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Today — 18 May 2024Main stream

Ex-military surgeons embrace new mission: stop Americans from bleeding to death

A movement to revolutionize the treatment of trauma patients in the U.S. can be traced to an infamous battle fought in East Africa more than 30 years ago.

© Meridith Kohut for NBC News

Eric Bank, Assistant Chief of EMS for Harris county Emergency Services District 48, demonstrates how blood and plasma can be administered in a properly equipped ambulance, that carries whole blood onboard.

© Courtesy Dr. John Holcomb

Dr. John Holcomb in Somalia in 1993.

© Meridith Kohut for NBC News

Dr. John Holcomb sits in an ambulance that carries whole blood on board.

© Meridith Kohut for NBC News

Dr. John Holcomb and Eric Bank with Harris County Emergency Services demonstrate how blood and plasma can be administered in a properly equipped ambulance.

© Courtesy Dr. Jeffrey Kerby

Dr. Jeffrey Kerby is a former Air Force trauma surgeon.

© Meridith Kohut for NBC News

Eric Bank demonstrates how blood can be administered in a properly equipped ambulance.

© Courtesy Dr. Donald Jenkins

Dr. Donald Jenkins, second from left, training with South African defense forces.

© Courtesy Neal Niemczyk

Izzy Niemczyk, 6, is wheeled to an ambulance on Jan. 19.

© NBC News

Neal Niemczyk with his 6-year-old daughter, Izzy.

© NBC News

Dr. Jeffrey Kerby with maps showing the locations of trauma centers.

© Meridith Kohut for NBC News; Courtesy Dr. John Holcomb

Dr. John Holcomb, a former Army trauma surgeon, with an ambulance equipped with whole blood in Katy, Texas.
Yesterday — 17 May 2024Main stream

The Apple TV is coming for the Raspberry Pi’s retro emulation box crown

17 May 2024 at 17:43
The RetroArch app installed in tvOS.

Enlarge / The RetroArch app installed in tvOS. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple’s initial pitch for the tvOS and the Apple TV as it currently exists was centered around apps. No longer a mere streaming box, the Apple TV would also be a destination for general-purpose software and games, piggybacking off of the iPhone's vibrant app and game library.

That never really panned out, and the Apple TV is still mostly a box for streaming TV shows and movies. But the same App Store rule change that recently allowed Delta, PPSSPP, and other retro console emulators onto the iPhone and iPad could also make the Apple TV appeal to people who want a small, efficient, no-fuss console emulator for their TVs.

So far, few of the emulators that have made it to the iPhone have been ported to the Apple TV. But earlier this week, the streaming box got an official port of RetroArch, the sprawling collection of emulators that runs on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the Raspberry Pi. RetroArch could be sideloaded onto iOS and tvOS before this, but only using awkward workarounds that took a lot more work and know-how than downloading an app from the App Store.

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The science of lifespan — and the impact of your five senses | Christi Gendron

What you experience through your senses — sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch — can impact how healthy you are and how long you live, says neurobiologist Christi Gendron. She explores how environmental cues like temperature, light and even just the sight of death have influenced the lifespan of fruit flies, suggesting your everyday perceptions may have direct repercussions on your ability to live a long, healthy life.

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How cuddly robots could change dementia care

17 May 2024 at 06:00

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. 

Last week, I scoured the internet in search of a robotic dog. I wanted a belated birthday present for my aunt, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Studies suggest that having a companion animal can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer’s. My aunt would love a real dog, but she can’t have one.

That’s how I discovered the Golden Pup from Joy for All. It cocks its head. It sports a jaunty red bandana. It barks when you talk. It wags when you touch it. It has a realistic heartbeat. And it’s just one of the many, many robots designed for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

This week on The Checkup, join me as I go down a rabbit hole. Let’s look at the prospect of  using robots to change dementia care.

Golden pup robot with red kerchief

As robots go, Golden Pup is decidedly low tech. It retails for $140. For around $6,000 you can opt for Paro, a fluffy robotic baby seal developed in Japan, which can sense touch, light, sound, temperature, and posture. Its manufacturer says it develops its own character, remembering behaviors that led its owner to give it attention.  

Golden Pup and Paro are available now. But researchers are working on much more  sophisticated robots for people with cognitive disorders—devices that leverage AI to converse and play games. Researchers from Indiana University Bloomington are tweaking a commercially available robot system called QT to serve people with dementia and Alzheimer’s. The researchers’ two-foot-tall robot looks a little like a toddler in an astronaut suit. Its round white head holds a screen that displays two eyebrows, two eyes, and a mouth that together form a variety of expressions. The robot engages people in  conversation, asking AI-generated questions to keep them talking. 

The AI model they’re using isn’t perfect, and neither are the robot’s responses. In one awkward conversation, a study participant told the robot that she has a sister. “I’m sorry to hear that,” the robot responded. “How are you doing?”

But as large language models improve—which is happening already—so will the quality of the conversations. When the QT robot made that awkward comment, it was running Open AI’s GPT-3, which was released in 2020. The latest version of that model, GPT-4o, which was released this week, is faster and provides for more seamless conversations. You can interrupt the conversation, and the model will adjust.  

The idea of using robots to keep dementia patients engaged and connected isn’t always an easy sell. Some people see it as an abdication of our social responsibilities. And then there are privacy concerns. The best robotic companions are personalized. They collect information about people’s lives, learn their likes and dislikes, and figure out when to approach them. That kind of data collection can be unnerving, not just for patients but also for medical staff. Lillian Hung, creator of the Innovation in Dementia care and Aging (IDEA) lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told one reporter about an incident that happened during a focus group at a care facility.  She and her colleagues popped out for lunch. When they returned, they found that staff had unplugged the robot and placed a bag over its head. “They were worried it was secretly recording them,” she said.

On the other hand, robots have some advantages over humans in talking to people with dementia. Their attention doesn’t flag. They don’t get annoyed or angry when they have to repeat themselves. They can’t get stressed. 

What’s more, there are increasing numbers of people with dementia, and too few people to care for them. According to the latest report from the Alzheimer’s Association, we’re going to need more than a million additional care workers to meet the needs of people living with dementia between 2021 and 2031. That is the largest gap between labor supply and demand for any single occupation in the United States.

