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Editor’s note: This story is being highlighted in ASU Now’s year in review. Read more top stories from 2018 here.

In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists, in collaboration with researchers from the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply.

“We have developed the first fully autonomous, DNA robotic system for a very precise drug design and targeted cancer therapy,” said Hao Yan, director of the ASU Biodesign Institute’s Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics and the Milton Glick Professor in the School of Molecular Sciences.

Almost 99% of all human ancestors may have been wiped out around 930,000 years ago, a new paper has claimed.

The new research, published in the journal Science, used DNA from living people to suggest that humans went through a bottleneck, an event where populations shrink drastically. The paper estimates that as few as 1,300 humans were left for a period of around 120,000 years.

While the exact causes aren’t certain, the near-extinction has been blamed on Africa’s climate getting much colder and drier.

Perfecting the heat tiles for the Starship is crucial for its re-entry and landing, and SpaceX’s progress in recovering the ship is essential due to the high cost of each launch Questions to inspire discussion What is SpaceX preparing for with the Starship? —SpaceX is preparing for the fourth flight of the Starship, aiming to smooth out any remaining issues and perfecting the heat tiles for re-entry.

16K likes, — primaltrust_official on May 9, 2024: ‘The amazing and awe inspiring creation of new neural pathways! This is what we talk about so much in brain rewiring, here you can actuall…’

ChatGPT is about to become a lot more useful.

OpenAI on Monday announced its latest artificial intelligence large language model that it says will make ChatGPT smarter and easier to use.

The new model, called GPT-4o, is an update from the company’s previous GPT-4 model, which launched just over a year ago. The model will be available to unpaid customers, meaning anyone will have access to OpenAI’s most advanced technology through ChatGPT.

Scientists have published the most detailed data set to date on the neural connections of the brain, which was obtained from a cubic millimeter of tissue sample.


A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something stupendous.

Led by Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and newly appointed dean of science, the Harvard team helped create the largest 3D brain reconstruction to date, showing in vivid detail each cell and its web of connections in a piece of temporal cortex about half the size of a rice grain.

Published in Science, the study is the latest development in a nearly 10-year collaboration with scientists at Google Research, combining Lichtman’s electron microscopy imaging with AI algorithms to color-code and reconstruct the extremely complex wiring of mammal brains. The paper’s three first co-authors are former Harvard postdoc Alexander Shapson-Coe, Michał Januszewski of Google Research, and Harvard postdoc Daniel Berger.