The Famous, Feathered Dinosaur Archaeopteryx Could Fly, Suggests New Study of a ‘Beautifully Preserved’ Fossil The Chicago Archaeopteryx features more soft tissue and delicate skeletal details than any known fossil of its kind, and paleontologists discovered it has a set of feathers key to flight in modern birds The Chicago Archaeopteryx, seen under UV light, shows soft tissues alongside the skeleton. Delaney Drummond Archaeopteryx—a small, feathered dinosaur that lived around 150 million years ago—changed how humans understand the world, “maybe more than any other fossil,” as Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist at Chicago’s Field Museum, tells the New York Times’ Asher Elbein. That’s because fossils of Archaeopteryx, which are considered by many to be the oldest known birds, “proved Darwin right” by confirming that all birds are dinosaurs, according to a Field Museum statement. Thanks to an exceptionally preserved and prepared fossil named the Chicago Archaeopteryx recently acquired by the Field Museum, O’Connor and her colleagues have revealed more crucial insight into the species—including that it likely could fly. They detailed their work in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. As the Field Museum’s preparators worked on the pigeon-sized Chicago Archaeopteryx, they realized that the fossil included more soft tissues and delicate skeletal details than any other known Archaeopteryx specimen. From previous fossils, they already knew the dinosaur had asymmetric feathers, which are vital to creating thrust in modern, flying birds. But the hard slab of limestone around this specimen had also preserved a key layer of feathers called tertials that had never been documented before in Archaeopteryx. “It’s important that this is the first time these feathers have been seen,” John Nudds, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in England who didn’t participate in the study, tells the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. “These new feathers seen in this beautifully preserved specimen—as well as the asymmetric feathers—confirms it could fly.” An illustration shows an Archaeopteryx with tertial feathers that might have helped it to fly. Michael Rothman In modern birds, tertial feathers are crucial to flight, because they cover the space between the bird’s body and its wings. Without them, wings can’t generate lift. In fact, flightless feathered dinosaurs closely related to birds, but not quite birds themselves, didn’t have tertial feathers, according to the statement. Their wing feathers ended at their elbows. While paleontologists don’t know exactly when feathered, landbound dinosaurs gained the ability to fly, most scholars agree that Archaeopteryx is the earliest known bird. “People hypothesized that [the animal] probably had tertials,” O’Connor tells Science News’ Carolyn Gramling. Not only does the Chicago Archaeopteryx finally confirm this hypothesis, but it also indicates that tertials could have played an important evolutionary role in the development of feathered flight, she adds. “Archaeopteryx isn’t the first dinosaur to have feathers, or the first dinosaur to have ‘wings.’ But we think it’s the earliest known dinosaur that was able to use its feathers to fly,” O’Connor says in the statement. That’s despite the fact that “by modern standards, it was a very poor flyer,” she adds to Science News. The Chicago Archaeopteryx is housed at the Field Museum. Delaney Drummond / Field Museum Other notable features the researchers documented include bones in the roof of the animal’s mouth, which provide insight into its skull; scales on the bottom of its toes, which suggest it still spent a lot of time on the ground; and soft tissue on its hands. This last feature indicates that “the third digit could move independently, supporting long abandoned claims from the ’90s that Archaeopteryx could use its hands to climb,” O’Connor explains to Gizmodo’s Isaac Schultz. The team was able to reveal so many telling details thanks to their meticulous fossil preparation, which they conducted with the help of CT scanning and ultraviolet light to make sure they didn’t mistake any part of the fossil for rock and accidentally remove it. A fossil collector discovered the Chicago Archaeopteryx sometime before 1990 in limestone deposits near Solnhofen, Germany, where all known Archaeopteryx fossils originate. It was privately owned until the Field Museum’s purchase. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Plus, Sony Pictures Imageworks on ‘cubifying’ characters and environments, making Jack Black and Jason Momoa fly, and dealing with an intense array of different hair types on greenscreens. Yes, the internet has gone wild over *that* scene in Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie, when a baby zombie rides on the back of a chicken—the chicken jockey. Behind the visual effects of that sequence was Sony Pictures Imageworks, working with production visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon.  “I remember early on looking at that scene and going, ‘This is the one the fans are going to love. The kids are going to love this,’” shares Imageworks visual effects supervisor Seth Maury. “That scene started with storyboards. Then we worked with Dan to create little animated vignettes of the characters. For the baby zombie and the chicken, we recreated one of the boards, which was the baby zombie falling out of the box onto the chicken. The director saw it and had such a good reaction to it, so we knew we were onto something that was energetic and fun.” During production, the scene—which takes place in a wrestling ring in the Woodland Mansion against Jason Momoa’s Garrett ‘The Garbage Man’ Garrison character—was filmed in a three-walled set. Imageworks extended that environment and then tackled the character animation (Wētā FX was involved in designing the characters and co-ordinating a motion capture shoot in their mocap facility). Says Maury about the final results: “I just remember looking at that one and thinking, ‘Wow, this looks great and people are going to love this,’ but you don’t know until you let it out in the wild what’s going to happen.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jared Hess (@iamjaredhess) Finding the Minecraft look In that chicken jockey fight, and in all of Imageworks’ visual effects for the film, the studio had to incorporate a specific ‘look’ to its characters and environments. It’s something Maury called ‘cubify’. “We had to work out, what does a cubified character look like and what does a cubified environment look like? The rules for the environment were that anything that was a hard surface was cubic and anything that was a fluid followed normal fluid rules. We spent months on what a cubic cloud looks like, for example. How square are they on the bottom? What kind of vaporous surface do they have on top? It had to look photoreal, but it had to look cubified. And my son came back from seeing the movie and he’s like, ‘I didn’t look at the clouds at all.’ And I laughed. It’s like, well, of course not, right? It’s a background element. It’s just meant to be something subconscious.” “The characters were much, much more tricky,” adds Maury. “Until you start to see them in 3D and you see it turn and you see it move, only then you can understand, ‘How square is a square head?’” For example, the character Chungus, a general Piglin in Malgosha’s army who is voiced by the director, presented several ‘cubify’ challenges to Imageworks. “We thought, what does it mean to cubify your tricep muscle or your back muscle?” notes Maury. “We would start to give it edged shapes, but it still had to have some kind of anatomical detail. If you pull back from a macro level, it looks cubic, but the more you push in, there is some organic quality to it.” When Chungus leads a raid on the village, Imageworks also had to deliver shots of many villager characters. Their stand-out qualities, aside from their squarish heads, included largely expressionless faces. “The original brief from Jared was that they were less emotive than more,” advises Maury. “They didn’t have a ton of expressions, and their emotions came out through their body. We still built a proper facial system for all of them and then had to work out, well, how far do we push it? Do they smile, for example? In the end, most of their emoting came with eyebrows and just some small smiles and little frowns.” “I was on set at one point talking to the choreographer and I said, ‘Well, what is their motivation? What are they meant to be doing?’ And she said that Jared’s brief was that they should be like chickens with their head cut off. They’re jumping around, they’re a little bit mindless, but they have some kind of intelligence. So, we started with the body motion and then we had to translate that same idea to the head.” Integrating live-action and CG For scenes involving live-action characters like Steve (Jack Black) and Garrett (Momoa), production filmed primarily on partial sets surrounded by greenscreen or bluescreen. Integrate the live-action actors with their many CG companions involved careful attention to matching the on-set lighting, notes Maury, who praises his lighters and compositors.  “We came up with two light rigs,” says Maury. “We had an HDRI from on set and we would use that to match the set lighting exactly. The other light rig that we had was a daytime light rig which was essentially a sun and a sky dome. Any time we had to integrate or put CG into live-action, the team had both of those going. We would typically use the on set HDRI rig in the middle of the set to make sure that everything integrated, since there would be lights coming from multiple directions. But the further you got out radially from the center of the action, we let it fall off into the daytime rig so that your brain still felt like it was photoreal.” Another essential part of that integration effort was dealing with live-action actors who just happened to mostly have quite fuzzy hair. The keying and rotoscoping involved was meticulous. “We paid a ton of attention to it and we heard as well that the studio was very keen on hair edges,” recalls Maury. “There were scenes with the villages where the performers were wearing a robe and a gray skull cap on with some tracking markers on it so that we could place the head, and they might walk behind Dawn (Danielle Brooks) who has very curly hair. Also, because all the characters were heavily rim lit, you picked up every little bright hair. Simply, it was a ton of keying work and a ton of roto work, and, at the end of the day, painting back hair by hair if necessary.”  