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On Tuesday, storms dumped up to 16in of rain in some rural areas of the state, leading to the dispatch of emergency crews to make at least two dozen rescues across the region. Officials shut down parts of a highway near Uvalde, 80 miles west of San Antonio.

“This is called a typical mid-summer tropical weather pattern that happens in Texas,” Monte Oaks, a meteorologist with the weather service, told the Associated Press.

“About once every five years, we’ll get socked in with a daily recurrence of heavy rain chances that’s generally produced by a stagnant kind of a pattern with a low-pressure center that’s just not moving very fast.”

A flash flood warning is in place in the San Antonio area with torrential downpours expected through the afternoon. Most areas of the metro area are forecast to get between 2 and 4in of rain.

Areas of central Texas also remained at risk of excessive rainfall, including the Hill Country and areas such as Kerrville were at a moderate risk of flash flooding. Two years ago, an area bordering the Guadalupe River experienced flash flooding that killed at least 139 people.

The National Weather Service warned that storms overnight into Wednesday could dump more than a foot of additional rain to some places, creating potentially catastrophic impacts from flash flooding in areas west of San Antonio.

More rain is expected over the next 24 hours, with parts of the region upgraded to a rare level 4 “high” risk of excessive rainfall, indicating that flash flooding is likely. Rainfall totals between 3 and 7in are expected, with isolated higher totals of up to 15in possible.

“Intense rain rates and compounding effects from multiple rounds of storms will result in a dangerous flash flooding threat through Thursday,” the National Weather Service said.

Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, issued a disaster declaration for 59 Texas counties as severe storms continue to threaten the area.

In a statement on X, Abbott posted a weather map that showed 20in of rain could fall in some areas: “Texans, this is JUST ONE of the weather scenarios I have been referring to in my disaster declaration. Note the amount of rain and the early morning hour it is being predicted. We have deployed rescue teams, Blackhawk helicopters & state personnel to respond to this danger.”

He also advised Texans to “heed weather warnings and local advisories”. %!s()

They hope the declaration will put pressure on the Labour government to rethink drug policies and, specifically, lead to a legal drug-consumption facility being set up in the city.

The move, which has been backed by Bristol Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors, has been rejected by Tory members, who argue it is “ideologically framed”. Nationally, the Greens advocate legalising and regulating drugs.

The Bristol Green councillor Cara Lavan, who lost her partner, Jake Coe, 37, to drug overdose poisoning, said it felt like an important moment. “I hope other local authorities will take note and follow suit to create a domino effect that tells the government we need change,” she said.

Lavan said Coe had been in recovery for five years but when he relapsed was able to buy heroin and crack within half an hour, despite living in a new place where he did not know dealers. “The prohibition didn’t stop him getting hold of it.”

The couple had a baby and he was about to qualify as an arts psychotherapist. Lavan said: “We were unable to get the help we needed because the drugs he was using were illicit and there was the constant threat he would be arrested and criminalised. He desperately wanted to be drug free, but he just wasn’t able to cope and he couldn’t get support.

“What we need is sensible, evidence-led drug policies. There’s overwhelming evidence that the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 has failed. Drug treatment agencies, police forces, health professionals across the country know that our drug policies actively work against solving many of the problems that we have.”

The declaration was agreed at a full council meeting. The motion setting it out noted that deaths from drug poisoning were at an all-time high and in Bristol almost twice the national rate. It stated that the drug market was rapidly evolving, with a growing supply of dangerous super-strength synthetic opioids.

Bristol and other cities have taken a harm-reduction approach for some time, but Lavan said she felt the formal declaration was an important step forward.

Bristol Green councillors want the city to be allowed to open a drug-consumption facility, as has happened in Glasgow. Lavan said: “It’s not encouraging people to use drugs, but it’s about making sure that if they are going to use drugs, they’re not being stigmatised and criminalised.”

Instead of giving a closing speech at the full council meeting, Lavan called for a minute’s silence in memory of people suffering from addiction, those who have died from overdoses and the families left behind.

The Green party’s drugs policy was attacked by Labour during the Gorton and Denton byelection campaign, with a spokesperson calling it “extreme and dangerous”.