Have you been in an understaffed or poorly staffed memory care facility? I have. Patients are often sedated to make them easier to deal with. They get strapped into wheelchairs and parked in hallways. We barely have enough care workers to take care of the physical needs of people with dementia, let alone provide them with social connection and an enriching environment.

“Caregiving is not just about tending to someone’s bodily concerns; it also means caring for the spirit,” writes Kat McGowan in this beautiful Wired story about her parents’ dementia and the promise of social robots. “The needs of adults with and without dementia are not so different: We all search for a sense of belonging, for meaning, for self-actualization.”

If robots can enrich the lives of people with dementia even in the smallest way, and if they can provide companionship where none exists, that’s a win.

“We are currently at an inflection point, where it is becoming relatively easy and inexpensive to develop and deploy [cognitively assistive robots] to deliver personalized interventions to people with dementia, and many companies are vying to capitalize on this trend,” write a team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, in a 2021 article in Proceedings of We Robot. “However, it is important to carefully consider the ramifications.”

Many of the more advanced social robots may not be ready for prime time, but the low-tech Golden Pup is readily available. My aunt’s illness has been progressing rapidly, and she occasionally gets frustrated and agitated. I’m hoping that Golden Pup might provide a welcome (and calming) distraction. Maybe  it will spark joy during a time that has been incredibly confusing and painful for my aunt and uncle. Or maybe not. Certainly a robotic pup isn’t for everyone. Golden Pup may not be a dog. But I’m hoping it can be a friendly companion.


Now read the rest of The Checkup

Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive

Robots are cool, and with new advances in AI they might also finally be useful around the house, writes Melissa Heikkilä. 

Social robots could help make personalized therapy more affordable and accessible to kids with autism. Karen Hao has the story

Japan is already using robots to help with elder care, but in many cases they require as much work as they save. And reactions among the older people they’re meant to serve are mixed. James Wright wonders whether the robots are “a shiny, expensive distraction from tough choices about how we value people and allocate resources in our societies.” 

From around the web

A tiny probe can work its way through arteries in the brain to help doctors spot clots and other problems. The new tool could help surgeons make diagnoses, decide on treatment strategies, and provide assurance that clots have been removed. (Stat

Richard Slayman, the first recipient of a pig kidney transplant, has died, although the hospital that performed the transplant says the death doesn’t seem to be linked to the kidney. (Washington Post)

EcoHealth, the virus-hunting nonprofit at the center of covid lab-eak theories, has been banned from receiving federal funding. (NYT)

In a first, scientists report that they can translate brain signals into speech without any vocalization or mouth movements, at least for a handful of words. (Nature)

‘Super cute please like’: the unstoppable rise of Shein – podcast

It is taking fast fashion to ever faster and ever cheaper extremes, and making billions from it. Why is the whole world shopping at Shein? By Nicole Lipman

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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Before yesterdayMain stream

Vulnerabilities prioritization funnel: Focus on what matters

16 May 2024 at 09:51

We are excited to announce updates to our vulnerability prioritization funnel, which will help you focus on vulnerabilities that pose a real danger to your business.

The post Vulnerabilities prioritization funnel: Focus on what matters appeared first on Security Boulevard.

VMware Fusion, Workstation now free for home use, subscription-only for businesses

15 May 2024 at 11:45
VMware Fusion, Workstation now free for home use, subscription-only for businesses

Enlarge (credit: VMware)

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware last year has led to widespread upheaval at the company, including layoffs, big changes to how it approaches software licensing, and general angst from customers and partners. Broadcom also discontinued the free-to-use version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor/ESXi earlier this year, forcing home users to find alternatives.

But today there's a bit of good news—for home users, at least. Broadcom is making VMware Fusion Pro 13 and VMWare Workstation Pro free for personal use.

Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro certainly aren't the only free-to-use virtualization products—VirtualBox has existed for years, and there are many indie projects that make use of Apple's virtualization frameworks for macOS. But VMware's products are a bit more polished and easier to learn than some of those alternatives, and VMware's file formats are also commonly used when redistributing virtual machines for retrocomputing purposes.

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$460, 5,471-piece Lego Barad-dûr set comes for LOTR fans’ wallets in June

14 May 2024 at 13:33
  • Lego Barad-dúr silently surveils a living room. [credit: Lego ]

Here's something for any Lord of the Rings fan with a tall, narrow space available on their tchotchkes shelf: Lego has announced a $460, 5,471-piece rendition of Barad-dûr, which viewers of the films will recognize as "that giant black tower with the flaming eye on top of it."

Sauron, Base Master of Treachery, will keep his Eye on you from atop the tower, which will actually glow thanks to a built-in light brick. The tower includes a minifig of Sauron himself, plus the Mouth of Sauron, Gollum, and a handful of Orcs.

The Lego Barad-dûr set will launch on June 1 for Lego Insiders and June 4 for everybody else. If you buy it between June 1 and June 7, you'll also get the "Fell Beast" bonus set, with pose-able wings and a Nazgûl minifig. It doesn't seem as though this bonus set will be sold separately, making it much harder to buy the nine Nazgûl you would need to make your collection story-accurate.

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Apple releases iOS 17.5, macOS 14.5, and other updates as new iPads launch

13 May 2024 at 17:55
Apple releases iOS 17.5, macOS 14.5, and other updates as new iPads launch

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices.

The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 updates are all available to download now.

Cross-Platform Tracking Protection notifications alert users "if a compatible Bluetooth tracker they do not own is moving with them, regardless of what operating system the device is paired with." Apple has already implemented protections to prevent AirTag stalking, and Cross-Platform Tracking Protection implements some of those same safeguards for devices paired to non-Apple phones.

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M2 iPad Air review: The everything iPad

13 May 2024 at 17:00
  • The new 13-inch iPad Air with the Apple M2 processor inside. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

The iPad Air has been a lot of things in the last decade-plus. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Airs were just The iPad, and the “Air” label simply denoted how much lighter and more streamlined they were than the initial 2010 iPad and 2011’s long-lived iPad 2. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple focused on introducing and building out the iPad Pro.

The Air disappeared for a while after that, but it returned in 2019 as an in-betweener model to bridge the gap between the $329 iPad (no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first-gen Air design) and more-expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It definitely made sense to have a hardware offering to span the gap between the basic no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could make things complicated. The main issue for the last couple of years has been the base Air's 64GB of storage—scanty enough that memory swapping doesn't even work on it— and the fact that stepping up to 256GB brought the Air too close to the price of the 11-inch iPad Pro.