Then there was Garrett’s pink jacket with all of its tassels, as Maury describes. “This was the thing that kept me up at night. The jacket has got all these tassels hanging off of it and he’s flying on the greenscreens and those tassels get lost in the motion blur in an instant. Many, many times we were painting those back or we had a CG version of them, which meant we’d cut them off along the bottom of the arm and replace them with CG.” Making Jack Black and Jason Momoa fly While evading a group of Piglins, Steve, Garrett and Henry (Sebastian Hansen) narrowly escape by launching themselves off a cliff edge using elytra wingsuits. Mid-flight, they are chased through canyons by a series of flying Ghasts, which eventually meet some fiery ends.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jack Black (@jackblack) Imageworks began its work on the flying scenes with an Unreal Engine scene and previs from production. “We had two canyons we needed to build,” outlines Maury. “Canyon A was modeled after the American Southwest and looked a little like the Grand Canyon. We found some photos of the Grand Canyon and sculpted the silhouettes of what it looked like to go down into the gorge, and we copied the staining patterns and the color banding. Then they go into Canyon B, which was much more of a limestone look. There’s some mountains in China that we used for reference there. The effects team and the environment team did an amazing job putting all that together.” The actors were filmed on wire rigs against greenscreen. “Dan Lemmon’s view was that, if your characters are going to be anywhere foreground to midground, you want them on a plate,” states Maury. “When they’re midground to background, it’s a digi-double. What we did a lot as well, because the rigs that they were wearing were either bulky or didn’t allow them to move as if they were really flying, was limb replacement. We might cut them off at the waist and replace the legs and then do a cloth sim. One of the trickiest things there was lighting interaction. When you’re on a greenscreen, it’s hard to get all the live movement that will sell—the rolling and tumbling and all that as they’re flying—so a lot of that we did in 2D later on to give it some dynamic movement.” The post How the crazy chicken jockey scene in ‘A Minecraft Movie’ was made appeared first on befores & afters.

Has this ever happened to you? You're totally invested in a video—maybe the punchline to a great joke is about to hit, or you're finally about to learn the answer to some big mystery—and right as it's getting good, bam: an annoying ad grinds everything to a disappointing halt.Ads are a necessary element of the free internet, but that doesn't excuse how irritating they can be. Nobody wants an ad to cut them off from a video right as the interest levels are peaking—though that's exactly what's going to happen on all of your YouTube videos. As reported by Mashable, it's all part of a new feature called Peak Points, which YouTube announced during its Upfront presentation on Wednesday. Peak Points employs Google's AI model Gemini to find "the most meaningful, or 'peak,' moments" to interrupt a video with ads. It's not clear what data Gemini will use to make its determinations, but assume your behaviors are being watched by Google's AI whenever you tune into a YouTube video. YouTube knows that viewers are going to be most invested in the video during these points, and by strategically placing ads there, the chances are higher that a viewer will engage with that ad—making more money for both YouTube and the creator. And there's some logic there. But it also means that ad placement on YouTube videos is about to get really annoying. Every interesting, funny, frustrating, or otherwise emotional video on the site is going to have ads placed at their "peak." I wouldn't be surprised if, after a while, you could simply sense these ad breaks coming. Getting around annoying YouTube adsThere are a couple of workarounds to this. YouTube's solution, of course, is to subscribe to YouTube Premium. For $13.99 per month, you can watch videos largely ad-free, among other subscriber-only perks. On the other hand, you could use an ad blocker to, well, block these ads. YouTube can employ any AI model it wants to place ads in the most strategic moments possible, but it'll be in vain if you simply block those ads from appearing. The situation, however, is not quite as simple as it once was. YouTube and Google have gone to war against ad blockers, neutering popular options like uBlock Origin on Chrome, and finding new ways to stop users who are using ad blockers from watching YouTube. Even still, there are always ways around YouTube's tactics.

