This year, 16-year-old Joe Veneziale created a terrifying Old Hollywood hotel. Every October, 16-year-old Joe Veneziale builds a haunted house in his suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. The haunt is complete with live actors, intricate sets, and state-of-the-art tech. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Joe Veneziale is known as the "Halloween guy" at his high school, and for good reason.

One unlikely day during the empty-belly years of the Great Depression, an advertisement appeared in the smeared, smashed-ant font of the New York Times' classifieds: Five hundred college graduates, male, to perform secretarial work of a pleasing nature. Thousands of desperate, out-of-work bachelors of arts applied; five hundred were hired ("they were mainly plodders, good men, but not brilliant"). They went to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like millionaire who was devising "a new plan of universal knowledge." In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, each man read three hundred books a year, after which the books were burned to heat the manor. At the end of five years, the men, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive fifty thousand dollars.

LA JOLLA--(March 8, 2021) Deep learning is a potential tool for scientists to glean more detail from low-resolution images in microscopy, but it's often difficult to gather enough baseline data to train computers in the process. Now, a new method developed by scientists at the Salk Institute could make the technology more accessible--by taking high-resolution images, and artificially degrading them. The new tool, which the researchers call a "crappifier," could make it significantly easier for scientists to get detailed images of cells or cellular structures that have previously been difficult to observe because they require low-light conditions, such as mitochondria, which can divide when stressed by the lasers used to illuminate them. It could also help democratize microscopy, allowing scientists to capture high-resolution images even if they don't have access to powerful microscopes. The findings were published March 8, 2021, in the journal Nature Methods.

The new tool, which the researchers call a "crappifier," could make it significantly easier for scientists to get detailed images of cells or cellular structures that have previously been difficult to observe because they require low-light conditions, such as mitochondria, which can divide when stressed by the lasers used to illuminate them. It could also help democratize microscopy, allowing scientists to capture high-resolution images even if they don't have access to powerful microscopes. The findings were published March 8, 2021, in the journal Nature Methods. "We invest millions of dollars in these microscopes, and we're still struggling to push the limits of what they can do," says Uri Manor, director of the Waitt Advanced Biophotonics Core Facility at Salk. "That's the problem we were trying to solve with deep learning." Deep learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) in which computer algorithms learn and improve by studying examples.

A version of this story appeared in STAT Health Tech, our weekly newsletter about how tech is transforming health care and the life sciences. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox. You're looking at two versions of the same video of a moment in a single cell, captured under a powerful microscope. The red and yellow structures are mitochondria, and the inset magnified in the bottom left hand corner in each view captures a mitochondrion dividing. The view on the left shows the raw data as it came off the microscope; you might think of it like a social media influencer's first take, before any filters have been applied to get that Instagram-ready look.

Dave Allen once said that men know they're getting older when they watch Sunset Boulevard and realise they find Gloria Swanson quite attractive. Similarly, a certain generation will sense the grim reaper's presence now that Angelina Jolie is no longer the screen face of Lara Croft, because the mantle has passed to Alicia Vikander. This Lara is notably more serious and sensitive, and unlike Angelina, or the figure in the 90s video game – or indeed Karen Gillan in the new Jumanji movie – she doesn't have to wear cute shorts or revealing clothes, which is fair enough. But she does an awful lot of very pathetic and borderline creepy daddy-daughter pining for that all-important man in her life. This guy is forever smiling wisely in soft focus flashback in the grounds of Croft Manor, which has the same totemic importance as Wayne Manor, always kissing the demure infant Lara's forehead or indeed brushing his fingers with his lips and touching her forehead (eeuuww) prior to going off on one of his dangerous ethnological adventures.