Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have developed a solid polymer coated with harmless viruses to detect the bacteria Salmonella enterica (S. enterica), an advance that could lead to new ways of finding contamination in the food supply. The work is published in the journal ACS Applied Bio Materials.
The group, led by Yuxiang “Shawn” Liu, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, reports that the technology can rapidly capture and visualize foodborne bacterial contaminants in tiny fluid samples. With no need for incubation or complicated equipment in research centers, the technology has the potential to be used as a rapid biosensor in field applications and in areas with few resources.
“We have a solid surface that can be used anywhere in the food supply chain, from farm to fridge, to detect foodborne bacteria with minimum human intervention,” Liu says.
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Imagine a civilization reaches something like a Type II level, advanced enough to move through interstellar space and keep large populations alive for generations. At that stage, the challenge is developing ships that can cross the void, and also making sure the people inside them can survive radiation, isolation, and extreme travel times. That could mean heavy genetic engineering before the journey begins, changing bone density, metabolism, resistance to disease, tolerance for low gravity, or even sensory systems and respiration. But when they finally arrive, they may still find that the planet is wrong for them, maybe the air is toxic, the gravity is crushing, the temperatures are extreme, or the native chemistry is incompatible with human biology.
At that point, they face two paths. One is terraforming, which means trying to remake an entire planet into something closer to Earth. That could involve thickening or thinning an atmosphere, warming a frozen world, cooling a hot one, importing water, altering soil chemistry, introducing engineered microbes, building orbital mirrors or shades, and managing the planet for centuries or even millennia. The scale of that project is absurdly expensive, not just in money but in energy, infrastructure, labor, time, and raw materials. You are not changing a city or even a continent, you are trying to rewrite a whole world.
The other option is pantropy. Instead of forcing the planet to become Earth-like, the colonists change themselves to fit the planet. They might alter their lungs to breathe a different atmospheric mix, redesign their skin to handle harsher radiation, reduce their size for lower resource use, strengthen their bodies for higher gravity, or even become something so biologically different that they no longer look fully human. That is the core idea of pantropy, adapting the colonists to the world rather than adapting the world to the colonists.
The term was coined by James Blish, and he used it in connection with the stories collected in The Seedling Stars, especially “Surface Tension.” which was first published in 1952 in Galaxy Science Fiction.
Hantavirus infections are part of the broad group of viral haemorrhagic fevers. They are also recognised as a distinct model of an emergent zoonotic infection with a global distribution. Many factors influence their epidemiology and transmission, such as climate, environment, social development, ecology of rodent hosts, and human behaviour in endemic regions. Transmission to humans occurs by exposure to infected rodents in endemic areas; however, Andes hantavirus is unique in that it can be transmitted from person to person.
The FDA has approved once-weekly insulin icodec-abae (Awiqli; Novo Nordisk) for use in adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D), with a current projected launch in the second half of 20,261 for the 700-units/mL dose. This novel treatment option is a first-in-its-class therapeutic, freeing patients living with T2D from their strict schedule of daily basal insulin injections and reducing total injections from 7 to 1 for each 7-day period.
Its indication is as an adjunct to diet and exercise for improved glycemic control, as well as for patients also taking mealtime insulin or another common oral antidiabetic agent and/or a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist. A prescription is required, and administration is with or without food via a prefilled FlexTouch device on the same day each week.
Data from 4 of the trials in the phase 3a ONWARDS program and 2,680 adult patients with uncontrolled T2D support this approval; their primary end point of interest was reduction in hemoglobin A1c. Overall, the ONWARDS program encompasses 6 phase 3a trials and more than 4,000 adults with type 1 diabetes (T1D) or T2D.
Insulin icodec-abae (Awiqli; Novo Nordisk) is now approved for use in the US, Canada, European Union, Switzerland, and 12 other countries.
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The multiverse pops out of quite a few theories in physics, and has been proposed as a solution to certain vexing problems. But it’s also been argued that the very idea of a multiverse is just bad science. That it’s unfalsifiable and a dead-end to inquiry and as bad a violation of Occam’s razor as you could imagine. But the multiverse might also exist. Can something that exists be bad science?
What happens when machines can build more of themselves—and never stop? In this episode of Entropy Rising, Jacob and Lucas unravel the strange, fascinating world of von Neumann probes: self-replicating systems that could mine asteroids, build Dyson swarms, and maybe even terraform entire planets. But the same tech could go off the rails—accidentally wiping out alien life, turning planets into grey goo, or mutating into something far worse. Are these machines the key to a post-scarcity future, or the seeds of cosmic disaster? We explore the science, the speculation, and the existential questions behind one of the most provocative ideas in futurism.
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There is no formula for love. No formula for meaning. No formula for great art, for grief, for living a life that matters.
But we keep looking for one anyway. Increasingly, we look for it in AI.
In my new essay, I argue that this is a category error with a real cost. Some problems lend themselves to calculation: fusion, protein folding, and route optimization. With enough compute, they yield. Other problems do not bend at all. They cannot be solved. They can only be lived.
When we mistake the second category for the first, we bring what I call the Hammer of AI to questions that ask for wisdom, presence, and judgment.
Then we are surprised when the hammer keeps breaking the very thing we were trying to mend.
The piece draws on Tolkien, Vaclav Havel, Carlos Castaneda, and the Japanese art of Kyudo to argue that what we actually need in the age of AI is not another formula. It is the wisdom to know when there is no formula at all.
When complexity arrives in your life, do you reach for the hammer or for something else?