Speaking at the full council meeting, the Bristol Labour councillor Kaz Self said that while her party backed the declaration, there was some concern it was the “thin end of the wedge”.

Outside the meeting, a Green councillor, Abdul Malik, said that, as a mosque leader, his faith was clear that intoxicants were harmful and should be avoided. He said: “Nothing in this motion changes that. This is not about encouraging drug use or normalising addiction. It is about recognising a simple truth: after 55 years, we cannot honestly say prohibition on its own has solved this problem and we have a responsibility to look at what the evidence tells us does work.

“If this motion helps one more person into treatment, prevents one more overdose, reduces crime on our streets and spares one more family from unimaginable loss, then it is worth doing.” %!s()

The produce price index posted a seasonally adjusted 0.3% decline for the month, compared with the Dow Jones consensus estimate for the final demand cost measure to be unchanged. On an annual basis, the index indicated a 5.5% inflation rate. The May reading was revised sharply lower, from an initially reported increase of 1.1% to 0.6%.

Excluding food and energy, the core PPI rose 0.2%, against the outlook for a 0.3% increase. The core PPI less trade services rose 0.1% and was up 5.1% from a year ago.

As with consumer prices, the index benefited from easing energy costs, particularly as oil fell due to the brief pause in tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Goods prices posted a 1.4% monthly decline, the biggest drop since July 2022 as energy slumped 6.4% and final demand food prices were off 0.6%.

Within the goods category, gasoline tumbled 12%, accounting for about two-thirds of the monthly decrease.

People shop for groceries at a store in Arlington, Virginia, the United States, on June 10, 2026.

Li Rui | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images

At the same time, services prices rose 0.2%, boosted by a 0.4% increase in trade services.

The release comes the day after the BLS reported that the consumer price index, a broad measure of inflation at the cash register, posted an unexpectedly sharp decline of 0.4% in June, bringing the annual inflation rate down to 3.5%. That was the biggest monthly drop since April 2020, just after the Covid pandemic declaration.

Core consumer inflation slipped to 2.6% after prices were unchanged for the month.

While the inflation measures are still well above the Federal Reserve's 2% goal, they do represent progress in the central bank's five-year battle to get back to target.

"The Fed's war with inflation isn't over by any means," said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at Fwdbonds, "... but there is good news from the front and the odds of Fed rate hikes should continue to recede as inflation at the factory level is trending lower, and producers will not be passing on their higher costs to the consumer level as much as we previously thought."

Stocks were higher Wednesday morning, though traders scaled back expectations for interest rate hikes, with September now a 50-50 bet, according to the CME Group's FedWatch gauge of futures pricing.

The consumer and producer price indexes both feed heavily into the calculation of the Fed's preferred inflation gauge. Policymakers most closely follow the personal consumption expenditures price index, due to be released later this month from the Commerce Department. For May, the PCE index indicated headline inflation of 4.1% and core at 3.4%, both likely to come down following this week's releases.

Markets still expect the Fed to approve an interest rate hike this year, as soon as September. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh on Tuesday told House lawmakers that the June decline in prices did not represent a "mission accomplished" moment for inflation. %!s()

The three Russians, Alexander Volosovik, Kirill Zatolokin, and Yulia Pankova, who reside in St. Petersburg, are accused of owning and running two web hosts, Media Land and ML.Cloud, which allegedly provided criminals and state-backed hackers with web hosting and infrastructure support for carrying out cyberattacks.

The Russians were first charged in 2024, but the indictment was unsealed this week. The U.S. Treasury previously sanctioned Media Land and ML.Cloud for allowing ransomware gangs, including LockBit, BlackSuit, and Play, to use their infrastructure. Economic sanctions bar Americans and U.S. businesses from transacting with the Russians or their companies.

Prosecutors said that hackers used the web hosts to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks designed to knock websites and services offline, launch phishing attacks, and carry out cyberattacks on critical infrastructure in the United States.

Hackers used the companies to launch attacks on dozens of U.S. businesses across more than 20 states, netting some $62 million in proceeds from cybercrime.

According to the Justice Department, by offering their services as a “bulletproof” web host, the companies deliberately aimed to shield their customers from law enforcement demands and takedowns.

