In the long effort to understand why some cancers spread and others do not, researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria have turned their attention away from the cell itself and toward the world surrounding it. Working with microfluidic models and computer simulations, the team found that physical disorder in a tumor's microenvironment — not genetics alone — can prompt cancer cells to detach from their collective and invade neighboring tissue. The finding places the chaos of context alongside the code of DNA as a force shaping human fate, suggesting that what surrounds us ma