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.
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.
“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:
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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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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, 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.
Boreal forests are being clear-cut faster than some of their wildlife and plant species can recover, with a few failing to return even 100 years after harvesting, according to University of Alberta-led research.
The comprehensive global analysis looked at how clear-cutting—when all trees in an area are felled—affects birds, small mammals, spiders, insects, vascular plants, mosses and lichens in forests that are harvested for lumber or pulp and paper production. The researchers compared logged and unlogged areas over many decades, tracking how long it took to return to the biodiversity levels of a mature forest. The findings are published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
While some species came back within 30 years—soon enough to fall within the typical 60-to 80-year logging cycles—others won’t fit into that timeline, warns biologist Dr. Ellen Macdonald, a professor emerita in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences and lead author of the study.
Scientists at the University of Oklahoma have identified a previously unrecognized immune system pathway that helps explain how cigarette smoking increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. The findings, published in Circulation Research, show that cigarette smoke activates immune cells that trigger widespread inflammation throughout the body, accelerating the buildup of plaque in arteries.
Cigarette smoking is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and is linked to heart attacks, strokes and other life-threatening conditions. While smoking’s harmful effects on the lungs are well established, the biological processes that connect cigarette smoke exposure to cardiovascular disease have been less well understood.
A biodegradable pressure sensor could help people with knee injuries exercise and heal faster, University of Connecticut researchers report in Science Advances. The knee can take a great deal of abuse, thanks to the cartilage that cushions it. But if it’s not moved and exercised enough, the knee stiffens and has poor blood flow. The cartilage can degrade or tear, worsening any injury already there. So people with injured knees have to move in order to heal. The challenge is knowing how much exercise or movement is too much.
To answer that question, UConn College of Engineering professor Thanh Nguyen, along with Ph.D. student Jinyoung Park and other colleagues, developed a pressure sensor that can be placed inside the knee joint and then degrade harmlessly in the body when no longer needed.
“Overloading destroys the cartilage. But if you don’t move and exercise, if you don’t run, walk, jump, you have a very stiff joint with little blood flowing to it,” says Nguyen, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, which is a joint effort by the College of Engineering, School of Medicine and School of Dental Medicine. “My lab developed a sensor that can monitor the force in real time.”