Which brings us to the 2024 M2 iPad Air, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by bumping the Air's base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any pricing overlap (only the 1TB 11-inch Air, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).

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Apple apologizes for ad that crushes the sum total of human artistic endeavor

10 May 2024 at 11:31
One of many human-created objects destroyed in Apple's "Crush!" ad for the iPad Pro.

Enlarge / One of many human-created objects destroyed in Apple's "Crush!" ad for the iPad Pro. (credit: Apple)

Earlier this week, Apple took the wraps off of a thoroughly leaked iPad Pro refresh with a 1 minute and 8 second ad spot wherein a gigantic hydraulic press comprehensively smushes a trumpet, an arcade cabinet, a record player, paint cans, a piano, a TV, sculptures, a bunch of emoji, and plenty of other tools that one might loosely categorize as "artistic implements."

At the end of the ad, the press lifts away to reveal a somewhat thinner, somewhat faster version of Apple's iPad Pro. The message of the ad, titled "Crush!" and still available via Apple's YouTube channel and CEO Tim Cook's Twitter account, is obvious: look at all of the things we've squeezed into this tablet!

"Just imagine all the things it'll be used to create," wrote Cook.

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The Painful Reality of Being an Incarcerated Mother

pMany of us will celebrate Mother’s Day over the weekend by remembering or being present with women who raised us, or with our families. But for the a href=https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024women.htmlmore than 190,000 women incarcerated in the United States this weekend/a, there will be no celebration./p pClose to a href=https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2023/05/Incarcerated-Women-and-Girls-1.pdf60 percent/a of these women serving prison sentences were the primary caregiver of their minor children before sentencing. All too often, a prison sentence tears them from their family connections and contact with their children, while severing their children from a vital source of emotional and financial support. State women’s prisons are often located in rural areas, with limited modes of transportation, and families struggle to visit./p pAs a result, families have very few in-person visits, and must rely on postal mail, or pay inflated prices for telephone calls and video contacts. Compounding the lack of connection, women in many state prisons cannot even hold in their hands and cherish a card or drawing sent by their children. Many prisons a href=https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/pennsylvania-prison-scanned-mail-smart-communications.htmlhave done away with real mail/a, and now use vendors to intercept, scan, and destroy all postal mail, delivering poor quality printouts of the original letter to the incarcerated recipients weeks later for a fee./p pIn addition to women sentenced to prison, more than a href=https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/cj0519st.pdf#page=462.4 million women/a spend at least one day in jail each year, and a href=https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/overlooked-women-and-jails-report-updated.pdf80 percent of them/a are mothers of children under the age of 18. And more than 60 percent of women in our nation’s jails are presumed innocent and awaiting trial, a href=https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-profit-shapes-bail-bond-systemjailed due to poverty and an inability to purchase their freedom/a by posting bail./p pChildren with mothers incarcerated in local jails often fare no better than those whose mothers are in state prisons: Some jails have a class=Hyperlink SCXW228476086 BCX0 href=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/us/jail-visits-ban-michigan-lawsuit.html target=_blank rel=noreferrer noopenercompletely banned in-person visitation/a to require all visits be done by paid video, not because of COVID, but to boost their bottom line. A a class=Hyperlink SCXW228476086 BCX0 href=https://www.prisonpolicy.org/visitation/report.html target=_blank rel=noreferrer noopener2015 study/a found that 74 percent of jails had banned in-person visits after putting video visits into place. Even when women are able to have in-person visits with their children, jail visits are often done through a plexiglass barrier. Women cannot hold, hug, touch, or kiss their children./p pAlthough many more men are incarcerated than women in the U.S., women’s rate of incarceration has grown a href=https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/women_overtime.htmltwice that of men in the past 40 years/a. Since 2009, while the overall number of people in prisons and jails has decreased, a href=https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/women_overtime.htmlwomen have fared worse than men in 35 states/a. Women and families of color are disproportionately affected by this increase. Black and Native American / Alaska Native women are a href=http://chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p22st.pdfincarcerated at double their share of the population of women in the United States. /a/p div class=mp-md wp-link div class=wp-link__img-wrapper a href=https://www.aclu.org/issues/prisoners-rights/women-prison target=_blank tabindex=-1 img width=700 height=350 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/9be40077d72d6d19f05757087e5331e2.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/9be40077d72d6d19f05757087e5331e2.jpg 700w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/9be40077d72d6d19f05757087e5331e2-400x200.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/9be40077d72d6d19f05757087e5331e2-600x300.jpg 600w sizes=(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px / /a /div div class=wp-link__title a href=https://www.aclu.org/issues/prisoners-rights/women-prison target=_blank Women in Prison /a /div div class=wp-link__description a href=https://www.aclu.org/issues/prisoners-rights/women-prison target=_blank tabindex=-1 p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletThe ACLU works in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the.../p /a /div div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet a href=https://www.aclu.org/issues/prisoners-rights/women-prison target=_blank tabindex=-1 p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p /a /div /div pWomen often become entangled with the criminal legal system due to trying to cope with poverty, limited access to child care, underemployment or unemployment, unstable housing, and physical and mental health challenges. They get thrown into a legal system that criminalizes survival behaviors such as selling drugs or sex work, and policies that charge and arrest persons for being present when crimes are committed by others, “aiding and abetting” others, or fighting back against domestic violence. Aa href=https://survivedandpunished.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SP_ResearchAcrossWalls_FINAL-compressedfordigital.pdf study in California found/a that 93 percent of women incarcerated in state prison for a homicide of a partner were abused by the person they killed, and in two-thirds of those cases, the homicide occurred while attempting to protect themselves or their children./p pIncarcerated women have high rates of histories of physical and sexual abuse, trauma, and mental health and substance use disorders. While incarcerated, a href=https://www.ktvu.com/news/u-s-senators-call-fci-dublin-transfer-of-women-appallingwomen are more likely than incarcerated men/a to face a href=https://thehill.com/opinion/4648109-feds-close-prison-dubbed-the-rape-club-but-accountability-is-needed/sexual abuse or harassment/a by correctional staff, and they experience serious psychological distress due to incarceration and the conditions in prisons. a href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/jensen-v-thornellTreatment in prisons/a or jails for mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and trauma is often nonexistent. Health care for physical medical conditions or pregnancy often is limited at best: Last year, through our a href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/jensen-v-thornelllawsuit/a, we learned the Arizona Department of Corrections was a href=https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2023/01/02/arizona-inducing-labor-of-pregnant-prisoners-against-their-will/69768038007/inducing the labor/a of pregnant incarcerated people against their will. This came after we a href=https://kjzz.org/content/951486/pregnant-women-arizona-prison-suffering-miscarriages-giving-birth-alonedocumented inadequate prenatal and postpartum care/a of women in Arizona prisons in 2019, including a woman with serious mental illness who gave birth alone, in the toilet of her cell, at a maximum custody unit./p pSo what can we do to honor incarcerated women and families? First, we can financially support the incredible work of community-based bail funds that help free mothers and bring them home to their children and families. Second, we can support criminal legal reform policies to stop mass incarceration./p pThe a href=https://www.nationalbailout.org/National Bail Out/a is a Black-led and Black-centered collective of organizers and advocates who are working to abolish pretrial detention and mass incarceration. They have coordinated with a variety of other groups, including a href=https://southernersonnewground.org/our-work/freefromfear/black-mamas-bail-out-action/Southerners on New Ground (SONG)/a, to create the tactical mass bail out of #FreeBlackMamas to acknowledge the reality that incarceration of women disproportionately affects Black women. They work with partner organizations to post bail for incarcerated women year-round, but especially before Mother’s Day. This year, instead of (or in addition to) sending flowers to your favorite mothers, you can donate to a href=https://www.nationalbailout.org/partnersNational Bail Out or the 18 Black-led organizations they are working with across the country/a to help #FreeBlackMamas./p pWe also need to address the root causes of the incarceration of women in this country, which is often due to poverty. While drug or property offenses account for about half of the charges for which women are incarcerated, policies must also focus on reducing a href=https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article272572946.htmlso-called “violent” offenses/a that women commit often in response to violence and abuse./p pWhen we incarcerate women, we are causing irreparable damage to them, their families, and all of our communities./p

