Circulating B cells often react to self-antigen, but whether this predisposes for autoimmunity is unclear. Using a mouse model of lupus erythematosus, Zhu et al. demonstrate that human B cells displaying naturally autoreactive immunoglobulin sequences are advantaged for retention when immune tolerance is broken.
Physical systems that can learn by themselves.
Brains learn and perform an enormous variety of tasks on their own, using relatively little energy. Brains are able to accomplish this without an external computer because their analog constituent parts (neurons) update their connections without knowing what all the other neurons are doing using local rules. We have developed an approach to learning that shares the property that analog constituent parts update their properties via a local rule, but does not otherwise emulate the brain. Instead, we exploit physics to learn in a far simpler way. Our collaborators have implemented this approach in the lab, developing physical systems that learn and perform machine learning tasks on their own with little energy cost. These systems should open up the opportunity to study how many more is different within a new paradigm for scalable learning.
Learn More About Opera: https://opr.as/04-Opera-browser-pbssp…
The James Webb Space Telescope found galaxies that are too ancient-looking for our young universe. You may have heard that, but it keeps finding them, and our recent efforts to solve this conundrum point in wildly different directions. Have we found galaxies older than the universe, or did we just learn something incredible about how galaxies form?
Check out be smart’s mercator map episode. • something strange happens when you flatten…
And the full earth month playlist. • behind the scenes: the fight to save india…
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord!
/ pbsspacetime.
Check out the Space Time Merch Store.
A biotech company just doubled the lifespan of mice without changing their diet and without editing their genes.
Instead, they trained the immune system to hunt down and destroy the cells that make the body age. Then they flooded the body with fresh stem cells to rebuild what was lost.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s longevity science happening right now.
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt assembled what was then the most credentialed group of forecasters in the world. He called it the Brain Trust.
He asked them to map the next 25 years.
They missed transistors. They missed atomic energy. They missed antibiotics. They missed faster-than-sound travel. They missed space probes. They missed World War II.
I have spent the last 16 years interviewing 300 of the most credentialed futurists alive. From Ray Kurzweil to Peter Diamandis to Marvin Minsky to Sir Martin Rees.
They agree on almost nothing.
That is my report from inside the room.
There is now a professional class that sells certainty about an inherently uncertain thing. Call it the crystal ball industry. The product is confidence. The buyer is the anxious executive. The medium is the keynote stage.
Lunar Outpost aims to develop a whole ecosystem of infrastructure on the moon, as well as the robots that will build it.
“We’re a lunar infrastructure company, and the infrastructure of the moon base won’t be built by astronauts alone,” the company’s Vice President of Strategy Michael Moreno told Space.com. “It’ll be an autonomous robotic workforce, and that’s our expertise.”
Space.com spoke with Moreno in April 2026 at the Space Foundation’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs about Lunar Outpost’s vision for autonomous technologies that will operate alongside astronauts to build the infrastructure needed for a sustained human presence on the moon.
Search the web, and you’ll find any number of biohacking techniques for promoting healthy lifespan, from taking cold baths to breathing pressurized oxygen to sleeping under a red light.
There’s a simpler path to healthy aging, and science from Tufts and elsewhere has shown that it really works: Just eat a little bit less. Cutting down on calorie intake by as little as 10–15% can lower the risk of developing age-related illnesses by improving cardiovascular health, lowering blood pressure, and improving glucose tolerance, among many other benefits. For some people, reaping these benefits can be as easy as giving up one large latte per day.
The work is published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.