Protesters march on Meta after the company was caught using pirated books for AI training. Credit: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Plaintiffs in the landmark Kadrey v. Meta case have already submitted the U.S. Copyright Office's controversial AI report as evidence in their copyright infringement suit against the tech giant. Last Friday, the Copyright Office quietly released a "pre-publication version" of its views on the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models. The consequential report contained bad news for AI companies hoping to claim the fair use legal doctrine as a defense in court. Less than a day after the report was published, Shira Perlmutter, the head of the Copyright Office, was fired by President Donald Trump. It's still unclear exactly why Perlmutter was fired, but the move alarmed some copyright lawyers, as Mashable previously reported. You May Also Like And on May 12, the plaintiffs in Kadrey v Meta, which includes artists and authors such as Junot Diaz, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, submitted the report as an exhibit in their class action lawsuit. What's in the U.S. Copyright Office's AI report?The Office's report was the conclusion of a three-part investigation into copyright law and artificial intelligence, which it calls uncharted legal territory. The "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3: Generative AI Training" report examined exactly the type of legal issues at stake in Kadrey v Meta.While some copyright lawyers and Democratic politicians have speculated the report led to Perlmutter's firing, there are other possible explanations. In a blog post, copyright lawyer Aaron Moss said "it’s more likely that the Office raced to release the report before a wave of leadership changes could delay — or derail — its conclusions."The report addressed in detail the four factors of the fair use doctrine. Meta and other AI companies are being sued for using copyrighted works to train their AI models, and Meta in particular has claimed this activity should be protected under fair use. Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! The lengthy 113-page report spends around 50 pages delving into the nuances of fair use, citing historic legal cases that ruled for and against fair use. It doesn't goes as far as making any blanket conclusions, but its analysis generally favors copyright holders over AI companies and their unprecedented stockpiling of data for model training.The Copyright Office's stance on the white hot issue doesn't line up with the wishes of Big Tech titans, who have cozied up to the Trump Administration. In general, President Trump has taken a pro-tech approach to AI regulation. The plaintiffs in the Kadrey v. Meta case are clearly hoping the report could tip the scale in their favor. The lawyers who submitted the report as evidence on Monday didn't explain in detail why it was submitted as a "Statement of Supplemental Authority." The brief simply said, "the Report addresses several key issues discussed in the parties’ respective motions regarding the use of copyrighted works in the development of generative AI systems and application of the fair use doctrine." AI models can harm creative markets, Copyright Office finds The controversial AI copyright report could tip the scales for the case against Meta. Credit: wildpixel / iStock / Getty Images The part of the report that's potentially the most damning for Meta is the Copyright Office's assessment of the fourth factor of fair use, which considers the effects on current or future markets. Related Stories "The use of pirated collections of copyrighted works to build a training library, or the distribution of such a library to the public, would harm the market for access to those works," said the pre-publication version of the report. The analysis also considers possible market dilution for authors. "If thousands of AI-generated romance novels are put on the market, fewer of the human-authored romance novels that the AI was trained on are likely to be sold. Royalty pools can also be diluted," the report stated. In addition, the plaintiffs have argued that Meta's use of piracy to access the authors' books deprived them of licensing opportunities. For its part, Meta argues that its AI model Llama doesn't compete with the authors' market, and that the model's transformative output makes the fair use argument irrelevant.While the report favors the plaintiffs' argument, we don't know if the judge in the case will agree. And because this is a pre-publication version, it could be edited or even rescinded by a future leader at the Copyright Office.Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems. Cecily Mauran Tech Reporter Cecily is a tech reporter at Mashable who covers AI, Apple, and emerging tech trends. Before getting her master's degree at Columbia Journalism School, she spent several years working with startups and social impact businesses for Unreasonable Group and B Lab. Before that, she co-founded a startup consulting business for emerging entrepreneurial hubs in South America, Europe, and Asia. You can find her on X at @cecily_mauran.

