Science.

By comparison, people who smoked but didn't carry the mutation were four times likelier to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers, so the mutation alone carried a higher risk of the disease.

Among people in the study who smoked and carried the mutation, T790M increased their cancer risk 11-fold compared with other smokers.

This is a "very important finding," said Chris Amos, a genetic epidemiologist at the Baylor College of Medicine who wasn't involved in the study. "The prevalence of the T790M variant and its impact on lung cancer risk has previously been poorly understood."

The study included over 3 million people of European ancestry, and the mutation showed up in 1 out of every 15,850 people. Given that it's relatively rare, it likely doesn't account for a large percentage of overall lung cancer cases, Dr. Stephen Chanock, director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, who wasn't involved in the study.

However, Amos argued that it is important to test whether a patient has this mutation when they have a family history of lung cancer in nonsmokers, or when their relatives are known to have the mutation. Having the T790M mutation not only influences a person's risk of lung cancer, but also affects treatment decisions for those who already have cancer, he said.

Combining genetic, geographic and historical data

For the study, researchers analyzed DNA and health data from over 3.3 million people who used 23andMe's at-home genetic testing kits and who gave consent for their personal data to be used in research.

Two of the largest public genetic databases to date — called All of Us and the UK Biobank — contained just 19 and two individuals with the T790M mutation, respectively. But the 23andMe cohort included 641 individuals with the mutation, giving the researchers enough data to run reliable statistical analyses.

On average, people who had the mutation had about 25 times the odds of developing lung cancer compared with people who didn't have the mutation. That statistic includes both smokers and nonsmokers. T790M was not linked to any other type of cancer or noncancerous lung condition.

When the researchers looked at where the study participants were born, they found that the T790M mutation was much more common among those born in the Southeast, especially in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. In those three states, the mutation showed up in 1 out of every 2,078 people who'd contributed data to 23andMe.

By referring to historical records, the researchers pieced together when and how the mutation likely spread. They think settlers from the British Isles first brought it to the U.S. in the early 1700s. Later, families with the mutation moved to southern Appalachia, where they were relatively isolated —‬ so the variant got passed down again and again within that area and became unusually common there.

The concentration of people with the T790M mutation in the Southeast‬ may help to explain why this region of the U.S. experiences elevated lung cancer rates, Chanock said. Statistics suggest that people in the region also have higher smoking rates than the U.S. average: approximately 20% of adults in Appalachia report smoking, compared to 16% of adults elsewhere in the U.S. So it's possible that those two factors interact.

Ongoing and future studies

Certain populations with a history of smoking are recommended to get screened annually for lung cancer using low-dose CT scans. A key question, Chanock said, is when and how often people with the T790M mutation should be screened.

The study found that people with T790M developed lung cancer about five years earlier than people without the mutation, on average. That finding highlights the "need to begin screen[ing] at an earlier age and irrespective of smoking status," Amos said.

A clinical trial is now underway to evaluate CT-based lung cancer screening in people with the mutation. The trial will also determine whether lung cancer risk increases with age in this population.

The researchers recommended that future studies unpack why the T790M mutation increases the risk of lung cancer, as well as investigate environmental risk factors that might interact with this genetic risk. Exposure to particulate-matter pollution in the air is one key factor to explore, they suggested. Future work could also look for other genetic mutations that might contribute to the inherited risk of lung cancer.

"Time will tell" whether additional lung-cancer-linked mutations will be identified, Chanock said. But personally, he fully expects scientists to find other very rare mutations that contribute to the risk.

"It is likely there are other variants of EGFR that increase lung cancer risk, but these may be even rarer than the one studied in this publication," Amos said. Finding these variants is important because it could enable people who carry them to proactively manage their risk for developing lung cancer, he said.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

'> Scientists identify rare genetic mutation that dramatically raises risk of lung cancer in nonsmokers most planets form. However, the alien world was not directly visible at the time.