The burgeoning field of brain mapping

10 May 2024 at 06:00

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. 

The human brain is an engineering marvel: 86 billion neurons form some 100 trillion connections to create a network so complex that it is, ironically, mind boggling.

This week scientists published the highest-resolution map yet of one small piece of the brain, a tissue sample one cubic millimeter in size. The resulting data set comprised 1,400 terabytes. (If they were to reconstruct the entire human brain, the data set would be a full zettabyte. That’s a billion terabytes. That’s roughly a year’s worth of all the digital content in the world.)

This map is just one of many that have been in the news in recent years. (I wrote about another brain map last year.) So this week I thought we could walk through some of the ways researchers make these maps and how they hope to use them.  

Scientists have been trying to map the brain for as long as they’ve been studying it. One of the most well-known brain maps came from German anatomist Korbinian Brodmann. In the early 1900s, he took sections of the brain that had been stained to highlight their structure and drew maps by hand, with 52 different areas divided according to how the neurons were organized. “He conjectured that they must do different things because the structure of their staining patterns are different,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Updated versions of his maps are still used today.

“With modern technology, we’ve been able to bring a lot more power to the construction,” he says. And over the past couple of decades we’ve seen an explosion of large, richly funded mapping efforts.

BigBrain, which was released in 2013, is a 3D rendering of the brain of a single donor, a 65-year-old woman. To create the atlas, researchers sliced the brain into more than 7,000 sections, took detailed images of each one, and stitched the sections into a three-dimensional reconstruction.

In the Human Connectome Project, researchers scanned 1,200 volunteers in MRI machines to map structural and functional connections in the brain. “They were able to map out what regions were activated in the brain at different times under different activities,” Hawrylycz says.

This kind of noninvasive imaging can provide valuable data, but “Its resolution is extremely coarse,” he adds. “Voxels [think: a 3D pixel] are of the size of a millimeter to three millimeters.”

And there are other projects too. The Synchrotron for Neuroscience—an Asia Pacific Strategic Enterprise,  a.k.a. “SYNAPSE,” aims to map the connections of an entire human brain at a very fine-grain resolution using synchrotron x-ray microscopy. The EBRAINS human brain atlas contains information on anatomy, connectivity, and function.

The work I wrote about last year is part of the $3 billion federally funded Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which launched in 2013. In this project, led by the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which has developed a number of brain atlases, researchers are working to develop a parts list detailing the vast array of cells in the human brain by sequencing single cells to look at gene expression. So far they’ve identified more than 3,000 types of brain cells, and they expect to find many more as they map more of the brain.

The draft map was based on brain tissue from just two donors. In the coming years, the team will add samples from hundreds more.

Mapping the cell types present in the brain seems like a straightforward task, but it’s not. The first stumbling block is deciding how to define a cell type. Seth Ament, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, likes to give his neuroscience graduate students a rundown of all the different ways brain cells can be defined: by their morphology, or by the way the cells fire, or by their activity during certain behaviors. But gene expression may be the Rosetta stone brain researchers have been looking for, he says: “If you look at cells from the perspective of just what genes are turned on in them, it corresponds almost one to one to all of those other kinds of properties of cells.” That’s the most remarkable discovery from all the cell atlases, he adds.

I have always assumed the point of all these atlases is to gain a better understanding of the brain. But Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, doesn’t think “understanding” is the right word. He likens trying to understand the human brain to trying to understand New York City. It’s impossible. “There’s millions of things going on simultaneously, and everything is working, interacting, in different ways,” he says. “It’s too complicated.”

But as this latest paper shows, it is possible to describe the human brain in excruciating detail. “Having a satisfactory description means simply that if I look at a brain, I’m no longer surprised,” Lichtman says. That day is a long way off, though. The data Lichtman and his colleagues published this week was full of surprises—and many more are waiting to be uncovered.


Now read the rest of The Checkup

Another thing

The revolutionary AI tool AlphaFold, which predicts proteins’ structures on the basis of their genetic sequence, just got an upgrade, James O’Donnell reports. Now the tool can predict interactions between molecules. 

Read more from Tech Review’s archive

In 2013, Courtney Humphries reported on the development of BigBrain, a human brain atlas based on MRI images of more than 7,000 brain slices. 

And in 2017, we flagged the Human Cell Atlas project, which aims to categorize all the cells of the human body, as a breakthrough technology. That project is still underway

All these big, costly efforts to map the brain haven’t exactly led to a breakthrough in our understanding of its function, writes Emily Mullin in this story from 2021.  