The web host suspects are unlikely to be captured, given that the hackers are located in Russia and extraditions to the U.S. are rare. Russia is known to shield its citizens from overseas extradition requests, but law enforcement have previously arrested high-value suspects when they travel to countries with diplomatic agreements with the United States.

In a statement, U.S. Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said the actions of the web hosts “put the American public at risk,” adding: “We will continue to dismantle these networks and protect our critical infrastructure from cybercriminals at home and abroad.”

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Zack Whittaker is the security editor at TechCrunch. He also authors the weekly cybersecurity newsletter, this week in security.

He can be reached via encrypted message at zackwhittaker.1337 on Signal. You can also contact him by email, or to verify outreach, at [email protected].

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The findings of this study, conducted by a research team led by professor Hyung Joon Cha of the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology), together with Ph.D. candidate Hyeokjun Lee of the Department of Chemical Engineering, were published in Biomaterials.

Borrowing from mussel adhesion

Pancreatic cancer is a notoriously difficult-to-treat disease because it is located deep within the body, making it hard to detect in its early stages, and it spreads rapidly to surrounding organs. While intravenous chemotherapy is the most widely used treatment, gemcitabine—a leading drug in this class—breaks down rapidly in the bloodstream and fails to reach tumor tissue in sufficient quantities. Furthermore, it also attacks normal cells, causing severe systemic side effects.

To address this issue, the research team drew inspiration from the principle that allows mussels to cling firmly even to wet rocks. Using molecular synthetic biotechnology, they mass-produced mussel adhesive protein, converted it into nanoparticles, encapsulated gemcitabine inside them and coated the surface with a protective layer of the biocompatible polymer polyethylene glycol (PEG).

Thanks to this protective layer, the nanoparticles can conceal their adhesive properties while traveling through the bloodstream, evading attacks from immune cells and circulating stably throughout the body.

A coating that comes off in tumors

The key to this study is a "spatially controlled stimulus-response system" designed so that the protective coating is removed only in tumor tissue. The research team used a special peptide—which is cleaved only by MMP2, an enzyme secreted in particularly high amounts in pancreatic cancer tissue—as the link in the protective coating.

As a result, the nanoparticles retain their protective coating while in the bloodstream, but once they reach tumor tissue, the coating is removed by the MMP2 enzyme.

Once stripped of their protective coating, these stealth nanoparticles regain the strong adhesive properties of mussel adhesive protein, firmly attaching themselves to the tumor tissue. They then penetrate the cancer cells and continuously release the anticancer drug, selectively attacking only the cancer cells.

Stronger tumor retention, lower toxicity

When these nanoparticles were administered intravenously in an animal model of pancreatic cancer, the results were striking. Compared with cases in which conventional anticancer drugs were administered alone or standard nanoparticles were used, the accumulation and retention time of the nanoparticles within the tumor tissue increased by more than 60%.

No systemic toxicity was observed, and tumor volume and weight were reduced by more than half compared with the group treated with conventional anticancer drugs alone. Histological analysis also confirmed widespread cancer cell death.

This technology is significant because it not only enhances treatment efficacy by keeping the drug in the tumor tissue for a longer period but also reduces the amount of drug delivered to normal tissue, thereby minimizing systemic side effects—a major challenge in cancer treatment.

Extending the platform beyond pancreas tumors

The research team plans to further develop this platform into a next-generation targeted drug delivery technology that can be applied not only to pancreatic cancer but also to various intractable solid tumors where drug delivery is difficult.

Cha stated, "The drug delivery platform we have developed is a novel systemic treatment that, even when administered intravenously, is selectively activated only within tumor tissue to release the drug," adding, "By reducing the side effects of cancer treatment while enhancing its efficacy, it will offer hope to patients with intractable solid tumors, including pancreatic cancer."

Publication details

Hyeokjun Lee et al, Stealthy systemic circulation of spatially controlled tumor microenvironment-activated bioadhesive proteinic nanoparticles for pancreatic cancer chemotherapy, Biomaterials (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2026.124384

Who's behind this story?

Sadie Harley

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Andrew Zinin

Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

Citation: Stealth anticancer nanoparticles made from mussel proteins that 'lie in wait and attack only cancer cells' (2026, July 15) retrieved 16 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-stealth-anticancer-nanoparticles-mussel-proteins.html

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