In the new study, published Sept. 16 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers combined observations from three telescopes — the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also in Chile — to take a closer look at the gap in the protoplanetary disk. Not only was the team able to directly image Elias 2-24 b and confirm its existence, but the researchers also dated it, revealing that the alien world is likely less than 1 million years old.

"What makes Elias 2-24 b so remarkable is its age," study first author Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral student with the Institute of Astrophysical Studies (IEA) at Diego Portales University in Chile, said in a statement. "This is the youngest planet detected so far, and because it is still actively accreting material from its surroundings, we're able to observe a stage of planet formation that is rarely seen directly."

The newly confirmed exoplanet is roughly 5,000 times younger than Earth or around 0.008% the age of the oldest known exoplanet, PSR B1620-26 b or "Methuselah," which formed around 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. Compared to the average human lifespan, this makes Elias 2-2 b roughly equivalent to a two- or three-day-old baby.

Record setter

This is not the first time that astronomers have spotted baby exoplanets. But until recently, there has been an age limit on when they become visible to us.

For a long time, the youngest-known exoplanets, which included several worlds orbiting the star PDS 70, were around 5 million years old. This is because telescopes were not powerful enough to spot exoplanets until they had cleared a large enough gap in their star's protoplanetary disks. But advances in telescope design and data analysis have helped researchers push past this age limit: For example, in 2024, astronomers discovered TIDYE-1b, which is believed to be around 3 million years old; and in 2025, scientists detected AB Aurigae b, which could be as young as 2 million years old.

Elias 2-24 b is at least twice as young as any known exoplanet, which is a significant step forward. This provides scientists with a rare opportunity to fill in the current knowledge gaps surrounding the initial stages of planet formation.

"Our planet-formation models already struggled to explain the previous record holders for the youngest known planet," Lucas Cieza, an IEA astronomer who led the 2017 study that first spotted the gap left by Elias 2-24 b, said in a second NASA statement. "Elias 2-24 b shows us that even our best planet-formation models are still missing some important processes."

Mind the gaps

A majority of the more than 6,000 exoplanets discovered so far have been spotted via the transit method, where a distant world passes between its home star and Earth, causing a temporary dip in the star's brightness. However, this doesn't work if the alien worlds lurk within a protoplanetary disk, because the swirling debris cloud permanently dims the star's light when viewed side-on. This has created a bias toward finding older exoplanets.

The only way to spot a juvenile exoplanet is if a star's protoplanetary disk is perpendicular to Earth, so that we are looking at it from the top down or bottom up and can clearly see any gaps within it. But this is much harder because the light from the star often outshines the disks, meaning we are "mostly blind to these baby planets right now," Cieza said.

However, this could change thanks to NASA's soon-to-be-operational Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which launched into space Aug. 30 and is currently calibrating its instruments before beginning its potentially decades-long mission to observe the cosmos. The space telescope is equipped with a state-of-the-art starshade, or coronagraph, which blocks out the light from distant stars, making it easier to study their surroundings. Experts predict that Roman could spot up to 100,000 new exoplanets during its mission and will have less of a bias toward older planets, meaning we should find many more planetary infants.

"This is just the beginning of a new era of discovery," Cieza said. "Roman will take planet hunting to the next level."

'> This million-year-old 'baby planet' is the youngest world scientists have ever discovered

Crucially, mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge had been working on the Navier-Stokes problem for roughly a year when they alleged that OpenAI found out about their work and raced to scoop them, claiming that an OpenAI representative threatened them not to go public.

It is in the bow wave of this news that the Heidelberg Laureate Forum panelists debated the controversy surrounding what the rise of AI means for the future of their discipline. Addressing the OpenAI announcement head-on from the outset was Michael Harris, a professor of mathematics at Columbia University.

"There's no legal obstacle to the kind of predatory behavior that we've seen particularly over the last month, in the same way there was no legal obstacle in the 19th century to … the violent acquisition of territory by colonial powers," he said.

