Again not that much in the way of science news. The online discourse is being completely dominated by the fallout from the elections in the US.

• The most controversial story making the rounds this months is the one about a scientist who treated her own breast cancer by injecting lab-grown viruses into the tumor. The case itself isn’t particularly novel as the treatment known as oncolytic virotherapy is already being tested elsewhere. It involves using viruses to attack cancerous cells and provoke the immune system to fight them. In this case, the scientist in question, Beata Halassy, used two viruses, a measles virus and a vesicular stomatitis virus. What provoked controversy is that this treatment has obviously not been approved by any government regulator and so Halassy took matters into her own hands. As far as my concerned, it’s her body and her choice to make so there’s no question about this being ethical or not. In any case, it’s been working so far as this happened four years ago and the results are only being published now.
• There’s an ever growing body of evidence that the new class of weight-loss drugs, GLP-1 receptor agonists, offer an entire host of health benefits beyond just weight loss. I’m not arguing to the contrary of course but it’s also worth paying attention to the possible side effects and other consequences of long-term use. This new paper claims the use of these drugs also lead to substantial loss of muscle tissue. It hasn’t established that the loss is greater than what would be expected from the weight loss itself but it’s still a matter of some concern.
• Finally things are moving in the world of physics with regards to what dark energy actually is. I won’t go into the whole mess of why the concept of dark energy is needed to explain why the universe looks as it does as that is a whole other story. What’s new here is that we now have new data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). The instrument found that the density of dark energy seems to increase over time. This increase is consistent with formation of new black holes as massive stars die and is being interpretated as evidence in favor of the view that there is a fundamental coupling between dark energy and black holes. All this is far above my level of comprehension and as far as I can tell, this is only one of several other possible changes to how dark energy is being viewed. Still, it does seem that we must brace ourselves for some major revisions on what the current consensus in cosmology is.