PittCaleb

Every time you get a cancer biopsy, the lab makes a tissue slide that costs about $5. It shows the shape of your cells under a microscope, and every cancer patient already has one on file. There’s a much fancier version of that test called multiplex immunofluorescence (basically a protein-level map showing which immune cells are near your tumor and what they’re doing). It costs thousands of dollars per sample, takes specialized equipment most hospitals don’t have, and barely scales. But it’s the kind of data oncologists need to figure out whether immunotherapy will actually work for you. Right now, only about 20 to 40% of cancer patients respond to immunotherapy, and one of the biggest reasons is that doctors can’t easily tell whether a tumor is “hot” (immune cells actively fighting it) or “cold” (immune system ignoring it). Microsoft, Providence Health, and the University of Washington trained an AI to analyze the $5 slide and predict what the expensive test would show across 21 different protein markers. They called it GigaTIME, trained it on 40 million cells in which both the cheap slide and the expensive test coexisted, and then turned it loose on 14,256 real cancer patients across 51 hospitals in 7 US states. The results landed in Cell, one of the most selective journals in biology. The model generated about 300,000 virtual protein maps covering 24 cancer types and 306 subtypes. It found 1,234 real, verified connections between immune cell behavior, genetic mutations, tumor staging, and patient survival that were previously invisible at this scale. When they tested it against a completely separate database of 10,200 cancer patients, the results matched up almost perfectly (0.88 out of 1.0 agreement). Nature Methods named spatial proteomics (mapping where specific proteins sit inside your tissue) its Method of the Year in 2024, and specifically cited GigaTIME in a March 2026 update as a model that “democratizes” this kind of analysis. The full model is open-source on Hugging Face. Any cancer research lab with archived biopsy slides, and most of them have thousands, can now run virtual immune profiling without buying a single piece of new equipment.

Democracy without secure elections is merely a facade

Don’t be misled by the spectacle of fires burning in Tehran. These are not strikes on the Iranian people. These fires are not destroying ordinary commercial facilities. Israel targeted oil depots under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. For years the IRGC has used state oil assets as its private revenue stream. Instead of operating through a normal government budget, it was granted control over oil resources and the income they generate. Those funds have financed the regime’s regional war machine—paying for proxy militias, purchasing weapons and equipment from China, and underwriting destabilization from Lebanon to Yemen. Because these depots are controlled and guarded by security forces, they are part of the IRGC’s military logistics network. That makes them legitimate and necessary targets for anyone seeking to degrade the regime’s capacity to wage war. The distinction is important. The strikes were directed at assets controlled by the Guard, not at the energy infrastructure that serves ordinary Iranians. The resources of Iran should belong to the Iranian people. For decades, the IRGC has treated them as its war chest.