Take-Two Interactive reported its latest earnings Thursday, which included a writedown of more than $3 billion. But despite that hit, the biggest news for the company still came out nearly two weeks ahead of the financial results: the publisher’s highly anticipated Rockstar Games-developed “Grand Theft Auto 6” would be shifting from a planned fall 2025 release to a May 26, 2026 launch. The choice, which was announced May 2, was made before Take-Two revealed these full fiscal 2025 results (which ran April 1, 2024 -March 31, 2025) and projections for its Fiscal 2026, but the company has not disclosed exactly at what point Rockstar decided “GTA 6” would need to be moved. As of February, the company had still been publicly eyeing that fall window. Related Stories “So we don’t talk about when we make decisions around here,” Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick told Variety Thursday ahead of the company’s earnings call. “And obviously, the net bookings that are expected for Fiscal ’26 are lower without the release of ‘GTA 6,’ that goes without saying. But we haven’t actually parsed what the specific felt is, although analysts have speculated. I think the key point to bear in mind is, once again, we’re setting a record, which is what we said we would do. We certainly expect growth in Fiscal ’27. This company is in extraordinarily sound shape and well positioned both for the challenges and opportunities ahead.” Popular on Variety Wall Street forecast a loss of earnings per share (EPS) of 5 cents on $1.55 billion in revenue for Take-Two’s January-March results, according to analyst consensus data provided by LSEG. On Thursday, Take-Two reported $1.58 billion in net bookings. GAAP net loss was $3.78 billion, or $21.08 per share. That loss included a writedown of $3.55 billion, though Take-Two did not disclose which division within the company accounted for that large hit and declined to comment when asked. For the year-long period between April 1, 2025-March 31, 2026, Take-Two is projecting net bookings between $5.9 to $6 billion. Regarding the potential pricing for “GTA 6,” as well as the rest of Take-Two’s games moving forward, Zelnick said he’s not letting recent moves made by competitors affect what Take-Two decides to do. “Well it’s true that some of our competitors have talked about higher prices and variable pricing. The rubric that informs our decision making is that we need and want to deliver way more value than whatever we charge consumers,” Zelnick said. “We think the consumer experiences the intersection of the thing itself. How great is the property with how much you pay for it? I think you know that anecdotally about yourself. We all feel that way. So we’re very mindful that it’s our job to deliver enormous value to consumers. We think we do just that.” More to come…

Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling. Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer.  “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the future of medicine,” says Kiran Musunuru, an expert in gene editing at the University of Pennsylvania whose team designed the drug. “My hope is that someday no rare disease patients will die prematurely from misspellings in their genes, because we’ll be able to correct them.” The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them.  In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells. “In reality, this drug will probably never be used again,” says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who treats metabolic diseases in children and who led the overall effort to treat the child. That effort involved more than 45 scientists and doctors as well as pro bono Eventually, he says, the cost of custom gene-editing treatments might be similar to that of liver transplants, which is around $800,000, not including lifelong medical care and drugs. The researchers used a new version of CRISPR technology, called base editing, that can replace a single letter of DNA at a specific location.  Previous versions of CRISPR have generally been used to delete genes, not rewrite them to restore their function. The researchers say they were looking for a patient to treat when they learned about KJ. After he was born in August, a doctor noted that the infant was lethargic. Tests found he had a metabolic disorder that leads to the buildup of ammonia, a condition that’s frequently fatal without a liver transplant. In KJ’s case, gene sequencing showed that the cause was a misspelled letter in the gene CPS1 that stopped it from making a vital enzyme. The researchers approached KJ’s parents, Nicole and Kyle Muldoon, with the idea of using gene editing to try to correct their baby’s DNA. After they agreed, a race ensued to design the editing drug, test it in animals, and get permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to treat KJ in a one-off experiment. The team says the boy, who hasn’t turned one yet, received three doses of the gene-editing treatment, of gradually increasing strength. They can’t yet determine exactly how well the gene editor worked because they don’t want to take a liver biopsy, which would be needed to check if KJ’s genes have really been corrected. But Ahrens-Nicklas says that because the child is “growing and