Harris broke the OpenAI Navier-Stokes story on his Substack newsletter Silicon Reckoner, largely to reveal what he views as an important controversy relating to how OpenAI may have used Buckmaster and Alpöge's research.

Harris, who describes the big tech companies developing AI as "gangsters," would like to see a regulatory framework implemented to protect mathematics and mathematicians from similar actions in future. In the meantime, "those who act in a way that's destructive of the community should not be considered members of good standing," he suggested.

Though this sentiment was shared by fellow panellist Geordie Williamson of the University of Sydney, 2026 Fields Medalist Jacob Tsimerman, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto who in July joined OpenAI as an AI safety researcher, was keen to highlight the magnitude of the achievement by the company's internal AI model.

"I do think the top line is getting buried a little bit," he said. "AI has solved a Millennium [Prize] Problem, and I don't think it's had the kind of effect of at least informing people of AI's capabilities that it's meant to have had."

Tsimerman is highly focused on AI safety at OpenAI and his newly formed independent nonprofit, the Mathematical AI Safety Institute. He believes OpenAI's Navier-Stokes announcement represents a watershed moment in how mathematics is conducted, and by whom.

"If we put our value in human beings doing research in mathematics at the frontier level, developing expertise and slowly making progress, then I think that's coming to an end," he said during a separate news conference held at the forum. "If we put our value in new mathematics being created, and it both serving society and giving mathematicians something to study, then that seems like a golden age."

Peter Scholze, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany and a 2018 Fields Medalist, had a completely different perspective. Dismissing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes news as "some kind of PR," he stated that the point of the Millennium Prize Problems is not just to solve one math problem but to bring a fresh perspective to a host of related open questions in a way that builds human understanding ‪—‬ something that a long, machine-produced proof is unlikely to deliver.

Moreover, Scholze — who confessed to never having prompted a large language model and proudly showed off his "dumb phone" to the audience — said AI largely just accelerates mathematical progress, which is in his opinion of little value when it is already impossible to acquire a genuine understanding of all the progress that has been made.

So where does all of this leave mathematics and mathematicians? A number of initiatives ‪—‬ such as Proofs and Prompts, Mathematical Discourse, and the Association for Human Mathematics ‪—‬ aim to preserve a kernel of human mathematics so the field can continue to be a home for human culture and understanding.

But for all the panelists, the speed of change and advancement in AI means they cannot offer clear predictions of the impacts of these initiatives or what the field might look like in the future.

"To be honest, whenever anyone talks about 10 years from now, or even five years from now … it just seems unfathomably far away," Tsimerman said. "The world in two years is going to look so incredibly different than it does now."

'> 'Predatory behavior': Elite mathematicians clash over OpenAI's 'solution' to million-dollar math problem

The newly identified species, Leopardus tilcayo, is a type of tiger cat ‪—‬ a small, spotted wild cat ‪—‬ that lives in the Yungas cloud forest region of Bolivia. The analysis also revealed a subspecies of another tiger cat species, named Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, which lives in Peru.

Previously thought to be a northern tiger cat (Leopardus tigrinus), L. tilcayo split off from other Leopardus species 1.4 million years ago, the study found. This makes it the first novel living cat species to be discovered in over a century, since the Uruguayan pampas cat (Leopardus fasciatus) was described in 1923. The name L. tilcayo refers to what locals call the cat, "tilcayo."

Descriptions of L. tilcayo are based on only two live individuals in Bolivia: one specimen caught and photographed in the wild, and another living in captivity. These small cats weigh 3 to 4 pounds (1.5 to 2 kilograms) and reach up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) without their tail, with the tail adding about 10 inches (25 cm). The male L. tilcayo in captivity, nicknamed Tigrino, is the species' "type specimen" — an individual that acts as the reference for the whole species.

