In agriculture, the use of microbial inoculants can improve nutrient availability, strengthen soil structure and help protect crops from pests while reducing the need for chemical inputs.
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Fed study: AI’s slow productivity story fits a century-old historical pattern
From the article
Economists Ozkan and Aakash Kalyani, along with research associate Nicholas Sullivan, scanned roughly 490,000 earnings call transcripts from 5,198 publicly traded U.S. firms between 2000 and 2025, using an AI model to tag sentences about productivity and AI. The share of productivity commentary tied to AI rose from near zero before ChatGPT’s late-2022 debut to roughly 15% of all productivity discussions by the end of 2025.
Approximately 95% of AI-related productivity sentences describe gains executives expect in the future, not gains already realized, a share that has held steady since 2023. When executives do describe AI’s effect, they’re almost uniformly bullish: 95% describe productivity as rising, compared with 75% for non-AI commentary.
Researchers say this is exactly what history predicts.
Ozkan said he wasn’t surprised by the future-tense findings, since aggregate data already showed no meaningful bump in productivity once capital investment was accounted for. He invoked economist Robert Solow’s famous quip that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” drawing a direct line to electrification; it took “several decades,” Ozkan said, to reorganize factories, retrain workers, and change workflows before its productivity payoff showed up in the data.
Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson called this the “productivity paradox” in a 1993 paper for MIT, and lately has taken to describing the current situation as the modern sequel.”
A cooperative approach to reproductive success
Fertilization is often imagined as a frantic race, with millions of sperm competing for a single prize. But new research by a team of evolutionary biologists from Syracuse University, the University of Siena in Italy and the University of Szeged in Hungary reveals a more surprising reality, where success can depend less on competition and more on cooperation.
The group focused its study on organisms called arthropods, a large and diverse part of the animal kingdom that includes spiders, crabs, insects and centipedes. The scientists explored instances throughout evolutionary history where arthropod sperm worked together in coordinated groups, forming structures to improve their chances of reaching and fertilizing an egg. This process, known as sperm conjugation, is reshaping what researchers thought they understood about reproduction and evolution.
Ancient Protein AIDS in Anti-Cancer Immunity
Scientists have advanced the field of cancer treatment by leveraging the body’s immune system to recognize and target tumors. The study of the immune system helps better advance these treatments and boost immune responses. The evolution of immune cells and different aspects of the immune system has helped fight aggressive forms of disease. More importantly, as ancient populations become exposed to different diseases over time, heredity can protect future generations from these specific viruses and bacteria.
One specific part of the immune system, known as ‘complement’, is crucial to aiding a robust immune response. Complement is part of the innate immune system and consists of over 50 plasma proteins. Complement proteins rapidly target foreign pathogens and trigger inflammation from infection. Specifically, these proteins help puncture infected cell membranes to eliminate disease. While complement is a unified system, it takes several pathways to function: Classical, Lectin, and Alternative. These three functions trigger complement in different ways but converge into a single innate immune defense. There are also different types of complement proteins. One of the most abundant is complement C3, which acts as a critical surveyor and defense against pathogens. Compliment C3 is an ancient protein and is found in organisms such as jellyfish, playing a pivotal role in the immune system. It specifically tags infected cells with molecules for immune cells to identify and target.
Gene Therapy Improves Stem Cell Transplant Success
Stem cell transplantation (or bone marrow transplantation) and gene therapy have revolutionized the way oncologists treat patients. Both approaches have the potential to cure patients with sickle cell disease, b-thalassemia, immune disorders, and even several blood cancers. There are specific transplants that can occur: autologous and allogenic. Both forms of transplantation are dependent on the source of the donor cells. Autologous transplants use the patient’s healthy stem cells taken from the patient before systemic treatment, like chemotherapy. Allogenic transplants use stem cells collected from healthy donors. Typically stems cells for an allogenic transplant is from a family member or umbilical cord blood to genetically match the recipient. If stem cells are not genetically matched, then the donor will recognize the stem cells as foreign and reject the transplant. This rejection is known as Graft-versus-Host Disease (GvHD). Infusion of stem cells only takes about 15 minutes, but the engraftment or the ability for cells to proliferate and establish themselves in the bone marrow takes up to 18 days. For full immune system recovery, most physicians see patients recover within a year. However, stem cell transplants are not perfect. There is a high rate of GvHD, infection, and disease relapse. Patients also usually receive chemotherapy before a transplant, which increases toxicity and reduces success of the procedure. Scientists are currently working on how to improve the success rate of transplantation.
A recent article in Nature, by Dr. Pietro Genovese and others, demonstrated that stem cell transplantations are safer when chemotherapy is replaced with a targeted treatment. Researchers used antibodies that recognize and target markers on blood-forming stem cells. This approach helps clear harmful preexisting stem cells from the patient before transplantation, instead of using toxic chemotherapeutic agents that damage DNA throughout the body. The antibody approach is more specific and reduces toxicity in patients. Genovese is an Assistant Professor at Dana Farber and Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. His work focuses on gene-editing and bioengineering technologies that improve stem and immune cells. Specifically, Genovese investigates ways to improve gene therapy and develop approaches to enhance treatment for patients with hematological malignancies.
Previously, an antibody could not discern between current recipient and infused autologous stem cells. Antibodies could also attack transplanted cells from a separate donor (allogenic). To avoid these issues, Genovese and his team have used gene-editing tools to select for a specific biomarker on the surface of donor stem cells. The small edit prevented the antibody from binding to the donor stem cells. These antibodies were able to avoid the healthy stem cells and still eliminate the infected stem cells. This approach allows the donor stem cells to properly graft in the host and improve success of transplantation.
