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80s USB Stick Cost $500,000 #Beyond2000 #Shorts

Half a million dollars. That’s what a complete system for reading this high-density optical disc could set you back, and each disc held 40,000 pages of information. The pitch? Think of the money you’d save on paper. Printing everything on a metre-high stack of these discs would take a strip of paper 6,000 kilometres long. Today the same 40,000 pages fit on a USB stick that costs less than lunch. — Welcome to the official Beyond 2000 channel, where you’ll find weird inventions, retro technology and the future the way we imagined it back in the ’80s and ’90s: flying machines, robot jockeys, a car that folds into a suitcase, virtual reality in 1987, the smart homes of the ’80s and wearable gadgets that actually existed. Some of these came true, some never took off, and some are still waiting. Here you’ll find compilations of weird and unnecessary inventions, full episodes of Beyond 2000 and Before 2000, and clips of our favourite inventions from the archive. New videos every week. Subscribe for more of the future we imagined.

A decade of CAR-T cell therapy at Mayo Clinic: From experimental treatment to new frontiers (VIDEO)

From early clinical trials to an established CAR-T Cell Therapy Program, Mayo Clinic has delivered the transformative therapy to over 1,500 patients.

A decade ago, chimeric antigen receptor-T cell therapy, or CAR-T cell therapy, was an experimental treatment only available through clinical trials. Today, Mayo Clinic offers CAR-T cell therapy at all three sites in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota and continues to explore new frontiers for the life-changing treatment.

That progress traces back to Mayo Clinic’s early involvement in research exploring CAR-T cell therapy for patients with few remaining options.

Printed electronics turn mattress protectors into fall-risk monitors

Australian medtech company Sleeptite and RMIT University researchers have secured a U.S. patent for smart bedding technology designed to monitor residents’ well-being in health care settings and identify fall risk so caregivers can intervene.

A recent study by RMIT and Sleeptite shows the technology can be manufactured using scalable production techniques while maintaining performance and durability.

Now, Sleeptite has unveiled the technology at The MedTech Conference—a high-profile gathering of medical technology industry leaders held in Boston—as part of an Australian trade delegation led by AUScelerate. The study is published in the journal Flexible and Printed Electronics.

New virtual assistant streamlines one of the most advanced microscopes

Some of the most important discoveries in materials science and structural biology come down to a simple question: Where, exactly, are the atoms? The arrangement of atoms determines nearly everything about how a material behaves in the real world—how strong it is, how it conducts electricity, how a battery stores energy, or how a drug binds to a cell.

To answer that question, scientists use transmission electron microscopes. Researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), operate several of these microscopes, including some of the most advanced in the world, capable of imaging structures roughly half the size of a hydrogen atom (or 60 billion times smaller than you). This gives outside researchers access to equipment they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

That access to complex equipment comes with a steep learning curve. As a user facility, the Molecular Foundry hosts scientists from universities, companies, and other institutions who don’t have access to the specialized electron microscopes at their home labs. Some visiting researchers arrive with a semester of coursework in electron microscopy basics, but still need weeks of hands-on training to run the lab’s more advanced techniques.

Cracks that carry current: Virginia Tech researchers unlock the secrets of liquid metal and electricity

In a new study, mechanical engineering researchers reveal how microscopic cracks can turn an insulating material into an electrical conductor, perfect for electronics that need to stretch, bend, and flex.

Deleted AI chats may leave clues behind

Deleting a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant may not erase everything the assistant remembers. Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tool that can recover deleted conversations from AI assistants running on Android phones. The tool, called ORISA, can also rebuild the recovered information into a working AI session.

The findings show that deleting an AI conversation on a phone does not necessarily mean it removes every trace.

The research could give digital investigators a new way to recover information from phones. It also raises privacy concerns for people who use AI assistants that run locally on their devices.

Deepseek-ai/dsh-superagent-prototype: Towards a More Autonomous Agent System

DeepSeek launches “Super-Agent,” a new open-source AI coding agent designed to rival Anthropic’s Claude Code.

DeepSeek’s Super-Agent is an open-source, always-on AI coding agent architecture released by DeepSeek’s Harness team on GitHub under the MIT license.

Positioned as an autonomous alternative to tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code, Super-Agent shifts the focus from model capability to solving human attention limits in software development.

Key Architecture: Two-Layer “Router & Worker”

Traditional terminal or single-session AI coding tools require constant human monitoring and prompt management. DeepSeek’s Super-Agent breaks this paradigm using a two-tier system:

1. The Router (The Triage Layer): An always-on, lightweight agent that monitors group chats (Slack, WeChat), GitHub pull requests, and CI/CD pipelines. It handles initial entry points, prioritizes triggers, and delegates work without executing shell commands itself.

2. Workers (Isolated Execution Sessions): Spun off by the Router, individual Workers use full-capability LLMs and shell toolsets to execute specific coding tasks in parallel.

Large language models show product name convergence in drug recommendations

In a benchmark analysis spanning 123 disease–drug pairs and 1,440 sociodemographic profiles, five large language models recommended the same drug product for a given active ingredient in 97.5% of cases and favoured originator products over available generics.