From around the web

The Apple Watch’s atrial fibrillation (AFib) feature received FDA approval to track heart arrhythmias in clinical trials, making it the first digital health product to be qualified under the agency’s Medical Device Development Tools program. (Stat)

A CRISPR gene therapy improved vision in several people with an inherited form of blindness, according to an interim analysis of a small clinical trial to test the therapy. (CNN)

Long read: The covid vaccine, like all vaccines, can cause side effects. But many people who say they have been harmed by the vaccine feel that their injuries are being ignored.  (NYT)

Google helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain

A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. Although the map covers just a fraction of the organ—a whole brain is a million times larger—that piece contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million synapses. It is currently the highest-resolution picture of the human brain ever created.

To make a map this finely detailed, the team had to cut the tissue sample into 5,000 slices and scan them with a high-speed electron microscope. Then they used a machine-learning model to help electronically stitch the slices back together and label the features. The raw data set alone took up 1.4 petabytes. “It’s probably the most computer-intensive work in all of neuroscience,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the research. “There is a Herculean amount of work involved.”

Many other brain atlases exist, but most provide much lower-resolution data. At the nanoscale, researchers can trace the brain’s wiring one neuron at a time to the synapses, the places where they connect. “To really understand how the human brain works, how it processes information, how it stores memories, we will ultimately need a map that’s at that resolution,” says Viren Jain, a senior research scientist at Google and coauthor on the paper, published in Science on May 9. The data set itself and a preprint version of this paper were released in 2021.

Brain atlases come in many forms. Some reveal how the cells are organized. Others cover gene expression. This one focuses on connections between cells, a field called “connectomics.” The outermost layer of the brain contains roughly 16 billion neurons that link up with each other to form trillions of connections. A single neuron might receive information from hundreds or even thousands of other neurons and send information to a similar number. That makes tracing these connections an exceedingly complex task, even in just a small piece of the brain..  

To create this map, the team faced a number of hurdles. The first problem was finding a sample of brain tissue. The brain deteriorates quickly after death, so cadaver tissue doesn’t work. Instead, the team used a piece of tissue removed from a woman with epilepsy during brain surgery that was meant to help control her seizures.

Once the researchers had the sample, they had to carefully preserve it in resin so that it could be cut into slices, each about a thousandth the thickness of a human hair. Then they imaged the sections using a high-speed electron microscope designed specifically for this project. 

Next came the computational challenge. “You have all of these wires traversing everywhere in three dimensions, making all kinds of different connections,” Jain says. The team at Google used a machine-learning model to stitch the slices back together, align each one with the next, color-code the wiring, and find the connections. This is harder than it might seem. “If you make a single mistake, then all of the connections attached to that wire are now incorrect,” Jain says. 

“The ability to get this deep a reconstruction of any human brain sample is an important advance,” says Seth Ament, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. The map is “the closest to the  ground truth that we can get right now.” But he also cautions that it’s a single brain specimen taken from a single individual. 

The map, which is freely available at a web platform called Neuroglancer, is meant to be a resource other researchers can use to make their own discoveries. “Now anybody who’s interested in studying the human cortex in this level of detail can go into the data themselves. They can proofread certain structures to make sure everything is correct, and then publish their own findings,” Jain says. (The preprint has already been cited at least 136 times.) 

The team has already identified some surprises. For example, some of the long tendrils that carry signals from one neuron to the next formed “whorls,” spots where they twirled around themselves. Axons typically form a single synapse to transmit information to the next cell. The team identified single axons that formed repeated connections—in some cases, 50 separate synapses. Why that might be isn’t yet clear, but the strong bonds could help facilitate very quick or strong reactions to certain stimuli, Jain says. “It’s a very simple finding about the organization of the human cortex,” he says. But “we didn’t know this before because we didn’t have maps at this resolution.”

The data set was full of surprises, says Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University who helped lead the research. “There were just so many things in it that were incompatible with what you would read in a textbook.” The researchers may not have explanations for what they’re seeing, but they have plenty of new questions: “That’s the way science moves forward.” 

Correction: Due to a transcription error, a quote from Viren Jain referred to how the brain ‘exports’ memories. It has been updated to reflect that he was speaking of how the brain ‘stores’ memories.

Apple’s plastic-free packaging means pack-in logo stickers are going away

9 May 2024 at 14:10
Many different Apple stickers from many different products and eras.

Enlarge / Many different Apple stickers from many different products and eras. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As a noted sticker enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for news at the intersection of stickers and technology. Which is why this report from 9to5Mac caught my eye: Apple is apparently starting to wind down its decades-long practice of including Apple logo stickers in the box with all of its products.

If you buy a new iPad Air or iPad Pro, you’ll be able to get some stickers if you ask the people at the Apple Store to include them (stores will get a “limited quantity” of stickers they can distribute on request). But the little sticker insert that has come with Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and other devices and accessories for as long as I can remember will stop being one of the default pack-ins.

Apple is apparently cutting down on its sticker distribution to help meet its environmental goals. The stickers are some of the last bits of plastic included in most modern Apple packaging; in recent years, even the plastic backing layer for the stickers has been replaced with wax paper instead. This happened around the same time that the inner layer of packaging wrapped around new Apple devices also shifted from plastic to paper and when plastic-sealed boxes gave way to tear-away paper adhesive strips.

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Israel is furious with Biden's decision to draw a red line over the planned invasion of Rafah

Israel reacted with a mix of concern and fury Thursday to President Joe Biden's warning that he would cut off weapons to the U.S. ally's military if it moves forward with a full-scale assault on Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering.

© Abed Rahim Khatib

Civilians load belongings onto a truck as they flee Rafah ahead of Israeli military action Thursday.

© Hani Alshaer

An injured Palestinian child is treated at a hospital following Israeli airstrikes on Rafah on Wednesday.

© Mary Anne Fackelman

President Reagan expressing his disapproval of Israel's bombing of Beirut to the county's prime minister, Menachem Begin, from the White House on Aug. 12, 1982.

Biden warns he could halt weapons supply; Israel demands Rafah be left out of cease-fire deal

President Joe Biden said Wednesday the U.S. would not supply Israel with certain weapons and artillery shells if its military invades Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where more than 1 million people are sheltering.

