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British physician and microbiologist Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin nearly 100 years ago, was the first to warn of the dangers of antibiotic resistance.

In his 1945 Nobel Prize speech, 27 years after his breakthrough discovery, Fleming put the world on notice foretelling a potentially dark future for his miracle drug in the event of abuse or overuse of the medication. It was a warning that spelled trouble ahead for a vast segment of the pharmacopeia known as antimicrobial drugs.

Now, microbiologists in Hungary and China are collaborating on ways to predict drug resistance among strains of Staphylococcus aureus when exposed to antibiotics in the drug development pipeline—drugs that have yet to reach the marketplace.

Intel’s 18A is said to report an SRAM density equal to that of TSMC’s N2 process, signaling a massive breakthrough for the IFS and its semiconductor ambitions.

Intel’s 18A Process Is a “Special” One, Credits To Implementations Such As BSPDN Along With Years of R&D Behind It

Well, it seems like now might be the time to be bullish on the future of Intel’s chip plans, since the latest reports are clearly indicating that the momentum is shifting towards Team Blue. Following the political backing of the Trump administration, it is now disclosed via ISSCC sessions (via Ian Cutress) that both TSMC and Intel’s cutting-edge processes are rivaling each other in SRAM densities, showing that the gap has been narrowed down significantly, at least in one of the important aspects.

Elad Harel is used to shining a light on the mysteries of the natural world.

Working at the cutting edge of ultrafast spectroscopy—the use of short laser pulses to analyze molecular dynamics—the Michigan State University associate professor seeks to uncover how microscopic phenomena impact large complex systems.

One promising frontier Harel has been working on is the development of new methods of microscopy that will allow researchers to observe molecular and atomic landscapes in motion rather than through static imagery. Such work has earned Harel MSU’s 2023 Innovation of the Year award, as well as MSU’s first-ever grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation.

The key breakthrough? Finding a gene small enough to fit inside a viral delivery system. Early results in lab models suggest this therapy could be a game-changer, but further research is needed before it reaches clinical trials.

The Urgent Need for Better Arrhythmia Treatments

Cardiac arrhythmias affect millions worldwide and contribute to one in five deaths in the Netherlands. Current treatment options range from lifelong medication to invasive surgeries. However, new research from Amsterdam UMC and Johns Hopkins University, published today (February 20) in the European Heart Journal, marks a significant step toward a potential one-time gene therapy that could enhance heart function and prevent arrhythmias.

Will the dream of interstellar travel soon become reality? Experts have been working for some time on concepts that will one day enable us to enter foreign star systems. Until now, the vast expanses of space have always thwarted this ambitious desire – after all, even the Alpha Centauri system, which is only 4.34 light-years away, is tens of thousands of travel years away with our current means! But now NASA has presented a revolutionary propulsion technology that should get us to the star system of our dreams in just 40 years! But how does the groundbreaking Sunbeam drive work? What technical tricks will make the vast distances of the cosmos seem forgotten – and when will the first interstellar research probe leave Earth?

It’s a breakthrough in cancer treatment, and UChicago Medicine is one of the first hospitals to offer it.

It’s not just one treatment, but can eventually become a whole new way to treat cancer.

Alla Pinzour has been fighting skin cancer for around 15 years—but not anymore.

Targeted Radiation: A Breakthrough in Cancer Treatment

Radiation is one of the most powerful tools for destroying tumors, but traditional radiation therapy can’t distinguish between cancerous and healthy cells, often causing harmful side effects.

Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) represent a breakthrough in AI problem-solving capabilities, but their effectiveness in interactive environments can be limited. This paper introduces and analyzes overthinking in LRMs. A phenomenon where models favor extended internal reasoning chains over environmental interaction. Through experiments on software engineering tasks using SWE Bench Verified, we observe three recurring patterns: Analysis Paralysis, Rogue Actions, and Premature Disengagement. We propose a framework to study these behaviors, which correlates with human expert assessments, and analyze 4,018 trajectories. We observe that higher overthinking scores correlate with decreased performance, with reasoning models exhibiting stronger tendencies toward overthinking compared to non-reasoning models. Our analysis reveals that simple efforts to mitigate overthinking in agentic environments, such as selecting the solution with the lower overthinking score, can improve model performance by almost 30% while reducing computational costs by 43%. These results suggest that mitigating overthinking has strong practical implications. We suggest that by leveraging native function-calling capabilities and selective reinforcement learning overthinking tendencies could be mitigated. We also open-source our evaluation framework and dataset to facilitate research in this direction at this https URL.

From: Alejandro Cuadron [view email].