Nadiah Wan

An 18-month-old infant in Gaza, Jawad Abu Nassar, was tortured by Israeli soldiers to press his father into confessing during interrogation after being abducted near the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, according to his family and doctors. Al Jazeera's Tareq Abu Azzoum reports from Deir Al-Balah

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.

Other underrated materials flows now offline: helium 1/3 of global production is now disrupted. Qatar is one of only two places in the world where semiconductor grade helium is produced Unlike LNG, which mostly has to go by tanker, liquid helium can be transported overland by truck. But the vast majority of helium production is a byproduct of natural gas production, so when the latter shuts down, so does the former

We trained a new flood forecasting model designed to predict flash floods in urban areas up to 24 hours in advance. To help address a flash floods data gap, we created Groundsource: a new AI methodology using Gemini to identify 2.6M+ historical events across 150+ countries. We’re open-sourcing this dataset to advance global research, and urban flash flood forecasts are live now in Flood Hub to help communities stay safe.

China’s often-overlooked mega project, the ‘Vegetable Basket Project,’ has been running for nearly 40 years and ensures that 1.4 billion Chinese people have affordable, fresh vegetables on their tables every day.

Here are some 💯 real stories from me, a nice Colorado girl, forced to live in Massachusetts for 4 years and completely bewildered by the general attitudes and affects there:

As announced today, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, the SARA initiative will now include frozen food in the list of claimable items. This brings the total of basic necessity categories to 15 and increases the variety of eligible items to over 140,000. Eligible frozen food items include Poultry, Fried Chicken, Meat, Fish, Seafood, Burgers, Frozen Vegetables, Nuggets, Meatballs, Sausages and Ready-to-eat meals.