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2 new NASA satellites will track space weather to help keep us safe from solar storms

“TRACERS joins the fleet of current heliophysics missions that are actively increasing our understanding of the sun, space weather, and how to mitigate its impacts,” said Westlake.

The $170 million TRACERS is set to launch no earlier than the end of July on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will be carrying several other small missions into orbit at the same time. The answers that TRACERS could provide about how magnetic reconnection works will allow scientists to better protect critical infrastructure for when solar storms hit.

“It’s going to help us keep our way of life safe here on Earth,” said Westlake.

“We Gave AI $20 Million to Rethink Science”: Nexus Super-System Set to Turbocharge US Innovation Like Never Before

IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 Nexus, a $20 million supercomputer, is set to transform U.S. scientific research with its AI power. 🔬 Designed for accessibility, Nexus democratizes high-performance computing, allowing researchers nationwide to apply for access. 🌐 Georgia Tech, in collaboration with the NCSA, is creating a shared national research infrastructure through Nexus. 📈 With unprecedented

Stevia leaf extract has potential as anticancer treatment, researchers find

Stevia may provide more benefits than as a zero-calorie sugar substitute. When fermented with bacteria isolated from banana leaves, stevia extract kills off pancreatic cancer cells but doesn’t harm healthy kidney cells, according to a research team at Hiroshima University.

The researchers published their findings on April 28 in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.

“Globally, the incidence and mortality rates of continue to rise, with a five-year survival rate of less than 10%,” said co-author Narandalai Danshiitsoodol, associate professor in Department of Probiotic Science for Preventive Medicine, Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Sciences.

What is consciousness, and could AI have it?

In the Voltaire Lecture 2025, Professor Anil Seth will set out an approach to understanding consciousness which, rather than trying to solve the mystery head-on, tries to dissolve it by building explanatory bridges from physics and biology to experience and function. In this view, conscious experiences of the world around us, and of being a ‘self’ within that world, can be understood in terms of perceptual predictions that are deeply rooted in a fundamental biological imperative – the desire to stay alive.

At this event, Professor Seth will explore how widely distributed beyond human beings consciousness may be, with a particular focus on AI. He will consider whether consciousness might depend not just on ‘information processing’, but on properties unique to living, biological organisms, before ending with an exploration of the ethical implications of an artificial intelligence that is either actually conscious – or can convincingly pretend to be.

How Distillation Makes AI Models Smaller and Cheaper

Considering that the distillation requires access to the innards of the teacher model, it’s not possible for a third party to sneakily distill data from a closed-source model like OpenAI’s o1, as DeepSeek was thought to have done. That said, a student model could still learn quite a bit from a teacher model just through prompting the teacher with certain questions and using the answers to train its own models — an almost Socratic approach to distillation.

Meanwhile, other researchers continue to find new applications. In January, the NovaSky lab at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that distillation works well for training chain-of-thought reasoning models, which use multistep “thinking” to better answer complicated questions. The lab says its fully open-source Sky-T1 model cost less than $450 to train, and it achieved similar results to a much larger open-source model. “We were genuinely surprised by how well distillation worked in this setting,” said Dacheng Li, a Berkeley doctoral student and co-student lead of the NovaSky team. “Distillation is a fundamental technique in AI.”

Ancient Killer Is Rapidly Becoming Resistant to Antibiotics, Warns Study

In spite of having plagued humans for millennia, t yphoid fever is rarely considered in developed countries today. But this ancient threat is still very much a danger in our modern world.

According to research published in 2022, the bacterium that causes typhoid fever is evolving extensive drug resistance, and is rapidly replacing strains that aren’t resistant.

Currently, antibiotics are the only way to effectively treat typhoid, which is caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S Typhi). Yet over the past three decades, the bacterium’s resistance to oral antibiotics has been growing and spreading.