Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:
In a presentation at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2025, author Andy Zeng of the University of Toronto revealed that their approach could distinguish 12 distinct patterns of differentiation across AML samples—this level of granular information could not be achieved using current methods. “You can see that despite having the same diagnosis, they differ profoundly in terms of the regions of hematopoiesis that are implicated,” said Zeng. The team used their reference map for normal hematopoiesis, comprised of 263,159 single-cell transcriptomes across 55 cell states, as a North Star. They mapped over 1.2 million cells from more than 300 leukemia samples to this reference atlas to determine patterns of aberrant differentiation.
Among the different cell differentiation stages that the team identified, some were characterized by early blocks in differentiation, and some by the enrichment of differentiation states from many stages of hematopoiesis. Others were characterized by the enrichment of differentiation states from a specific progenitor, such as an erythroid, lymphoid, or myeloid progenitor. Erythroid and lymphoid enrichment were unexpected because AML is typically characterized by a differentiation trajectory toward myeloid cells.
More here.
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There have always been many ways of dying badly. In the late eighteenth century, the devout English writer Samuel Johnson struggled furiously and profanely against his own demise, ordering his surgeon, beyond all hope and reason, to delve deeper with a scalpel to force more senseless bleeding. That was then. Surely things are better now? Not according to theologian and ethicist Travis Pickell, who argues in his new book that the vast array of modern end-of-life technologies have only ended up providing us with even more ways of shuffling off this mortal coil. What Pickell calls “burdened agency” is a particularly modern condition arising from a combination of two factors. First, because we are presented with more choices than ever before, we are obliged to choose more than ever before. Only a century ago, for example, an ailing person simply met death when it came. Now the ailing person must choose whether to undergo exceedingly invasive medical operations, or perhaps hasten death through physician-assisted suicide. Even if one were to reject both of these routes, that itself is a choice with consequences and moral meanings. Where once an elderly person dwindling slowly to death may have stood as an example of resolution and quiet dignity unto the last, now that person is stubbornly choosing to drain the healthcare coffers and drive up insurance premiums for the rest of us, when they could instead have disqualified themselves from life and saved society the burden.
Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization. The ancient Trojans waded “ankle deep” in pottery shards and animal bones and whatever else they threw on the floor until they got so fed up with the mess that they paved it over. Rome’s first underground sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which used the city’s rivers to sweep away waste, was constructed in the third century BC. Writing over two centuries after its construction, Livy praised the Cloaca as a monument without match, and Pliny, writing about a hundred years after him in AD 77, called it the “most noteworthy achievement” of the Roman Empire, beating out the Colosseum and the Parthenon. At the time of its construction the Cloaca was an engineering spectacle, and it also became a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Sturdy infrastructures that served the people endured; flashy monuments to emperors did not. During floods, Pliny noted, “the street above, massive blocks of stone are dragged along, and yet the tunnels do not cave in.” Humbly concealed by walls and by continued elevations of the surface of the city through centuries of accumulated matter, its invisibility ensured its durability.
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Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston.
Trump’s assault on the old global order is real. But in taking its measure, it’s necessary to look beyond the daily headlines and acknowledge that being in a state of crisis is nothing new to capitalism. It’s also important to note that, as Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” Even would-be authoritarians who occupy the Oval Office have to operate in the social, economic and political environment that is bequeathed to them. In Trump’s case, the inheritance was one in which global capitalism was already suffering from a crisis of legitimacy.
Kanakia isn’t the only one playing with fiction on Substack. The National Book Award winner 
OpenAI is best known for ChatGPT — the free-to-use, 
In my last substack piece I discussed the need for voice of labor in influencing the R & D decisions of companies in shaping the pattern of innovations in a labor-absorbing direction—otherwise increasingly more powerful AI is likely to make most workers redundant in their current jobs and tasks. In the latter eventuality how will people survive in that not-too-distant future? The Big Tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and elsewhere—which include some avowed libertarians (though being libertarian has not usually stopped them from lobbying for large government contracts) and some open supporters of political parties with neo-Nazi roots—have often suggested a simple solution: Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Have you ever noticed how someone who’s drop-dead gorgeous can also seem charming, honest and kind – even before they’ve said a word? That’s the halo effect, a common psychological bias where one trait (such as good looks) influences your impressions of someone’s other qualities. The halo effect was first systematically studied by the psychologist Edward Thorndike more than a century ago. In 1920, Thorndike reported that when he analysed the judgments of military officers evaluating their subordinates, their ratings of intelligence, leadership and physical qualities tended to blur together. If a subordinate excelled in one area, the evaluator was inclined to think he was exceptional in all of them. The effect shows up in many different fields, including social psychology, clinical psychology, child psychology, health, politics and marketing. The ‘attractiveness halo effect’ is what happens when a physically beautiful person also seems interesting, capable and good-natured. It’s as if we’re wired to judge books by their covers, even if we know we shouldn’t.
That willingness to abandon democracy can be traced to two primary causes: the disillusionment of some people with the democratic system, and the demagoguery of autocratic politicians. The disenchantment is found in people who believe that democratic government is leaving them 
AMERICA IS A LAND OF BEGINNINGS, impatient, virginal, suspicious of foreplay. Sales are clinched on first impressions; books judged by covers; presidents, on their first one hundred days. The critic, novelist, and short story writer Lynne Tillman is an author who refreshingly resists our national logic of instant gratification. What might initially seem like a “theatrical” tendency to keep the audience at arm’s length soon gives way, as the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín once observed, to something “kinder and more considerate and oddly vulnerable.” In a Tillman story, everything can come together in the final line, and often does. In a land of beginnings, here is a master of elegant endings, the rare writer who can construct entire plots (or rather, “plots”) from false starts. By design, her stories unfold with the knowledge that she may lose some ticket holders at the intermission—but also with the confidence that those who mutiny will be the poorer for it. As usual, Tillman is correct.