How the Red Planet acquired its two moons, Phobos and Deimos, is unknown – they could have formed after something collided with the planet, or started out as asteroids – but now there is a hint of a cometary origin.
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Elon Musk reveals plan for next Starship mission
The static fire test comes less than two weeks after the last Starship mission, which saw the rocket reach orbital velocity for the first time before breaking up upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief operating officer, said last week that the next launch attempt could take place in the “beginning part of May”, though no payload will be onboard.
The fourth major flight test of the fully stacked Starship rocket system will instead aim to resolve the issues that arose during the last mission.
Kate Rice — Cured: Stage 4 Cancer and the Culture That Caused It (The HEAL Podcast)
Listen to this episode of The HEAL Podcast with Kate Rice on…Spotify — https://tinyurl.com/yt7eha76Apple Podcasts — https://tinyurl.com/3fftfxptEPISODE DES…
Clinical trial: Some sarcoma patients improve with T cell immunotherapy
A clinical trial led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown that a T cell immunotherapy—in which the patients’ own T cells are genetically modified to attack and kill cancer cells—is effective in treating some patients with rare cancers of the body’s soft tissues.
Antibody Therapy Rejuvenates Aging Mouse Immune System, Boosting Vaccine Response
The results of the team’s research showed that the approach, targeting a subset of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that increase with age, rebalanced blood-cell production and reduced age-related immune decline. The treatment significantly improved the ability of geriatric animals’ immune systems to tackle a new virus, and to respond to vaccination, enabling the animals to fight off a new viral threat months later.
“This is a real paradigm shift—researchers and clinicians should think in a new way about the immune system and aging,” said Stanford postdoctoral scholar Jason Ross, MD, PhD. “The idea that it’s possible to tune the entire immune system of millions of cells simply by affecting the function of such a rare population is surprising and exciting.”
Weissman, who is professor of pathology and of developmental biology, and Kim Hasenkrug, PhD, the chief of Rocky Mountain Laboratories’ Retroviral Immunology Section, are senior authors of the team’s published study in Nature, titled “Depleting myeloid-biased haematopoietic stem cells rejuvenates aged immunity.” Ross and Lara Myers, PhD, a research fellow at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, are lead authors of the report, in which the team concluded, “The clinical development of safe protocols to rebalance HSCs could have broad effects on a number of age-associated issues.”
New imaging method illuminates oxygen’s journey in the brain
The human brain consumes vast amounts of energy, which is almost exclusively generated from a form of metabolism that requires oxygen. While the efficient and timely delivery of oxygen is known to be critical to healthy brain function, the precise mechanics of this process have largely remained hidden from scientists.
Cerebras Update: The Wafer Scale Engine 3 Is A Door Opener
Cerebras held an AI Day, and in spite of the concurrently running GTC, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house.
As we have noted, Cerebras Systems is one of the very few startups that is actually getting some serious traction in training AI, at least from a handful of clients. They just introduced the third generation of Wafer-Scale Engines, a monster of a chip that can outperform racks of GPUs, as well as a partnership with Qualcomm to provide custom training and Go-To-Market collaboration with the Edge AI leader. Here’s a few take-aways from the AI Day event. Lots of images from Cerebras, but they tell the story quite well! We will cover the challenges this bold startup still faces in the Conclusions at the end.
As the third generation of wafer-scale engines, the new WSE-3 and the system in which it runs, the CS-3, is an engineering marvel. While Cerebras likes to compare it to a single GPU chip, thats really not the point, which is to simplify scaling. Why cut up a a wafer of chips, package each with HBM, put the package on a board, connect to CPUs with a fabric, then tie them all back together with networking chips and cables? Thats a lot of complexity that leads to a lot of programing to distribute the workload via various forms of parallelism then tie them all back together into a supercomputer. Cerebras thinks it has a better idea.