Daily Science to all

🧠 Singapore Just Opened a Data Center Powered by Living Human Neurons This sounds like science fiction, but it went live on July 16. Australian startup Cortical Labs, together with the National University of Singapore and data-center operator DayOne, has launched a biological computing facility where part of the processing is performed not by GPUs — but by living human neurons grown in a lab. Inside are 20 CL1 biological computers. Each contains at least 200,000 neurons grown on a silicon chip covered with electrodes. The neurons originate from human blood cells that are reprogrammed into stem cells and then differentiated into neurons. And yes, the computers have to be fed. Every three days, technicians supply the cells with sugar, micronutrients and pH buffers, while a life-support system regulates oxygen, nitrogen and CO₂. The strange part is that these neurons can actually learn. Cortical Labs’ earlier DishBrain experiment showed human and mouse neurons learning to play Pong, with measurable learning appearing within just minutes. Earlier this year, developer Sean Cole connected around 200,000 human neurons to DOOM — allowing them to navigate the game and shoot at enemies. Biology is nowhere near silicon in raw speed. But it has another advantage: efficiency. A CL1 consumes around 30 watts. An NVIDIA H100 SXM can draw up to 700 W, while an eight-H100 server may consume roughly 10 kW including supporting hardware. Cortical Labs also argues that biological neural networks may learn from far smaller datasets — closer to how humans adapt from limited experience. Access to one CL1 currently costs about $2,200 per month. Cortical Labs already operates 120 units in Melbourne with around 20 paying customers, and Singapore could eventually expand to 1,000 biological computers. So no, neurons aren’t replacing GPUs tomorrow. But we have officially reached the stage where a data center needs electricity, an internet connection… and food. Cyberpunk is becoming an engineering discipline. #Biocomputing #Neuroscience #AI #DataCenters #CorticalLabs https://www.straitstimes.com/tech/forget-silicon-chip-servers-singapores-newest-data-centre-needs-to-be-fed

🧬 A Personalized mRNA Cancer Vaccine Has Passed Its Biggest Test Yet For the first time, a personalized mRNA cancer therapy has succeeded in a Phase 3 clinical trial — the final major testing stage before regulators can consider approval. The treatment, called intismeran autogene, is not an off-the-shelf vaccine. Doctors sequence each patient’s tumour, identify mutations unique to their cancer, and manufacture an individual mRNA therapy encoding up to 34 of those tumour-specific targets. The goal is essentially to give the immune system a personalized wanted poster for the cancer. In the trial, 1,137 people with stage IIB–IV melanoma whose tumours had been completely removed received either the personalized mRNA therapy plus the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda), or pembrolizumab alone. The combination produced statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in both recurrence-free survival and distant-metastasis-free survival. No new safety signal was reported. There is an important caveat: the companies have so far announced only top-line Phase 3 results. They have not yet released the detailed numbers, and it is not yet known whether the treatment ultimately extends overall survival. The therapy also remains investigational and has not been approved. But the principle is now much harder to dismiss. Instead of finding one cancer vaccine that works for everyone, medicine may be able to manufacture a different vaccine for each individual tumour. Cancer is personal. The vaccine might have to be too. #Cancer #mRNA #Melanoma #Immunotherapy #Biotechnology #Medicine #Science

🌌 Scientists May Have Seen “Empty” Space Bend Light Almost 90 years ago, quantum theory made a bizarre prediction: a perfect vacuum is not truly empty. Under an unimaginably strong magnetic field, empty space itself should behave a little like a transparent material — changing the way light passes through it. Now astronomers may finally have seen the effect in nature. Researchers studied 1E 1547.0−5408, a magnetar — an ultra-dense neutron star with a surface magnetic field above 100 trillion gauss. Using NASA’s IXPE X-ray telescope together with NICER and Australia’s Parkes/Murriyang radio telescope, the team measured extraordinarily polarized X-rays: about 65% at 2 keV, rising to nearly 80% during parts of the star’s rotation. Ordinary models struggled to reproduce what they saw. But when the researchers included vacuum birefringence — a prediction of quantum electrodynamics in which extreme magnetic fields make the quantum vacuum refract different polarizations of light differently — the observations fell naturally into place. The idea goes back to work by Werner Heisenberg and Hans Euler in the 1930s. In modern quantum field theory, even a vacuum contains fluctuating quantum fields, and extreme magnetic fields can alter how photons propagate through them. This is not yet considered a definitive detection. The researchers say more observations and improved simulations are needed to rule out competing explanations. But if confirmed, the result would turn one of the strangest properties of quantum theory into something astronomers can actually observe across the Galaxy. Empty space, apparently, may not be very empty at all. #Physics #QuantumPhysics #Magnetar #Astronomy #QED #Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10859-z

🪱 Animals Have Been Eating Nature’s “Bioplastic” for Millions of Years Long before humans invented biodegradable plastics, bacteria were already making their own. Many microorganisms produce compounds called polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs — natural polyester-like materials that they store inside their cells as reserves of carbon and energy. Scientists had long assumed that breaking down these microbial plastics was essentially a job for microorganisms themselves. Then researchers studied a very strange animal: Olavius algarvensis, a tiny marine worm with no mouth and no gut. It survives by hosting bacteria beneath its skin and digesting them for nutrition. Some of those bacteria store as much as 42% of their cellular carbon in PHA. The researchers discovered that the worm produces its own enzyme capable of breaking PHA into smaller molecules it can use. And it is not alone. Related enzymes turned up in more than 66 animal species across nine major animal groups, including sponges, starfish, earthworms and springtails. Laboratory experiments confirmed that enzymes from several distantly related animals really can degrade PHA. The finding reveals a previously overlooked route through which carbon stored by microbes enters animal food webs — and suggests animals may have been consuming nature’s original bioplastics for hundreds of millions of years. Humans invented biodegradable plastic. Evolution apparently invented both the plastic and something to eat it. #Biology #Evolution #Bioplastic #Ecology #Microbiology #Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03153-8

👁️ Scientists Have Mapped the Wiring Behind Human High-Resolution Vision Researchers have created the first complete cell-by-cell and synapse-level wiring map of the human fovea — the pinhead-sized region of the retina that lets us read, recognize faces and see fine detail in color. The team reconstructed roughly 3,000 neurons and more than 300,000 connections, tracing how signals move through this tiny patch of nervous tissue. What they found was unexpectedly elegant: while much of the retina uses many overlapping pathways, the human fovea funnels visual information through just three major circuits. That streamlined architecture may be one reason human central vision is so precise. The researchers describe it as more like an expressway than a maze of side streets — sacrificing redundancy for speed and efficiency. The fovea is technically part of the central nervous system, which makes this the first complete connectivity map of a human CNS structure at this level of detail. Beyond basic neuroscience, the map could become a reference for treatments aimed at retinal diseases that destroy central vision. We often talk about the brain as the organ that “sees.” But the first stage of high-resolution vision may already be doing far more sophisticated processing than we realized. #Neuroscience #Vision #HumanBrain #Retina #Connectome #Science https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2603286123