that humans are inherent destroyers of nature and that nature is pristine.” Narratives around constraints, limits, and boundaries are polarizing instead of energizing, he says. So the NRI isn’t about how badly we are failing. It speaks to aspirations for a green, abundant world. As we do better, the number goes up—and there is no limit.
Emma Marris is the author of Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World.