The human cell is a miserable thing to study. Tens of trillions of them exist in the body, forming an enormous and intricate network that governs every disease and metabolic process. Each cell in that circuit is itself the product of an equally dense and complex interplay among genes, proteins, and other bits of profoundly small biological machinery. Our understanding of this world is hazy and constantly in flux. As recently as a few years ago, scientists thought there were only a few hundred distinct cell types, but new technologies have revealed thousands (and that's just the start).

Artificial intelligence has helped discover a new class of antibiotics that can treat infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria. This could help in the battle against antibiotic resistance, which was responsible for killing more than 1.2 million people in 2019 – a number expected to rise in the coming decades. Testing in mice showed that the new antibiotic compounds proved promising treatments for both Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus – a bacterium that has developed resistance to the drug typically used for treating MRSA infections. "Our [AI] models tell us not only which compounds have selective antibiotic activity, but also why, in terms of their chemical structure," says Felix Wong at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Massachusetts. Wong and his colleagues set out to show that AI-guided drug discovery could go beyond identifying specific targets that drug molecules can bind to, and instead predict the biological effect of entire classes of drug-like compounds.

The significance: These emissions will add up quickly. The generative-AI boom has led big tech companies to integrate powerful AI models into many different products, from email to word processing. They are now used millions, if not billions, of times every single day. The bigger picture: The study shows that while training massive AI models is incredibly energy intensive, it's only one part of the puzzle. Most of their carbon footprint comes from their actual use.

Scientists have developed tiny robots using human cells that could one day patrol our bodies, searching for and healing diseased cells and tissue. So-called'anthrobots,' assembled from human cells can repair damage to brain cells in a dish, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Advanced Science. Scientists at Tufts University in Massachusetts developed the SIZE robots to heal diseases, but foresee the technology repairing cell and tissue damage from conditions such as Alzheimer's. These bots - whose name means'human robots' - were made from human airway cells. To build the anthrobots, scientists started with samples of the cells that line human lungs.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic organization created in 2015 by Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, announced a bold new generative AI initiative today. The group is funding and building a high-end GPU cluster that will use AI to create predictive models of healthy and diseased cells; it hopes they'll help researchers better understand the human body's cells and cellular reactions. The group believes the collection of computers will help it achieve its incredibly lofty goal of helping to "cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century." "Researchers are gathering more data than ever before about the trillions of cells within our bodies, and it's too complex for our brains to grapple with," Jeff MacGregor, CZI vice president of communications, wrote in an emailed statement to Engadget. He lists an example of imaging one cell at nanometer resolution, which would use the same amount of data as 83,000 photos on a smartphone.

A researcher preparing to perform an intraperitoneal injection on mice.Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket/Getty This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Animal testing has long been necessary for a drug to gain approval by the US Food and Drug Administration--but it may be on its way out. A new law seeks to replace some lab animal use with high-tech alternatives. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0, signed by President Biden at the end of December with widespread bipartisan support, ends a 1938 federal mandate that experimental drugs must be tested on animals before they are used in human clinical trials. While the law doesn't ban animal testing, it allows drugmakers to use other methods, such as microfluidic chips and miniature tissue models, which use human cells to mimic certain organ functions and structures.

Biological robots made of human tracheal cells can promote the repair of wounded neural tissue in the lab. While the research is still in an early stage, the findings suggest that the robots could one day treat the cellular damage that can occur after a stroke or with paralysis. In 2020, Michael Levin at Tufts University in Massachusetts and his colleagues created living robots out of frog cells, called xenobots.

The year is 2030 and we are at the world's largest tech conference, CES in Las Vegas. A crowd is gathered to watch a big tech company unveil its new smartphone. The CEO comes to the stage and announces the Nyooro, containing the most powerful processor ever seen in a phone. The Nyooro can perform an astonishing quintillion operations per second, which is a thousand times faster than smartphone models in 2020. It is also ten times more energy-efficient with a battery that lasts for ten days.

The rapid proliferation of omics data, which provides essential information regarding bio-molecular activity within cells, is transforming drug discovery. Equipped with this data, DeepLife, a next generation systems biology company, has established a platform for creating digital twins of human cells, enabling scientists to rapidly evaluate how unhealthy cells respond to drug candidates in silico. DeepLife has deployed and established proof-of-concept for its platform, and is now actively seeking partners for target identification and drug repositioning projects enabled by its digital twin technology. All diseases, and efforts to treat them, start at the cellular level. Small changes in the trillions of chemical interactions that make up human cells, which can be triggered by mutations or external forces, can cause cells to enter pathological states that ultimately manifest in diseases.

This week - a Covid passport implant; brain cells in a dish learned to play Pong; reprogramming human cells; the future of military fighter drones; and more! Swedish company DSruptive offers subdermal implants that can work as Covid passports. "I have a chip implant in my arm and I have programmed the chip so that I have my COVID passport on the chip and the reason is that I always want to have it accessible and when I read my chip, I just swipe my phone on the chip and then I unlock and it opens up," said Hannes Sjoblad, managing director of DSruptive Subdermals. Cortical Labs, a company that works on combining living neurons with electronic chips, showed how they trained hundreds of thousands of human brains cells in a dish to play Pong. And these neurons learned to play the game faster than an artificial neural network.