Supporting cell transdifferentiation induced by Notch inhibition reveals intrinsic regenerative capacity in cochlea.
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Lithium Dosing in Bipolar Disorder Shapes Brain Exposure Patterns
Now, a new study conducted by researchers at Newcastle University and Technische Universität Dresden has used a new lithium MRI technique to reveal that brain lithium levels closely track blood concentrations throughout the day.
Understanding lithium tracking gaps in bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder affects ~40 million people globally. The mental health condition is characterized by severe shifts in mood, energy, and activity levels. Patients navigate intense emotional states that alternate between mania and deep depression.
New T‑cell therapy targets three tumor proteins, shows early survival gains in aggressive pediatric brain cancers
Researchers report encouraging early results from a first-in-human clinical trial led by Children’s National Hospital using a new T-cell immunotherapy for children and young adults with some of the deadliest brain tumors, including diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) and relapsed central nervous system (CNS) tumors. These findings, published in Nature Medicine, are particularly significant given the challenges of treating pediatric brain tumors, which remain the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in children. Immunotherapies have been shown to work in blood cancers but rarely succeed in solid tumors, especially brain tumors.
“This study represents an important step toward developing safer and more effective T-cell therapies for children with devastating brain cancers,” said Catherine Bollard, MBChB, MD, senior vice president and chief research officer at Children’s National, and co-senior author of the study. “Even in this early-stage trial focused on safety, we were encouraged to see lasting clinical benefit in several patients who otherwise had very few options.”
Giant exoplanet may hold a magnetic grip on its host star
Within their planetary systems, stars are continuously shaping their orbiting planets through gravity, radiation and magnetic forces. So far, this relationship has appeared to be a one-way street.
But through new research published in Science, an international research team has found compelling evidence that the dynamic can run in reverse: A giant exoplanet orbiting very close to its star appears to be leaving a measurable magnetic imprint on the star itself.
Lipids and DNA nanostructures independently control artificial cell mechanics
What if the mechanical properties of a cell could be programmed like the components of a machine? Researchers at the University of Tokyo have discovered that two fundamental modes of cellular deformation—stretching and bending—can be independently controlled using different molecular building blocks. The finding provides a new strategy for engineering artificial cells, drug-delivery capsules and adaptive soft materials with precisely tailored mechanical functions.
Miho Yanagisawa, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo, and Kazutoshi Masuda, a Ph.D. student, developed a new framework for dissecting the mechanics of artificial cells. Using lipid-coated microdroplets as simplified cell models, they combined micropipette aspiration experiments with a theoretical model that separates membrane mechanics into stretching and bending contributions. The approach successfully captured nonlinear deformation behaviors that conventional models could not explain. The work is published in the journal Small Science.
The researchers found that lipid molecular geometry primarily determines membrane stretching elasticity. In contrast, when Y-shaped DNA motifs were interconnected to form a three-dimensional network, they created a nanoscale scaffold that dramatically enhanced resistance to bending while leaving stretching elasticity largely unchanged.
Futurist Brian David Johnson: Don’t Let The Future Happen To You!
“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”
I recorded this conversation with Brian David Johnson 14 years ago, back when he was Intel’s futurist with 25 patents to his name and a mandate to build an actionable vision of computing for 2020.
Read that again. 2020 was the far horizon he was paid to imagine. We are now well past it.
So here is the uncomfortable question worth sitting with: how much of the future he described did we make happen on purpose, and how much simply happened to us while we wondered what was going on?
Brian’s whole method was a refusal to be passive about it. He used ethnographic fieldwork, trend data, and even science-fiction prototyping as a #design tool because he believed the future is not a forecast you wait for; it is an object you construct. His line still lands harder every year: own the fact that you can build the future.
A few things he said in 2012 that read very differently in the age of generative #AI and ubiquitous #robotics:
Distributed Cognition: The New Science of Non-Biological Intelligence
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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about distributed intelligence and experiments on slime mold and ants.
Links:
https://journals.aps.org/prxlife/pdf/.…
ANT Lab • The odorous house ant trail pheromone depo…
Audrey Dussutour • Blob crawling around.
#inteligence #artificialintelligence #biology.
0:00 Intelligence — what is it?
1:10 Mechanical intelligence in the slime mold.
3:30 How it seems to work.
5:55 Ants and swarm intelligence.
6:45 What is the queen for?
8:35 Other swarm animals.
9:45 Ants vs humans.
11:10 Collective intelligence.
12:00 Implications for AI
13:20 Implications for the existence of alien intelligence.
Enjoy and please subscribe.
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The hardware used to record these videos:
USC scientists just unlocked an endless supply of cancer-fighting immune cells
A new stem-cell-inspired technique allows scientists to grow vast numbers of immune-cell progenitors that can be engineered to hunt cancer and strengthen immune responses. In animal studies, the cells fought tumors, restored immune function, and showed promise as a durable, off-the-shelf therapy platform.
We are introducing and open sourcing LongCat-2.0, a large-scale MoE language model with 1.6 trillion total parameters and ~48 billion activated per token —
We are introducing and open sourcing, a large-scale MoE language model with 1.6 trillion total parameters and ~48 billion activated per token — a substantial step up from previous LongCat models, accompanied by several architectural improvements.
Both the full training run and the large-scale deployment are built entirely on AI ASIC superpods. Pretraining spans millions of accelerator-days across more than 35 trillion tokens, with no rollbacks or irrecoverable loss spikes — demonstrating that we have the capability to conduct frontier-scale training on alternative hardware platforms.
To strengthen the model on long-horizon tasks, we introduce LongCat Sparse Attention and train on hundreds of billions of tokens of 1M-context data. Together with dedicated post-training, this gives strong performance on coding and agentic tasks.