How the Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake Beef Crashed the Genius Website

9 May 2024 at 09:20
The furious exchange of diss tracks and the rush to interpret each song briefly overwhelmed Genius, where users can annotate lyrics to songs.

© Kiko Huesca/EPA, via Shutterstock

Kendrick Lamar and Drake (not pictured) were responsible for nearly every entry on Genius’s list of the top 10.

M4 iPad Pro CPU cores and RAM amount are tied to storage capacity

8 May 2024 at 13:32
The new M4 iPad Pro.

Enlarge / The new M4 iPad Pro. (credit: Apple)

When Apple announced the Apple M4 chip during its iPad Pro event yesterday, it mentioned that the chip came with "up to" four high-performance CPU cores.

Those short, easily missable words always mean that there's a lower-end version of the chip coming that doesn't include that many CPU cores, and the tech specs page for the new iPad Pro has the full details: iPad Pros with 256GB or 512GB of storage use a version of the M4 with three high-performance CPU cores and six smaller efficiency cores. Only the models with 1TB and 2TB of storage have an M4 with all four high-performance CPU cores enabled.

The 256GB and 512GB models also ship with 8GB of RAM, where the 1TB and 2TB models come with 16GB of memory installed. Though these changes are clearly spelled out on the Tech Specs page, the actual configuration page for the iPad Pros in Apple's online store doesn't give any indication that upgrading storage also upgrades your CPU and RAM.

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Israel deeply frustrated that U.S. paused arms shipment over Rafah fears, official says

The United States halted a large shipment of offensive weapons to Israel last week in a sign of its growing concern over a possible military offensive on Rafah, senior administration officials told NBC News.

© AFP via Getty Images

A child peers over the destruction as Israel continued its bombardment of Rafah this week even as negotiators gather in Egypt to try to reach a deal.

© Oded Balilty

Families of hostages and other protesters blocked a highway in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, stepping up their campaign for Netanyahu to agree to a deal.

© AFP - Getty Images

Crowds of civilians lined the streets of Rafah on Tuesday as many rushed to flee parts of the city following the IDF's evacuation order.

Hands-on with the new iPad Pros and Airs: A surprisingly refreshing refresh

7 May 2024 at 16:06
Apple's latest iPad Air, now in two sizes. The Magic Keyboard accessory is the same one that you use with older iPad Airs and Pros, though they can use the new Apple Pencil Pro.

Enlarge / Apple's latest iPad Air, now in two sizes. The Magic Keyboard accessory is the same one that you use with older iPad Airs and Pros, though they can use the new Apple Pencil Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has a new lineup of iPad Pro and Air models for the first time in well over a year. Most people would probably be hard-pressed to tell the new ones from the old ones just by looking at them, but after hands-on sessions with both sizes of both tablets, the small details (especially for the Pros) all add up to a noticeably refined iPad experience.

iPad Airs: Bigger is better

But let's begin with the new Airs since there's a bit less to talk about. The 11-inch iPad Air (technically the sixth-generation model) is mostly the same as the previous-generation A14 and M1 models, design-wise, with identical physical dimensions and weight. It's still the same slim-bezel design Apple introduced with the 2018 iPad Pro, just with a 60 Hz LCD display panel and Touch ID on the power button rather than Face ID.

So when Apple says the device has been "redesigned," the company is mainly referring to the fact that the webcam is now mounted on the long edge of the tablet rather than the short edge. This makes its positioning more laptop-y when it's docked to the Magic Keyboard or some other keyboard.

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Apple announces M4 with more CPU cores and AI focus, just months after M3

7 May 2024 at 10:33
Apple's M4 chip in the new iPad Pro. It follows the M3 by just a few months.

Enlarge / Apple's M4 chip in the new iPad Pro. It follows the M3 by just a few months. (credit: Apple)

In a major shake-up of its chip roadmap, Apple has announced a new M4 processor for today’s iPad Pro refresh, barely six months after releasing the first MacBook Pros with the M3 and not even two months after updating the MacBook Air with the M3.

Apple says the M4 includes "up to" four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. Apple's high-level performance estimates say that the M4 has 50 percent faster CPU performance and four times as much graphics performance. Like the GPU in the M3, the M4 also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing to enable more advanced lighting effects in games and other apps. Due partly to its "second-generation" 3 nm manufacturing process, Apple says the M4 can match the performance of the M2 while using just half the power.

As with so much else in the tech industry right now, the M4 also has an AI focus; Apple says it's beefing up the 16-core Neural Engine (Apple’s equivalent of the Neural Processing Unit that companies like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft have been pushing lately). Apple says the M4 runs up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), considerably ahead of Intel's Meteor Lake platform, though a bit short of the 45 TOPS that Qualcomm is promising with the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus series. The M3's Neural Engine is only capable of 18 TOPS, so that's a major step up for Apple's hardware.

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Why US politics is broken — and how to fix it | Andrew Yang

The electoral system in the United States needs a redesign, says political reformer Andrew Yang. Exposing the flaws of a system built on poor incentives, he proposes a cost-effective overhaul inspired by primary elections already working in places like Alaska and advocates for ranked-choice voting, where voters can choose candidates in order of preference regardless of party, stemming the influence of extreme ideologies.

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Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon

6 May 2024 at 11:54
Rather than going to beaches to catch Wigletts, some <em>Pokémon Go</em> players are trying to bring the beaches to themselves.

Enlarge / Rather than going to beaches to catch Wigletts, some Pokémon Go players are trying to bring the beaches to themselves. (credit: Niantic)

Ah, Pokémon Go. The hottest mobile game of 2016 remains a potent force to this day, pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from tens of millions of monthly active players.

Part of what keeps the game fresh is a continuous trickle of new Pokémon. The game began with just the original 151 monsters back in 2016 and has gradually caught up to the current generation of Switch games in bits and pieces over the last eight years. The game is currently in the process of adding monsters from Scarlet and Violet, and that's where this story begins.

Two of the latest additions to the Pokémon Go roster are Wiglett and Wugtrio, riffs on the designs of Diglett and Dugtrio, who live on beaches and look kind of like garden eels. Pokémon Go uses a biome system that restricts certain Pokémon to certain types of real-world terrain, like forests, mountains, and beaches. As aquatic Pokémon, Wiglett and Wugtrio show up in the beach biome.

