Dreams of making drugs and tissues in space get closer to reality - Science | AAAS

Every time a tissue grows or renews itself, cells must divide inside an already crowded environment. That creates a fundamental problem that scientists have not fully understood: How does a tightly packed sheet of cells make room for two daughter cells when there was once only one?

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:For years, scientists have trained AI to read fMRI scans to accurately reconstruct visual information. A new tool, known as Brain-IT, uses a Brain Interaction Transformer (BIT) to decode and encode fMRI scans, and it can reconstruct images with stunning clarity using a relatively small training set. This tool could help those with severe paralysis communicate, and give scientists new insight into the inner workings of the brain’s visual processing system. While debates rage on various podcasts, in hand-wringing online essays, and even in the halls of Congress as to whether AI has surpassed human intelligence—a threshold of no-return known as the AI Singularity—there’s one skill where AI algorithms have long trounced the human competition: pattern recognition. Because of modern AI engines’ impressive abilities to sift through large datasets and recognize patterns, they can accurately detect developing cancers and even create entirely new viruses not seen in nature. When trained on the brain, this AI pattern recognition can gain almost supernatural powers.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.