By Brenda Goodman, CNN

(CNN) — Researchers recently tried an experiment: Gather people who had the same kind of lung cancer and put them on the same type of treatments to fire up their immune systems. The only difference was that half the group got their medications earlier in the day, before 3 p.m., and the other half got them later.

The surprise finding was that the time of day made a difference: Patients who got their first rounds of treatments in the morning had, on average, about five more months before their cancers grew and spread, a measure doctors call progression-free survival — and they lived almost a year longer than those who got their treatments later. They also had better odds of being alive at the end of the study, which has been running for more than two years.

Researchers have long studied the body’s clock, its circadian rhythm, which governs a host of biological functions including the release of hormones, when we feel hungry or tired, body temperature, blood sugar and blood pressure. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller clocks under the control of this master clock at work in cells and tissues.

More recently, scientists who study these body clocks have discovered that the immune system seems to be exquisitely sensitive to timing.

Evidence is mounting that timing may influence how protective vaccines are and the odds of an adverse events after heart surgery. One study found that valve replacement surgery was less risky for patients when it was performed in the afternoon, for example.

The new study, led by researchers in China, was the first to test something that other groups had documented in observational studies. Previous research that looked back at when melanoma and kidney cancer patients received their treatments had reached strikingly similar conclusions: Cancer patients appeared to get far more benefit from immunotherapy drugs when they get them earlier in the day.

Although many experts are excited about the new findings, they’re approaching with caution.

The results are “exceptionally compelling,” said Dr. Zach Buchwald, an oncologist at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute who was not involved in the research. “If this were a new drug, they would be hailed far and wide as having discovered something revolutionary.”

But there are questions about why the time of day would be so impactful when immunotherapies are active in the body for weeks after they’re given through IV infusion. The study authors say it’s a valid question and one they can’t answer yet.

“This is possibly the most controversial finding in immune-oncology,” Dr. Paolo Tarantino, a breast medical oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, posted on X. “The effect size is hard to believe. Though [randomized-controlled trials] are hard NOT to believe. We need a coordinated effort … to investigate this.”

The study’s authors want that to happen, too.

“It’s really dramatic that we se

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By Jacopo Prisco, CNN

(CNN) — Recreating a piece of the universe in a bottle might sound like science fiction, but it’s exactly what Linda Losurdo did.

Losurdo, a doctoral student in materials and plasma physics at the University of Sydney, used simple gases and electricity to recreate conditions usually found in the vicinity of stars and supernovas to produce a tiny amount of cosmic dust.

Cosmic dust is an essential component of the universe; it plays a role in star formation and acts as a catalyst for organic molecules that constitute the building blocks of life. The dust is abundant in interstellar space — the vast region between stars, and it is embedded in comets and asteroids. However, it’s difficult to study on Earth because, although particles and rocks from space constantly bombard our planet, most of that material burns up in the atmosphere. What little survives in the form of meteorites is often impossible to locate and collect.

Losurdo said that by making cosmic dust in the lab, she hopes to give scientists an extra tool to understand how life started on Earth.

“When we’re looking at big questions like the origins of life, we have to look at where the building blocks started from,” she said. “Where did all the carbon on Earth begin its life, and what type of journey did it have to go through in order to then be able to build into things like amino acids?”

Amino acids were among the earliest molecules to appear on Earth and are connected to most life processes, including the formation of proteins. But there’s a big question, Losurdo said, about whether amino acids were formed on Earth or if they had a different origin: space.

Producing a cosmic dust analogue can help researchers investigate this and other questions about the crucial chemistry that led to life on Earth, without having to rely exclusively on samples from space.

“Meteorites take so long to fall, and it’s quite hard to collect dust, let alone collect dust near a giant, dying old star,” added Losurdo, whose work was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society. “So we must have something to study. And even if it’s only a little bit, we get a lot more information out of it.”

Building up a database

To make the cosmic dust, Losurdo started with nitrogen, carbon dioxide and acetylene — a colorless, odorless gas made up of carbon and hydrogen. With coauthor David McKenzie, a professor of materials physics at the University of Sydney, she vacuumed the air out of a glass tube and introduced the gases. The pair then applied 10,000 volts of electricity to the gases for an hour, making a type of plasma, or electrically charged gas, called a “glow discharge.”

“You’re completing a circuit across the gas itself, so the gas is getting excited, electrons are flying off, creating an environment in which things want to bind and coalesce and aggregate,” Losurdo said. “And that’s a very natural process. It’s something that we know for certain happens around stars.”

The result was a few milligrams of “dusty nanoparticles,” she added. “They are a little bit challenging to collect and analyze, so what I do is actually get the dust to deposit itself on a silicon wafer,” she said. “Silicon is a fantastic material for so many reasons, and it allows us to only see the stuff on the wafer itself and not the silicon.”

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