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The most significant hip hop feud in decades

By: ndr
5 May 2024 at 10:07
Kendrick Lamar and Drake (aka Aubrey Graham), two of the biggest active hip hop artists and former collaborators, are seriously beefing in a major way that hasn't been seen since Tupac vs Biggie. Last October, Drake dropped a track, First Person Shooter, where his collaborator J Cole named the two of them and Kendrick as "the big three". Kendrick, who has a competitive streak, took umbrage at being put on the same level as the other two and replied in Like That "it's just big me". What might've started as a somewhat professional competition has rapidly gone nuclear since Kendrick took shots at Drake's Blackness, fitness as a parent, and masculinity in his track titled "euphoria" and Drake responded with allegations of domestic abuse, infidelity, and cuckoldry in Family Matters. As of the latest, Kendrick has accused Drake of hiding a 2nd child and being a sexual predator of underaged girls.

For those of you with teenage or young adult children, I can almost guarantee they are paying attention to this. Be warned the songs linked do contain liberal use of the n-word, casual misogyny, glorification of violence, etc (aka all the stuff rap critics talk about). Some additional background/details:
  • Drake was shamed into recognizing a son he had with an adult entertainer in a diss by Pusha T in 2018
  • Drake's initial response to Like That was Push Ups, which had what could be interpreted as a reference to Kendrick's long time fiancé. He rapidly followed up without waiting for a response with Taylor Made Freestyle, which was almost jocular in tone and pulled after Tupac's estate threatened to sue over unauthorized use of AI-generated vocals in his style.
  • After releasing euphoria, Kendrick took a page from Drake's book and shot off a 2nd diss track, 6:16 in LA.
  • Drake replied with Family Matters within a day, to which Kendrick fired back within minutes with meet the grahams where he implies an unrecognized daughter of Drake's. It's likely both circles are leaking like sieves and had responses prepared.
  • The latest from Kendrick, Not Like Us, is deeply personal in its rancor and makes life ruining accusations. The cover image is of Drake's house on Citizen App, filled with labels of child predators. People have been shot for less.
If you, like me, are only casually familiar with the hiphop world, you can delve into the meanings of the songs on Genius. I also only now found an NPR article on this, although it came out before things really escalated and became serious.

Microsoft ties executive pay to security following multiple failures and breaches

3 May 2024 at 16:25
A PC running Windows 11.

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

It's been a bad couple of years for Microsoft's security and privacy efforts. Misconfigured endpoints, rogue security certificates, and weak passwords have all caused or risked the exposure of sensitive data, and Microsoft has been criticized by security researchers, US lawmakers, and regulatory agencies for how it has responded to and disclosed these threats.

The most high-profile of these breaches involved a China-based hacking group named Storm-0558, which breached Microsoft's Azure service and collected data for over a month in mid-2023 before being discovered and driven out. After months of ambiguity, Microsoft disclosed that a series of security failures gave Storm-0558 access to an engineer's account, which allowed Storm-0558 to collect data from 25 of Microsoft's Azure customers, including US federal agencies.

In January, Microsoft disclosed that it had been breached again, this time by Russian state-sponsored hacking group Midnight Blizzard. The group was able "to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account" to gain access to Microsoft's systems for "as long as two months."

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Cancer vaccines are having a renaissance

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. 

Last week, Moderna and Merck launched a large clinical trial in the UK of a promising new cancer therapy: a personalized vaccine that targets a specific set of mutations found in each individual’s tumor. This study is enrolling patients with melanoma. But the companies have also launched a phase III trial for lung cancer. And earlier this month BioNTech and Genentech announced that a personalized vaccine they developed in collaboration shows promise in pancreatic cancer, which has a notoriously poor survival rate.

Drug developers have been working for decades on vaccines to help the body’s immune system fight cancer, without much success. But promising results in the past year suggest that the strategy may be reaching a turning point. Will these therapies finally live up to their promise?

This week in The Checkup, let’s talk cancer vaccines. (And, you guessed it, mRNA.)

Long before companies leveraged mRNA to fight covid, they were developing mRNA vaccines to combat cancer. BioNTech delivered its first mRNA vaccines to people with treatment-resistant melanoma nearly a decade ago. But when the pandemic hit, development of mRNA vaccines jumped into warp drive. Now dozens of trials are underway to test whether these shots can transform cancer the way they did covid. 

Recent news has some experts cautiously optimistic. In December, Merck and Moderna announced results from an earlier trial that included 150 people with melanoma who had undergone surgery to have their cancer removed. Doctors administered nine doses of the vaccine over about six months, as well as  what’s known as an immune checkpoint inhibitor. After three years of follow-up, the combination had cut the risk of recurrence or death by almost half compared with the checkpoint inhibitor alone.

The new results reported by BioNTech and Genentech, from a small trial of 16 patients with pancreatic cancer, are equally exciting. After surgery to remove the cancer, the participants received immunotherapy, followed by the cancer vaccine and a standard chemotherapy regimen. Half of them responded to the vaccine, and three years after treatment, six of those people still had not had a recurrence of their cancer. The other two had relapsed. Of the eight participants who did not respond to the vaccine, seven had relapsed. Some of these patients might not have responded  because they lacked a spleen, which plays an important role in the immune system. The organ was removed as part of their cancer treatment. 

The hope is that the strategy will work in many different kinds of cancer. In addition to pancreatic cancer, BioNTech’s personalized vaccine is being tested in colorectal cancer, melanoma, and metastatic cancers.

The purpose of a cancer vaccine is to train the immune system to better recognize malignant cells, so it can destroy them. The immune system has the capacity to clear cancer cells if it can find them. But tumors are slippery. They can hide in plain sight and employ all sorts of tricks to evade our immune defenses. And cancer cells often look like the body’s own cells because, well, they are the body’s own cells.

There are differences between cancer cells and healthy cells, however. Cancer cells acquire mutations that help them grow and survive, and some of those mutations give rise to proteins that stud the surface of the cell—so-called neoantigens.

Personalized cancer vaccines like the ones Moderna and BioNTech are developing are tailored to each patient’s particular cancer. The researchers collect a piece of the patient’s tumor and a sample of healthy cells. They sequence these two samples and compare them in order to identify mutations that are specific to the tumor. Those mutations are then fed into an AI algorithm that selects those most likely to elicit an immune response. Together these neoantigens form a kind of police sketch of the tumor, a rough picture that helps the immune system recognize cancerous cells. 

