Feb. 22, 2025: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.
A new breakthrough in cosmic mapping has unveiled the structure of a colossal filament, part of the vast cosmic web that connects galaxies.
Dark matter and gas shape these filaments, but their faint glow makes them hard to detect. By using advanced telescope technology and hundreds of hours of observation, astronomers have captured the most detailed image yet, bringing us closer to decoding the evolution of galaxies and the hidden forces shaping the universe.
The hidden order of the universe.
Science and Technology: Gene Therapy apparently Cure Blindness in Children.
S eye, very early in life, to treat a severe form of the condition.‘.
An experimental trial of gene therapy has helped four toddlers — born with one of the most severe forms of childhood blindness — gain “life-changing improvements” to their sight, according to doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.
The rare genetic condition means the babies’ vision deteriorated very rapidly from birth.
He emphasized that enhancing intelligence models is key to Alibaba’s long-term vision as it shifts towards AI technologies.
This aligns with Alibaba’s declaration as an AI-driven company.
While e-commerce remains central, Alibaba’s cloud services saw strong growth, with revenue rising 13% last quarter. AI-related products within the cloud division posted triple-digit growth.
Introduces the first World and Human Action Model (WHAM). The WHAM, which we’ve named “Muse,” is a generative AI model of a video game that can generate game visuals, controller actions, or both.
Today Nature published Microsoft’s research detailing our WHAM, an AI model that generates video game visuals & controller actions. We are releasing the model weights, sample data, & WHAM Demonstrator on Azure AI Foundry, enabling researchers to build on the work.
Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes, and sometimes two instruments, ingeniously recombined, can accomplish feats that neither could have done on its own.
Such is the case with a hybrid microscope, born at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), that for the first time allows scientists to simultaneously image the full 3D orientation and position of an ensemble of molecules, such as labeled proteins inside cells. The research is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The microscope combines polarized fluorescence technology, a valuable tool for measuring the orientation of molecules, with a dual-view light sheet microscope (diSPIM), which excels at imaging along the depth (axial) axis of a sample.
Rubidium could be the next key player in oxide-ion conductors. Researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo have discovered a rare rubidium (Rb)-containing oxide-ion conductor, Rb5BiMo4O16, with exceptionally high conductivity.
Identified through computational screening and experiments, its superior performance stems from low activation energy and structural features like large free volume and tetrahedral motion. Its stability under various conditions offers a promising direction for solid oxide fuel cells and clean energy technologies.
Oxide-ion conductors enable oxide ions (O2-) to be transported in solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), which can run on diverse fuels beyond hydrogen, including natural gas, and biogas, and even certain liquid hydrocarbons. This flexibility makes them particularly valuable during the transition to a hydrogen economy.
Summary of the open innovation session at the NATO Innovation Network Conference — 9 Nov 2021. Credit: Dimitris Moulas.
Very excellent.
Arc Institute researchers have developed a machine learning model called Evo 2 that is trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across the entire tree of life. Its deep understanding of biological code means that Evo 2 can identify patterns in gene sequences across disparate organisms that experimental researchers would need years to uncover. The model can accurately identify disease-causing mutations in human genes and is capable of designing new genomes that are as long as the genomes of simple bacteria.
Evo 2’s developers—made up of scientists from Arc Institute and NVIDIA, convening collaborators across Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco—will post details about the model as a preprint on February 19, 2025, accompanied by a user-friendly interface called Evo Designer. The Evo 2 code is publicly accessible from Arc’s GitHub, and is also integrated into the NVIDIA BioNeMo framework, as part of a collaboration between Arc Institute and NVIDIA to accelerate scientific research. Arc Institute also worked with AI research lab Goodfire to develop a mechanistic interpretability visualizer that uncovers the key biological features and patterns the model learns to recognize in genomic sequences. The Evo team is sharing its training data, training and inference code, and model weights to release the largest-scale, fully open source AI model to date.
Building on its predecessor Evo 1, which was trained entirely on single-cell genomes, Evo 2 is the largest artificial intelligence model in biology to date, trained on over 9.3 trillion nucleotides—the building blocks that make up DNA or RNA—from over 128,000 whole genomes as well as metagenomic data. In addition to an expanded collection of bacterial, archaeal, and phage genomes, Evo 2 includes information from humans, plants, and other single-celled and multi-cellular species in the eukaryotic domain of life.