Ancient humans in Africa changed their behaviour in a major way 70,000 years ago, which could explain how their descendants managed to people the rest of the world
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“We Engineered the Perfect Space Food”: US Scientists Unveil Super-Dwarf Plant Designed to Keep Astronauts Alive and Thriving on Years-Long Missions to Mars
IN A NUTSHELL 🌾 The Moon-Rice project is developing “super-dwarf” rice to support long-duration space missions and extreme Earth environments. 🛰️ Led by the Italian Space Agency, the project involves collaboration between three Italian universities specializing in rice genetics, crop physiology, and space crop production. 🔬 The research focuses on using CRISPR-Cas technology to create
Telescope With 26 84-Megapixel Cameras Will Look for a Second Earth Among 200,000 Stars
The Europeans, for instance, have a bucket full of plans in place in this field. One of them is called the PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations (PLATO) space telescope, and it’s scheduled for launch in 2026 with the stated goal of looking at “terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. ”
That would be the planets most likely to host life as we know it, located not too far and not too close to their stars to allow water to exist in liquid form, solid enough and with just the right amount of gravity to be life-friendly.
PLATO was first proposed in 2014 in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cosmic Vision 2015–25 plan as the third medium class mission. It was first reviewed in 2022, and then it go the thumbs up in the critical design review in 2024, and it’s now being assembled at Orbitale Hochtechnologie Bremen (OHB) in Germany.
AI that thinks like us—and could help explain how we think
Researchers at Helmholtz Munich have developed an artificial intelligence model that can simulate human behavior with remarkable accuracy. The language model, called Centaur, was trained on more than ten million decisions from psychological experiments—and makes decisions in ways that closely resemble those of real people. This opens new avenues for understanding human cognition and improving psychological theories.
For decades, psychology has aspired to explain the full complexity of human thought. Yet traditional models could either offer a transparent explanation of how people think—or reliably predict how they behave. Achieving both has long seemed out of reach.
The team led by Dr. Marcel Binz and Dr. Eric Schulz, both researchers at the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Helmholtz Munich, has now developed a model that combines both. Centaur was trained using a specially curated dataset called Psych-101, which includes over ten million individual decisions from 160 behavioral experiments. The study is published in the journal Nature.
How o3 and Grok 4 Accidentally Vindicated Neurosymbolic AI
Neurosymbolic AI is not one thing, but many. o3’s use of neurosymbolic AI is very different from AlphaFold’s use of neurosymbolic AI. Very little of what has been tried has been discussed explicitly, and because the companies are often quite closed about what they are doing, the public science of neurosymbolic AI is greatly impoverished.
Personalized Cancer Vaccine Proves Promising in a Phase 1 Trial at Mount Sinai
New York, NY (March 17, 2025) Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, led by Nina Bhardwaj, MD, PhD, Ward-Coleman Chair in Cancer Research and Director of the Vaccine and Cell Therapy Laboratory, have tested a promising new type of personalized multi-peptide neoantigen cancer vaccine, called PGV001, in a small group of patients. This early study (phase 1 trial) is an important step in finding better ways to help people fight cancer. The vaccine uses multiple peptides (amino acid sequences) to help the body’s immune system recognize and attack cancer cells and stop the disease from coming back. The findings are available in the latest issue of Cancer Discovery , a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Over the last decade, immune-based therapies have transformed cancer treatment, including CAR T cells, bi-specific antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, and immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI). These approaches have significantly improved outcomes, but some patients do not respond or eventually develop resistance. Personalized cancer vaccines, like PGV001, aim to overcome these challenges by training the immune system to recognize unique cancer mutations, called neoantigens, and mount a stronger, targeted response.
PGV001 can be made to fit each patient’s unique cancer. Scientists use advanced tools to find neoantigens—tiny changes in cancer cells—that are not found in healthy cells. The vaccine then teaches the immune system to target these changes, making treatment more personal and precise. Unlike tumor-associated antigens, neoantigens are not subject to central tolerance, meaning they can trigger a robust immune attack against cancer cells.
Scientists map pathogens that plagued humans for 37,000 years
Researchers have uncovered the types of bacteria, viruses and parasites that plagued ancient humans across Europe and Asia as far back as 37,000 years ago.
An international team, including researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Lund University, Sweden, Curtin University, Australia, has created an archaeogenetic-based map of human pathogens across both time and geography.
“Infectious diseases have had devastating effects on human populations throughout history, but important questions about their origins and past dynamics remain,” the authors write.