thriving,” she thinks the editing has been at least partly successful and that he may now have “a milder form of this horrific disease.” “He’s received three doses of the therapy without any complications, and is showing some early signs of benefit,” she says. “It’s really important to say that it’s still very early, so we will need to continue to watch KJ closely to fully understand the full effects of this therapy.” The case suggests a future in which parents will take sick children to a clinic where their DNA will be sequenced, and then they will rapidly receive individualized treatments. Currently, this would only work for liver diseases, for which it’s easier to deliver gene-editing instructions, but eventually it might also become a possible approach for treating brain diseases and conditions like muscular dystrophy. The experiment is drawing attention to a gap between what gene editing can do and what treatments are likely to become available to people who need them. So far, biotechnology companies testing gene editing are working only on fairly common gene conditions, like sickle cell disease, leaving hundreds of ultra-rare conditions aside. One-off treatments, like the one helping KJ, are too expensive to create and get approved without some way to recoup the costs. The apparent success in treating KJ, however, is making it even more urgent to figure out a way forward. Researchers acknowledge that they don’t yet know how to scale up personalized treatment, although Musunuru says initial steps to standardize the process are underway at his university and in Europe.

The world is awash in data about, well, the world — thanks to satellites and environmental sensors. But there’s still a lot we can’t see, and Fieldstone Bio thinks microbes can change that. “They’ve evolved to sense and respond to information. It’s just trillions of calculations going on at all times all around us,” Brandon Fields, Fieldstone Bio’s co-founder and chief science officer, told TechCrunch. “How do we take that and actually manipulate that to gain benefits for us?” Fieldstone’s technology emerged from that question. The startup was founded in 2023 after spinning out of MIT, where professor Chris Voigt’s lab had developed a way to turn microbes into sensors. The scientists programmed the microbes to change color when they encountered something of interest, whether it be nutrients in soil or landmines hidden in the dirt, and then figured out how to detect them. “The key technology out of Chris’ lab is this idea of, ‘How do we actually visualize these cells from really far away?’” Fields said. Fieldstone Bio recently raised $5 million in seed funding led by Ubiquity Ventures with participation from E14 and LDV Capital, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The startup has been testing its technology in the lab, and the funding will let it test those microbes in the real world. Each strain is tailored to sense a particular compound, such as nitrogen on a farm field or TNT residue from a landmine.  “We isolate microbes from the environments we want to sense,” Fields said. “We build our sensors the DNA pieces, and we just drop them into these different ones and see which ones behave the best, which ones can last the longest.” Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Once the microbes are ready, Fieldstone will broadcast them using drones. After the microbes have some time to sense their environment — several hours to days, depending on the target — the company will have another drone snap photos of the area. The images aren’t the usual aerial photography seen on Google Maps. Rather, they’re taken using what’s known as a hyperspectral camera, which divide visible and infrared light into as many as 600 different colors. Because Fieldstone’s microbes will reflect light at a very specific wavelength, it can train AI models to look for those signals amid a torrent of data. “That’s where the power of AI comes in, because we can start using that information to tease out these really faint signals to produce really cool heat maps of the microbe sensing the environment,” Fields said. In addition to agriculture and national security applications, Fieldstone is also programming microbes to detect environmental contaminants like arsenic, CEO Patrick Stone said. “Instead of going to do core soil samples over every 100 feet — and then you have 100 foot resolution — we could get a one-inch resolution and really map out exactly where they need to go clean up stuff,” he said. Gene edited microbial sensors broadcast over farm fields are sure to raise the eyebrows among people who oppose genetic modification. Fields said that the company has been in contact with the EPA to ensure that the company follows regulations. Fields said that, over time, he hopes the company’s database will become large enough that it can train models to associate other signals in the environment with whatever data is returned by the microbes. That would allow hyperspectral cameras to detect, say, arsenic contamination without needing to spread the engineered microbes. “Eventually, you don’t need to apply the microbe at all,” Fields said. “You have drones, planes, and satellites now collecting information about chemical information on a global scale.”

Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling. Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer.  “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the future of medicine,” says Kiran Musunuru, an expert in gene editing at the University of Pennsylvania whose team designed the drug. “My hope is that someday no rare disease patients will die prematurely from misspellings in their genes, because we’ll be able to correct them.” The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them.  In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells. “In reality, this drug will probably never be used again,” says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who treats metabolic diseases in children and who led the overall effort to treat the child. That effort involved more than 45 scientists and doctors as well as pro bono Eventually, he says, the cost of custom gene-editing treatments might be similar to that of liver transplants, which is around $800,000, not including lifelong medical care and drugs. The researchers used a new version of CRISPR technology, called base editing, that can replace a single letter of DNA at a specific location.  Previous versions of CRISPR have generally been used to delete genes, not rewrite them to restore their function. The researchers say they were looking for a patient to treat when they learned about KJ. After he was born in August, a doctor noted that the infant was lethargic. Tests found he had a metabolic disorder that leads to the buildup of ammonia, a condition that’s frequently fatal without a liver transplant. In KJ’s case, gene sequencing showed that the cause was a misspelled letter in the gene CPS1 that stopped it from making a vital enzyme. The researchers approached KJ’s parents, Nicole and Kyle Muldoon, with the idea of using gene editing to try to correct their baby’s DNA. After they agreed, a race ensued to design the editing drug, test it in animals, and get permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to treat KJ in a one-off experiment. The team says the boy, who hasn’t turned one yet, received three doses of the gene-editing treatment, of gradually increasing strength. They can’t yet determine exactly how well the gene editor worked because they don’t want to take a liver biopsy, which would be needed to check if KJ’s genes have really been corrected. But Ahrens-Nicklas says that because the child is “growing and thriving,” she thinks the editing has been at least partly successful and that he may now have “a milder form of this horrific disease.” “He’s received three doses of the therapy without any complications, and is showing some early signs of benefit,” she says. “It’s really important to say that it’s still very early, so we will need to continue to watch KJ closely to fully understand the full effects of this therapy.” The case suggests a future in which parents will take sick children to a clinic where their DNA will be sequenced, and then they will rapidly receive individualized treatments. Currently, this would only work for liver diseases, for which it’s easier to deliver gene-editing instructions, but eventually it might also become a possible approach for treating brain diseases and conditions like muscular dystrophy. The experiment is drawing attention to a gap between what gene editing can do and what treatments are likely to become available to people who need them. So far, biotechnology companies testing gene editing are working only on fairly common gene conditions, like sickle cell disease, leaving hundreds of ultra-rare conditions aside. One-off treatments, like the one helping KJ, are too expensive to create and get approved without some way to recoup the costs. The apparent success in treating KJ, however, is making it even more urgent to figure out a way forward. Researchers acknowledge that they don’t yet know how to scale up personalized treatment, although Musunuru says initial steps to standardize the process are underway at his university and in Europe.

