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A team of researchers in Spain has achieved a breakthrough by capturing the world’s first detailed images of a human cell’s ‘highway network’ beginning to emerge.

The high-resolution images and atomic-scale film help explain a longstanding puzzle of how small structures called microtubules form during cell division. The discovery could progress the development of targeted treatments for cancer, and many other conditions.

“Microtubules are critical components of cells, but all the images we see in textbooks describing the first moments of their creation are models or cartoons based on structures in yeast,” says biochemist Thomas Surrey from the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona.

Scientific research continuously expands our collective knowledge and pushes innovation forward. But what good is that innovation if it isn’t accessible to large swaths of the global population?

English is the standard language for most scientific communication — nearly 98% of scientific research is published in English. While standardizing scientific publications into a single language can streamline discussion, it is incredibly limiting for populations that don’t speak English.

A UCLA-led project aims to alleviate this issue. A collaboration among the UCLA Brain Research Institute, the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the nonprofit organization Knowing Neurons is translating the informational content on Knowing Neurons’ platform into Spanish. Created by a group of graduate students at UCLA and USC in 2012, Knowing Neurons works to make neuroscience accessible to people interested in learning about the brain.

When Lex Friedman visited our MIT AI Venture Studio class to talk about the future of AI, we got into some pretty interesting ideas about the near future.

At the top of Lex’s comments, he talked about disruption – predicting that two new trillion-dollar companies will emerge out of the AI era, and suggesting that Google, Meta and Microsoft will likely not be able to pivot quickly enough to maintain their dominance.

In terms of where we might see this innovation, one of his focus points was on language. Lex pointed out that in America, we take it for granted that everyone speaks English – but around the world, there is an enormous market for real, precise speech translation. People, he said, speak many languages in an “intimate” way – and that requires precision on the part of the technology.

Scientists have welcomed a “truly wonderful” new drug for a hard-to-treat and aggressive form of cancer.

Researchers led by a team at Queen Mary University of London said their new treatment “quadrupled” three-year survival rates and increased average survival by 1.6 months.

Academics said that the new drug, which works by cutting off the tumour ’s food supply, is the first of its type for mesothelioma in 20 years.