8 director Kohei Ikeda has joined Katsuhiro Harada’s VS Studio.
Ikeda announced his departure from Bandai Namco in June after twenty years with the company. At that time, he did not disclose his future plans but stated he would “continue taking on new challenges as a game developer.”
He has now joined VS Studio as a game designer. “Working on games again with two of my former bosses feels nostalgic in many ways,” Ikeda shared on social media.
Scientists have long been fascinated by two promising classes of antibiotics that disable RNA polymerase (RNAP). They knew that these drugs could grind gene expression to a halt in several pathogens, including the bacterium behind tuberculosis, by binding to specific locations in the RNAP. But despite decades of study, a key question remained: what process are the drugs actually targeting?
Now, a new paper in PNAS solves that mystery and simultaneously uncovers a new element of basic biology. Using these antibiotics as tools to clarify the finer points of RNAP function, the researchers discovered that the enzyme works only if a certain moving part briefly swings into place to stabilize RNA synthesis—and that these drugs disable the enzyme by preventing that motion. The findings reveal a previously unknown mechanism of RNA synthesis shared across diverse forms of life and lay the groundwork for developing next-generation antibiotics.
“It’s sort of a two-for-one,” says the senior author. “We now know how these inhibitors work, and the inhibitors also revealed a conformational change in the active site that we didn’t know was important.”
McGill University researchers have developed a more energy-efficient method of building AI systems that are better at measuring—and indicating—their own uncertainty. This will help users determine when human oversight is needed, when additional data should be collected and when a model is being asked to work beyond the conditions it was trained for, the researchers said.
“Artificial intelligence systems now play a central role in daily life, from medical diagnosis and content moderation to autonomous driving and AI agents that act on our behalf,” said Mame Diarra Touré, lead author and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. “As these systems take on more responsibility, they need to become more trustworthy. They should recognize when they are uncertain, rather than giving confident answers in situations where they may be wrong.”
The research was supervised by David A. Stephens, professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. “Singular Bayesian Neural Networks,” by Mame Diarra Touré and Stephens, was presented at the Forty-Third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026).
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If the Federation can replicate food, clothing, furniture, spare parts, and even medical supplies, then why doesn’t it simply use replicators to become infinitely rich?
The answer is much more interesting than simply saying “money doesn’t matter in Star Trek.”
Replicators don’t create infinite wealth — they create abundance.
Once almost anyone can produce a particular object on demand, that object stops being scarce. And when scarcity disappears, so does much of its economic value.
But replicators can’t eliminate every kind of scarcity.
You can’t replicate land. You can’t replicate a historic location. You can’t instantly replicate decades of human experience, expertise, creativity, reputation, or time.