Rejected by Museums Around the World, This New Art Exhibition Explores the Historical Roots of the Term ‘Homosexual’ “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” is a sprawling collection of more than 300 works at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 gallery An 1890 photo by Alice Austen titled The Darned Club Collection of Historic Richmond Town / Wrightwood 659 In 1868, the Hungarian writer and activist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in a letter to his friend, the pioneering sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Kertbeny was arguing against a German anti-sodomy law that made sexual contact between members of the same gender punishable by up to four years in prison. He reasoned that humans had innate desires—some homosexual, some heterosexual—that could not be regulated by the state. Although Kertbeny had just used the terms for what scholars believe is the first time, the language was already charged with the same imprecision that exists today. An expansive label like “homosexual” could describe actions; desires; and, crucially, an entire identity. The artistic and social “sea change” that accompanied the birth of the term “homosexual” is the subject of “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” a sprawling, ambitious exhibition at the Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. It is on view until July 26.The scale and scope of the exhibition is staggering. It gathers more than 300 works by 125-plus artists from 40 countries, on loan from private collections and major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay. “It is the kind of exhibition that a massive institution like the Met regularly pulls off,” curator Jonathan D. Katz, an art historian at the University of Pennsylvania, tells the Chicago Sun-Times’ Courtney Kueppers. “But for a small, fairly new institution like Wrightwood 659 to pull off, [it] is kind of extraordinary.” “Before the Binary,” the first of eight sections in the exhibition, begins decades before Kertbeny’s letter. Its focus is on longstanding cultural, sexual and romantic practices that modern language occludes. Dance to the Berdash is an 1835-1837 oil painting by George Catlin, a 19th-century artist known for his paintings of Indigenous life and the American frontier. It depicts a real feast Catlin witnessed in which members of the Sac and Fox tribe paid tribute to a Two-Spirit leader, a person who was born male but who dressed, performed and lived as a woman. Non-Indigenous observers applied the term “berdache,” now considered derogatory, to identities and practices they considered foreign. Catlin’s painting depicts what language could not capture. Dance to the Berdash, George Catlin, 1835-1837 Smithsonian American Art Museum “Art can tell this story uniquely well,” Katz says in a statement. “While written narratives must necessarily use specialized words to describe ideas, visual imagery is more elastic, allowing for coincident layers of meaning.” More modern works by well-known artists like Jean Cocteau, the Lumière Brothers, Gustave Moreau, John Singer Sargent, Egon Schiele and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec also convey those nuances with tact across the seven other sections of the exhibition. In “Portraits,” Katz and associate curator Johnny Willis assemble a 1907 portrait of Gertrude Stein, the only full-size portrait of Oscar Wilde painted in his lifetime and Thomas Eakins’ celebrated oil portrait of Walt Whitman. Some portraits explore sexuality more overtly than others, but all can be read in the spirit of the exhibition. Where do actions become identity? Do modern audiences have the right to retroactively apply labels to celebrated past figures who may have never embraced them? Another section of the show explores relationships through the photography of Alice Austen, a Victorian-era photographer in New York City who trained her lens on women’s lives. Still others examine how nude portraits have shifted with changing understandings of sexuality and how same-sex desire converged with colonialism and resistance. Gertrude Stein, Félix Vallotton, 1907 The Baltimore Museum of Art / Mitro Hood / Wrightwood 569 Wrightwood 659’s ability to land an exhibition like “The First Homosexuals” is in part due to its controversial subject matter. “Queer art is the third rail of the art realm,” Katz tells Block Club Chicago’s Web Behrens. “One very highly placed museum director told me, ‘This is exactly the exhibition I want to show, and therefore exactly the exhibition I can’t.’” Katz estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of the museums and art collectors he asked to contribute art to the exhibition rejected his requests, per Fast Company’s Grace Snelling. Later, nearly all of the museums Katz approached to host the multimillion dollar exhibition declined, even when he offered it to them for free, the Sun-Times reports. Besides Wrightwood 659, the only museum to express interest was the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, which is in talks to bring part of the show to Art Basel 2026. Despite enduring prejudice toward queer art, the exhibition at Wrightwood 659 has been a roaring success, with the gallery selling more advance tickets to it than any other show in its seven-year history. The final piece in the exhibition is an archway full of photographs of the Nazis burning thousands of books at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, the first sexology research center in the world, in 1933. “The idea that everything that flowers over the course of the exhibition can so quickly be destroyed, is, of course, a metaphor for where we are now,” Katz tells Fast Company. While Kertbeny’s terms became twisted into means of isolating “homosexuals” from the rest of the population, as the persecution and mass murder of queer people during World War II exemplifies on a horrific scale, the exhibition strikes a unified note about belonging, even in the midst of confusion and fear. “We wanted to show how art offered numerous positions along that spectrum, positions that literally had no words to describe them,” Katz tells Block Club. “Art could figure what language could not.” “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” is on view at the Wrightwood 659 in Chicago through July 26. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.