“A lot of immunotherapies stimulate the immune response in a nonspecific way—that is, not directly against the cancer,” said Patrick Ott, director of the Center for Personal Cancer Vaccines at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in a 2022 interview.  “Personalized cancer vaccines can direct the immune response to exactly where it needs to be.”

How many neoantigens do you need to create that sketch?  “We don’t really know what the magical number is,” says Michelle Brown, vice president of individualized neoantigen therapy at Moderna. Moderna’s vaccine has 34. “It comes down to what we could fit on the mRNA strand, and it gives us multiple shots to ensure that the immune system is stimulated in the right way,” she says. BioNTech is using 20.

The neoantigens are put on an mRNA strand and injected into the patient. From there, they are taken up by cells and translated into proteins, and those proteins are expressed on the cell’s surface, raising an immune response

mRNA isn’t the only way to teach the immune system to recognize neoantigens. Researchers are also delivering neoantigens as DNA, as peptides, or via immune cells or viral vectors. And many companies are working on “off the shelf” cancer vaccines that aren’t personalized, which would save time and expense. Out of about 400 ongoing clinical trials assessing cancer vaccines last fall, roughly 50 included personalized vaccines.

There’s no guarantee any of these strategies will pan out. Even if they do, success in one type of cancer doesn’t automatically mean success against all. Plenty of cancer therapies have shown enormous promise initially, only to fail when they’re moved into large clinical trials.

But the burst of renewed interest and activity around cancer vaccines is encouraging. And personalized vaccines might have a shot at succeeding where others have failed. The strategy makes sense for “a lot of different tumor types and a lot of different settings,” Brown says. “With this technology, we really have a lot of aspirations.”


Now read the rest of The Checkup

Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive

mRNA vaccines transformed the pandemic. But they can do so much more. In this feature from 2023, Jessica Hamzelou covered the myriad other uses of these shots, including fighting cancer. 

This article from 2020 covers some of the background on BioNTech’s efforts to develop personalized cancer vaccines. Adam Piore had the story

Years before the pandemic, Emily Mullin wrote about early efforts to develop personalized cancer vaccines—the promise and the pitfalls. 

From around the web

Yes, there’s bird flu in the nation’s milk supply. About one in five samples had evidence of the H5N1 virus. But new testing by the FDA suggests that the virus is unable to replicate. Pasteurization works! (NYT)

Studies in which volunteers are deliberately infected with covid—so-called challenge trials—have been floated as a way to test drugs and vaccines, and even to learn more about the virus. But it turns out it’s tougher to infect people than you might think. (Nature)

When should women get their first mammogram to screen for breast cancer? It’s a matter of hot debate. In 2009, an expert panel raised the age from 40 to 50. This week they lowered it to 40 again in response to rising cancer rates among younger women. Women with an average risk of breast cancer should get screened every two years, the panel says. (NYT)

Wastewater surveillance helped us track covid. Why not H5N1? A team of researchers from New York argues it might be our best tool for monitoring the spread of this virus. (Stat)

Long read: This story looks at how AI could help us better understand how babies learn language, and focuses on the lab I covered in this story about an AI model trained on the sights and sounds experienced by a single baby. (NYT)

April updates for Windows 10 and 11 break some VPN software, Microsoft says

2 May 2024 at 10:41
April updates for Windows 10 and 11 break some VPN software, Microsoft says

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is currently investigating a bug in its most recent batch of Windows 10 and Windows 11 updates that is preventing some VPN software from working properly. The company updated its list of known Windows issues to say that it has recreated the issue on its end and that it's currently working on a fix.

The VPN issue affects all currently supported versions of Windows: Windows 10 21H2 and 22H2; Windows 11 versions 21H2, 22H2, and 23H2; and Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022.

Microsoft says the problem was caused by update KB5036893, which was initially released on April 9, 2024. The update makes "miscellaneous security improvements to internal OS functionality," among a few other minor changes. The company hasn't provided specific information on what's been broken or what needs fixing, noting only that PCs "might face VPN connection failures" after installing the update.

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iOS 17.5 makes it less of a hassle to send your iPhone into Apple for repairs

1 May 2024 at 11:35
iOS 17.5 makes it less of a hassle to send your iPhone into Apple for repairs

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

If you've ever sent an iPhone in for repair, you might be familiar with the dance Apple asks you to do if your device still powers on: back up your data, then either erase the phone or disable the Find My feature so your phone can easily be serviced (or, if it's being exchanged for a new one, refurbished and resold). If you're also using the Stolen Device Protection and Security Delay feature introduced in iOS 17.3, this can be a pain, since you need to wait a full hour to turn Find My off after you make the request.

It looks like Apple is making some changes to that process in iOS 17.5, which is currently in beta testing. The update adds a new "repair state" mode that leaves the device functional while keeping both Find My and Activation Lock enabled. This means that iPhones swiped while in transit will still be trackable and that they'll still stay locked to your Apple ID so they can't easily be wiped and resold.

MacRumors has a good overview of the feature as it currently functions. You can set an iPhone to repair state mode by pulling it up in the Find My app and attempting to remove the device from your account while it’s still online and active. Rather than removing the device from your account, the app will offer to put it in the repair state instead; unlike when you try to disable Find My entirely, this doesn't trigger the one-hour Security Delay waiting period. If your phone is offline, Find My will offer to remove it from your account, as it currently does.

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Apple will bring sideloading and other EU-mandated changes to iPadOS this fall

2 May 2024 at 13:30
Apple will bring sideloading and other EU-mandated changes to iPadOS this fall

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Starting in March with the release of iOS 17.4, iPhones in the European Union have been subject to the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), a batch of regulations that (among other things) forced Apple to support alternate app stores, app sideloading, and third-party browser engines in iOS for the first time. This week, EU regulators announced that they are also categorizing Apple's iPadOS as a "gatekeeper," meaning that the iPad will soon be subject to the same regulations as the iPhone.

In a developer blog post released today, Apple said that it would comply with the EU's regulations "later this fall, as required." All changes that Apple has made to iOS on European iPhones to comply with the DMA will be implemented in the same way on the iPad, though it's not clear whether these changes will be brought to iPadOS 17 or if they'll just be a part of the upcoming iPacOS 18 update.

The EU began investigating whether iPadOS would qualify as a gatekeeper in September 2023, the same day it decided that iOS, the Safari browser, and the App Store were all gatekeepers.

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