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Electricity-generating bacteria may power future innovations

A team led by Rice University bioscientist Caroline Ajo-Franklin has discovered how certain bacteria breathe by generating electricity, using a natural process that pushes electrons into their surroundings instead of breathing on oxygen. The findings, published in Cell last month, could enable new developments in clean energy and industrial biotechnology.

By identifying how these bacteria expel electrons externally, the researchers offer a glimpse into a previously hidden strategy of bacterial life. This work, which merges biology with electrochemistry, lays the groundwork for future technologies that harness the unique capabilities of these microscopic organisms.

“Our research not only solves a long-standing scientific mystery, but it also points to a new and potentially widespread survival strategy in nature,” said Ajo-Franklin, professor of biosciences, director of the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute and a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Scholar.

Translating Alzheimer’s disease proteomics into drug discovery opportunities

Proteomic studies have identified thousands of protein changes in human Alzheimer’s disease brain tissue, offering significant opportunities for therapeutic and biomarker discovery. In this review, we discuss the current proteomic landscape of Alzheimer’s disease brain tissue, detailing protein changes across disease stages, brain regions, and neuropathological lesions (amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles and cerebral amyloid angiopathy). By performing a combined analysis of 53 proteomics studies of human Alzheimer’s disease brain tissue, we highlight proteins of particular interest for future studies including highly reproducible protein changes across many studies, proteins altered in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease, and proteins significantly enriched in neuropathological lesions. This combined analysis revealed early synaptic vulnerability, progressive mitochondrial dysfunction and glial activation, and the prominent involvement of extracellular, glycosaminoglycan-binding proteins in amyloid plaques. We discuss key considerations for prioritising proteomic hits for drug discovery including disease relevance, safety considerations, assayability, and how protein structure can influence druggability. We discuss the careful consideration required for selecting an appropriate animal or cell model of Alzheimer’s disease for functional studies of proteomic hits and drug screening. We detail the strengths and limitations of several commonly used Alzheimer’s disease models including transgenic mouse models, iPSC derived cells, 3D cell cultures, organoids and emerging neurovascular organ-on-a-chip systems. Together, this review outlines a roadmap for translating proteomic discoveries into clinically meaningful therapies.

Radioimmunotherapy (RIT) in AML Transplant Conditioning: Can Radiation Be Targeted to Leukemia?

Reduced-intensity conditioning (RIC) has made allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (allo-HCT) accessible to older patients and those who can’t tolerate myeloablative conditioning. The trade-off is less pre-transplant cytoreduction, and relapse remains a major limitation, especially in acute myeloid leukemia with adverse molecular or cytogenetic features and in patients who are MRD-positive at transplant.

Radioimmunotherapy (RIT) is being explored as a way to intensify leukemia-directed radiation without proportionally increasing radiation exposure to nonhematopoietic organs. A monoclonal antibody recognizes an antigen expressed in the hematopoietic compartment and carries a therapeutic radionuclide to the marrow, spleen and other sites of disease. It can be incorporated into an RIC transplant regimen.

The biological rationale, clinical experience, and emerging α-emitter platforms are reviewed in Frontiers. The clinical evidence remains early phase, but it shows that substantial radiation doses can be concentrated in hematopoietic tissues with reliable donor engraftment.

Byron Reese on Stories, Dice and Rocks That Think

In the summer of 2022, a few months before ChatGPT showed up and scrambled everyone’s sense of the future, Byron Reese told me he was a techno-optimist and an AI skeptic.

Both at once.

Four years later, that combination looks less like a contradiction and more like one of the few defensible positions left in the room.

And his skepticism doesn’t come from the sidelines. Byron has two NASDAQ IPOs behind him and was running a company that uses AI to build products when we spoke.

Our two-hour conversation was officially about his book “Stories, Dice and Rocks That Think.” His argument: stories let us imagine the future, dice let us calculate it, and thinking rocks (computer chips) let us build it. But we ended up in places I didn’t plan for. A stone hand axe that our ancestors barely changed for over a million years. Helen Keller and the moment language switched on a mind. The Stoned Ape Theory of #consciousness. And why punctuality is a virtue somebody had to invent from the top down.

That last one stayed with me. If the clock could redefine what a good person looks like, what is #AI quietly redefining right now?

Continue reading “Byron Reese on Stories, Dice and Rocks That Think” | >

Black hole jets reach far beyond galaxies’ visible edges, potentially deciding their fate

Galaxies are enormous and hold hundreds of billions of stars. These stars form from cold, dense gas. Every large galaxy, including the Milky Way, is wrapped in a huge envelope of gas called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This reservoir of raw material stretches 10–20 times the size of the visible portion of the galaxy.

The gas eventually cools, moves inward and clumps together to form stars. Thus, the CGM plays a key role in shaping stars, planets and even life within a galaxy.

But astronomers have long puzzled over why, given how much star-forming gas surrounds them, galaxies don’t have even more stars. What is keeping the fuel from cooling down and forming those stars?

Quality of Life, on Earth and Beyond: Space Renaissance International 4th World Congress 2026 Congress Theses, Final Resolution and Papers: Autino, Mr. Adriano V.: 9798177242019: Amazon.com: Books

Quality of Life, on Earth and Beyond: Space Renaissance International 4th World Congress 2026 Congress Theses, Final Resolution and Papers [Autino, Mr. Adriano V.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Quality of Life, on Earth and Beyond: Space Renaissance International 4th World Congress 2026 Congress Theses, Final Resolution and Papers.

Using Claude Science to produce the first complete map of the sky in UV light

Anthropic released a study demonstrating how autonomous AI agents using Claude generated the first complete, seamless map of the entire sky in ultraviolet (UV) light.

While complete all-sky maps have long existed in visible, infrared, radio, and X-ray spectrums, UV astronomy faced a major bottleneck: Earth’s atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet light, requiring space telescopes like NASA’s GALEX and Swift. Because those missions only surveyed targeted regions, roughly one-third of the celestial sky had never been observed in UV, leaving the existing data fragmented with blank spots and calibration artifacts.

How Claude Created the Map.

Rather than simply generating an image, Claude acted as an orchestrator across a complex scientific data pipeline:

1. Data Ingestion & Cleaning: Claude ingested decades of public observation data from space missions—including NASA GALEX, Swift-UVOT, SPEAR/FIMS, and star catalogs from ESA’s Gaia mission.

2. Artifact Correction: The system diagnosed and fixed systematic errors across 38,000 individual telescope observations—such as stray atmospheric glow and bright star contamination—which human teams hadn’t standardized due to sheer volume.

3. Statistical Inpainting: To fill the unobserved third of the sky, Claude used multi-wavelength templates (combining dust maps and stellar catalogs) to predict the missing UV emission. When cross-referenced against ground-truth test regions, its predictions were accurate to within 10%.

Continue reading “Using Claude Science to produce the first complete map of the sky in UV light” | >
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