"It's smaller than a house cat," Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a biologist and co-author of the new study, told Live Science. Nogales-Ascarrunz works with Senda Verde, a refuge in Bolivia for trafficked wildlife where Tigrino lives. Tigrino arrived about 10 years ago, Nogales-Ascarrunz said. "It didn't look like the other [cats]," Nogales-Ascarrunz said, "but we didn't expect a new species itself."

"Highly contentious" cat family tree

L. tilcayo and L. tigrinus antisuyo form part of a long-contested tiger cat family tree that the new genetic analysis has resolved.

The tiger cat was first described in 1775 in French Guiana. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, European naturalists came across tiger cats in various South American countries and assigned them different species names.

In the 20th century, taxonomists began lumping all tiger cats together into one species, L. tigrinus. Tiger cat species look very similar; they are distinguishable only by genetic analysis or small differences in markings.

Over the past decade, modern genomic techniques have enabled scientists to differentiate and validate tiger cat species. In 2013, scientists split tiger cats into two species, with L. tigrinus classified as the northern tiger cat and Leopardus guttulus as the southern tiger cat. The eastern tiger cat (Leopardus emiliae) was proposed as a separate species in 2017, and the clouded tiger cat (Leopardus pardinoides) split off in 2024.

Yet there were limited genetic data on L. tigrinus. The tiger cat's family tree has been "highly contentious and poorly understood," Fabio Oliveira do Nascimento, taxonomist at the Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil who was not involved with the new study, told Live Science.

In the new study, published Thursday (Sept. 17) in the journal Current Biology, researchers sequenced and analyzed the complete genomes of 38 cat samples from South and Central America, including eight from museum specimens. They examined teeth, bones, muscle tissue, skin and fur from cats across Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Suriname, Guyana and Venezuela.

By comparing these genomes, the researchers were able to map the history of the lineage and when the species diverged. They concluded that the group referred to collectively as tiger cats actually comprises five distinct species, verifying four that had previously been proposed — L. guttulus, L. emiliae, L. pardinoides and L. tigrinus — and naming one new species, L. tilcayo. The team also identified one new subspecies of L. tigrinus, called L. tigrinus antisuyo.

The findings clarify the long-debated tiger cat family tree, Nascimento said. "Our understanding of the natural history, evolution and taxonomy of the group has begun to become clearer, resolving long-standing questions while raising new ones," Nascimento noted.

Because L. tilcayo is a new species, scientists don't know much about its behavior, diet or range, Nogales-Ascarrunz said. The next steps are to get more accurate numbers of their populations and estimates of their ranges.

The IUCN Red List currently classifies the northern tiger cat and southern tiger cat as vulnerable species with decreasing populations, but these risk categories could now change.

"Species that are currently considered 'vulnerable' under the single label of 'northern tiger cat' may increase to 'endangered' when assessed on their own," Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and co-author of the new study, told Live Science. Accurate population numbers can help governments and environmental agencies implement targeted conservation strategies.

Tiger cats are threatened by deforestation, wildlife trafficking and diseases transmitted by domestic dogs. "This discovery is definitely expected to increase conservation attention — or, we hope so," Lescroart said.

Think you know about lions and tigers? Test your smarts with our big cat quiz!

'> Scientists name a new cat species for the first time in over a century Medusa from Greek mythology.

"The 'incompatible' images in this case could symbolize the victory of the forces of light over the forces of darkness," Toropov said.

The tradition of serpentine pendants likely came to Russia from the Byzantine Empire. Because the piece of jewelry is made from copper and not more valuable silver or gold, it likely belonged to a member of the middle class living on the medieval estate at Staraya Russa, Toropov said.

The pendant's combination of a Christian saint and a pagan mythological figure shows that Russia had a complicated religious landscape a millennium ago, according to the statement. Christianity had taken hold in the region, but some people clearly preserved their pagan traditions and symbols.

'> 1,000-year-old 'snake amulet' featuring a Christian saint and 'Medusa' discovered in Russia