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In 2020, the CASP competition vaulted AlphaFold to prominence and a Nobel Prize . But the era of people being impressed by an artificial intelligence model correctly predicting the structure of a protein — once a challenge many experts didn’t think would be solved in their lifetime — is over. Now drug developers want AI that can solve their big problems , like discerning whether the body is going to attack a drug candidate and render it useless.

One such example is the pregnane X receptor, or PXR. When activated, PXR increases the production of an enzyme that specifically breaks down foreign organic molecules — such as drug molecules — so the body can dispose of them. The specific enzyme that PXR regulates can metabolize approximately 50% of all marketed drugs.

Most drug development campaigns only discover whether candidates trip this sensor late in the game, forcing drug developers to go back to the drawing board. But if an AI model could reliably predict whether a given drug candidate will activate the PXR receptor, it could fix a lot of problems that present hurdles for new potential drugs, including the drug exiting the body too fast or creating drug–drug interactions.

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Imagine a patient who arrives at her doctor’s clinic furious. She shows her doctor a video of him — white coat, plausible exam room, familiar cadence — endorsing an over-the-counter hormone supplement for menopausal symptoms, dismissing standard therapies as “pharma scams,” and offering a discount code.

But the physician never recorded that message. Someone built a deepfake from online recordings, including interviews, webinars, and patient-facing videos, and used the synthetic likeness to sell an unregulated product. This scenario is no longer hypothetical. Investigations have documented AI-generated videos impersonating specific clinicians whom they name to promote supplements and other dubious treatments on major platforms .

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In August 2024, Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno left Capcom after "30 years and five months" at the Japanese publisher. The legendary developer, responsible for creating Dragon's Dogma and the Devil May Cry franchise, is practically synonymous with the former. It's a well-known story that he originally conceived of the game around the time he was working on Devil May Cry in the early 2000s, and had to fight hard for time and budget when preparing the launch of the original Dragon's Dogma game in 2012. In many ways, the 2024 launch of Dragon's Dogma 2 felt like coming good on a promise nearly two decades in the making.

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QUICK FACTS

Where is it? Over the Bahamas

What's in the photo? The space shuttle Atlantis, preparing to dock with the International Space Station (ISS)

Who took the photo? An unnamed astronaut on board the ISS

When was it taken? July 10, 2011

This stunning astronaut photo shows the last time one of NASA's iconic space shuttles photobombed astronauts' view of Earth as the spacecraft docked with the ISS.

NASA's Space Shuttle Program included five plane-like spacecraft — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — which collectively completed 135 missions between 1981 and 2011, racking up more than 32,000 hours in space. During that time, they helped to construct the ISS and, later, ferry astronauts to and from the station. The space shuttles also helped to deploy and maintain several other important spacecraft, including the Hubble Space Telescope .

The last space shuttle to fly was Atlantis, which successfully completed 33 missions (the second-highest total, behind Discovery ).

This photo shows Atlantis approaching the ISS for the last time as it passed over the distinctive turquoise waters of the Bahamas . The space shuttle's bay doors are open, exposing its cargo area. This was standard procedure for all space shuttles once they reached low Earth orbit because it prevented the spacecraft's radiators from overheating.

The open doors also enabled the shuttle's docking mechanism, located within its cargo bay, to attach to the ISS, thus creating a pressurized seal so that astronauts could move between the two spacecraft.

Atlantis' final flight began on July 8, 2011, when it launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida vertically strapped to a massive fuel tank and a pair of rocket boosters. It returned to Earth on July 21, gliding down to land onto a runway at the launch site. (The spacecraft is now on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.)

In addition to helping construct the ISS, NASA's space shuttles visited Russia's Mir space station, serviced Hubble, and deployed both the Magellan probe to Venus and the Galileo probe to Jupiter. In total, the space shuttle orbited Earth 4,848 times, traveling nearly 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) — more than 525 times the distance between Earth and the moon .

Astronaut photos of the space shuttles were popular because they offered "punctuated snapshots of distinct places on Earth" that were "framed by a human eye," NASA representatives wrote in 2011 . "These images speak to people."

Atlantis touched down at the Kennedy Space Center on July 21, 2011, brining the 30-year Space Shuttle program to an end. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls) While the Space Shuttle Program achieved a lot during its 30-year history, it famously suffered two tragedies: the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters, which killed all crewmembers on board.

NASA eventually canceled the program in 2011, citing the high cost of maintaining the aging spacecraft and a reduced need for the vehicles after the completion of the ISS the same year. To this day, the space shuttles remain the only winged spacecraft to carry humans into space.

See more Earth from space

'Painting-like' ripples in the Bahamas

A 2020 satellite photo shows off the ethereal beauty of submerged sandbanks and seagrass beds in the Great Bahama Bank.

Glowing ring of algae in New Zealand

A 2026 satellite photo captured a gleaming halo of phytoplankton encircling the remote Chatham Islands and a hidden underwater plateau.

Arctic blast paints plume in Florida

A 2026 satellite photo captured a stunning scene of sediment swirling across the West Florida Shelf after an extreme cold snap.

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“ The Deadliest Drug ,” a multipart series by STAT, spotlights an epidemic hidden in plain sight: excessive alcohol use. Alcohol kills more Americans each year than all illicit drugs combined, and yet health officials, industry leaders, and the public rarely focus on it. STAT reporters Isabella Cueto and Lev Facher examined the epidemic’s human cost and the complex causes — from personal to political — of the most harmful substance use crisis in the U.S. STAT data editor J. Emory Parker amplified many of the findings in data-rich charts.

These charts capture the toll, emerging risks, shifting usage, and economic stakes of America’s relationship to alcohol.

1. Alcohol-related emergency department visits nearly doubled in the U.S. between 2003 and 2022

Drinking-related adverse events, including emergency room visits, have soared in recent decades. American emergency rooms recorded roughly 5.4 million visits due to alcohol in 2022, and in many states, alcohol-related hospitalizations dwarf those stemming from other substances, like opioids.

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Kyiv’s decision to honour second world war fighters who killed about 100,000 Poles has revived simmering tensions

In the aftermath of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, Polish-Ukrainian solidarity emerged as one of the most heartwarming subplots of the Kremlin’s brutal war. Millions of Poles, remembering their country’s own tragic history with Russia, mobilised to help Ukrainian refugees with food, shelter and support as they crossed the border in huge numbers to flee the conflict.

Four years later, that outpouring of generosity and solidarity is a distant memory, as the two countries find themselves locked in a bitter dispute over history that has led to angry rhetoric, mutual mud-slinging and a threat from Poland to block Ukraine’s EU accession until it gets its historical house in order.

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