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Meituan Trains the First Frontier-Scale LLM Entirely on Chinese Domestic Chips: LongCat-2.0

* Performance: The model is optimized for “agentic coding” tasks. In benchmarks, it scored 59.5 on SWE-bench Pro, surpassing Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro and slightly exceeding OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. It also performed strongly on other agent and reasoning tests.

* Inference and Release: Before its official launch, it operated anonymously on OpenRouter as “Owl Alpha,” becoming one of the platform’s top three most-used models. The model weights and technical infrastructure are expected to be released soon on platforms like Hugging Face. API pricing is set at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3 per million output tokens, with promotional rates available.

Meituan trained LongCat-2.0 on over 50,000 unnamed Chinese AI ASICs arranged in superpods with high-bandwidth interconnects. The chips share architectural similarities with Huawei’s Ascend 910C series, though Meituan has not publicly named the exact vendor.

The training run consumed more than 35 trillion tokens, including hundreds of billions of tokens with approximately 1-million-token context lengths. This level of scale — previously achieved only on NVIDIA GPUs or Google TPUs — required extensive custom engineering in parallelism, fault tolerance, and numerical stability.

The team implemented 6D parallelism (tensor, context, expert, data, pipeline, and embedding parallelism) to efficiently distribute both the MoE layers and the novel embedding components across the cluster.

Blood protein clocks flag higher risks of death and chronic disease

Organ-specific age gaps showed strong associations with cancers affecting the corresponding organ. The strongest association was observed between kidney biological age and renal cancer (HR, 1.6). Organ-specific aging in lungs and intestines also increased the risk of lung cancer and stomach cancer, respectively (HR, 1.4 for both). The sensitivity analysis yielded largely similar results, except for attenuations in kidney and lung cancer, indicating the robustness of the primary findings.

The Global Proteomic Aging Clock predicted mortality from any cause as accurately as conventional risk factors. Combining the findings with established risk factors further improved mortality prediction compared with using risk factors alone.

Single Injection Reverses Osteoarthritis in Animals in Just 4 Weeks

The chronic loss of joint cartilage known as osteoarthritis causes pain and bone decay for hundreds of millions of people every day.

But a new treatment option just got a step closer to human trials – in the form of a simple, single shot.

Based on ongoing animal experiments, researchers have shown that injecting a carefully engineered, slow-release drug-delivery system into the damaged joint can coax the body’s own cartilage and bone cells to carry out an effective repair job in just a few weeks.

Addressing Barriers to Transitioning Pediatric Patients With Epilepsy to Adult Health Care in the United StatesA Narrative Review

Purpose of ReviewAdolescents with childhood-onset epilepsy, along with their families, must navigate a complex constellation of uncertainties related to physical, psychological, and social changes as well as medical and possibly legal ramifications as…

Fear-learning circuit shows how stress disrupts brain’s ability to suppress trauma

Fear is often thought of as a negative emotion but is actually a natural protective response to perceived threats or danger. It helps us survive. When we experience a situation that causes fear, it becomes stored in our brain as a fear memory. These fear memories prevent us from touching a hot stove after being burned or from stepping onto a busy street.

What about fear memories that take over? Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is caused by severe acute or chronic stress that disrupts the learning process designed to suppress fear memories. These memories then begin to negatively affect a person’s quality of life.

Typically, our fear memories can be suppressed through extinction learning. The original memory or fear isn’t forgotten, but a new memory is formed and suppresses the original fear memory. However, extinction learning can become tricky in situations that involve traumatic memories.

Routine eye exams reveal stage 2 hypertension in half of diabetes patients

Diabetes opens people to other noncommunicable diseases like obesity, retinopathy and cardiovascular diseases like heart attacks and hypertension. A recent study by researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine sought to understand how common high blood pressure (BP) was among people with diabetes. They measured the BP of 172 adults with type 1 or type 2 diabetes and asked for their opinions on being screened during their eye exams.

Uncontrolled blood pressure was a common finding among the patients. Of the entire cohort, only about one in 12 had a normal blood pressure reading. Roughly half of the patients had stage 2 hypertension. They also found that about 10.5% had BP levels in the hypertensive crisis range—a level at which BP becomes a medical emergency because, if left untreated, it can lead to serious events such as a heart attack or stroke.

Having their blood pressure checked at the eye doctor was considered reasonable and acceptable by 93% of patients, as many were unaware they had a medical condition that needed attention, and some were under the impression that their BP was under control.

Trisomic rescue via allele-specific multiple chromosome cleavage using CRISPR-Cas9 in trisomy 21 cells

Human trisomy 21, responsible for Down syndrome, is the most prevalent genetic cause of cognitive impairment and remains a key focus for prenatal and preimplantation diagnosis. However, research directed toward eliminating supernumerary chromosomes from trisomic cells is limited. The present study demonstrates that allele-specific multiple chromosome cleavage by clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats Cas9 can achieve trisomy rescue by eliminating the target chromosome from human trisomy 21 induced pluripotent stem cells and fibroblasts. Unlike previously reported allele-nonspecific strategies, we have developed a comprehensive allele-specific (AS) Cas9 target sequence extraction method that efficiently removes the target chromosome. The temporary knockdown of DNA damage response genes increases the chromosome loss rate, while chromosomal rescue reversibly restores gene signatures and ameliorates cellular phenotypes. Additionally, this strategy proves effective in differentiated, nondividing cells. We anticipate that an AS approach will lay the groundwork for more sophisticated medical interventions targeting trisomy 21.

Keywords: CRISPR/Cas; Down syndrome; allele specificity; chromosome cut; chromosome loss; human trisomy 21.

© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences.

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