Can smart cameras improve evacuations? A new approach to smarter crowd mapping
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 8-Apr-2026 08:15 ET (8-Apr-2026 12:15 GMT/UTC)
Accurate crowd monitoring is crucial for guiding emergency evacuations. Non-repetitive scanning LiDAR systems are affordable and offer wide coverage, but their sparse and discontinuous depth data limit practical use. A study from Doshisha University introduces a color-guided depth completion method to reconstruct missing 3D information. The researchers also created a simulated dataset to support the evaluation of future depth reconstruction approaches.
Researchers at Kumamoto University have announced the world’s first rum produced using the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces japonicus, marking a breakthrough in fermentation science and craft spirits innovation. The new product, “JAPONICUS RHUM AGRICOLE,” goes on sale February 27, 2026.
> Developed a novel technology (PL-Display) that enables high-precision, high-speed drug target discovery without using cells
> By firmly immobilizing candidate peptide and their coding DNA onto a magnetic bead, highly accurate screening is possible
> A peptide found in only one out of 10,000 can be detected in a single screening
> Efficiently detect target peptides from a library of approximately 1.7 million random peptides
> Efficiently concentrate the target by amplifying the DNA encoding the detected peptide via PCR
In recent years, the quickly growing “femtech” industry has transformed how many women monitor and manage their health. This field of technology creates products including everything from period trackers to AI-assisted cancer diagnostics. While these innovations offer benefits, they also raise questions about privacy, bias, regulation, and the ethical implications of new technologies in healthcare.
Cancer Center at Illinois member Sara Gerke is working to navigate these issues. A health law scholar and bioethicist, Gerke focuses on AI and digital health safety. Her recent paper, “Effective regulation of technology in women’s health and healthcare,” published in The BMJ together with co-authors Sara Raza, Eric Bressman, and Carmel Shachar, addresses ethical and legal issues surrounding “femtech,” bringing light to the lack of data privacy protection regulation for health apps trusted with personal information.
A new online game allows players to build a farmers market empire as they learn real-world food safety topics. The game is titled “Market, Set, Go!” and is inspired by games like "SimCity" and allows players to build 10 farmers market stands with a variety of products and activities. To grow, vendors must solve food safety challenges. Success provides vendors more resources to expand their stand. The game is one result of a $550,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Though CAR T cells have been effective against certain blood cancers, they have not been for solid tumors. Now, a new form of highly sensitive CAR T cells aims to overcome one of the biggest barriers in solid tumor immunotherapies – the way solid tumors lack a single, widely shared surface target. By engineering an ultra-sensitive receptor capable of detecting even the smallest amounts of the protein CD70, researchers report they were able to eradicate kidney, ovarian, and pancreatic tumors in preclinical models. The findings provide a potential strategy to treat a broad range of solid tumors. Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) are engineered molecular “homing devices” that augment the functions of immune cells to recognize and attack specific disease targets. CAR T cells targeting CD19 have transformed the treatment of certain blood cancers and have shown success in producing lasting remissions in patients who have shown resistance to other therapies. However, unlike many blood cancers, solid tumors lack a single, widely shared surface target that is consistently present on cancer cells and largely absent from healthy tissues. Previous studies have suggested that CD70 could be a promising target for future CAR T immunotherapies, as it is abnormally overproduced in several solid tumors. Yet CD70 expression within these tumors is uneven – some cancer cells display it abundantly while others express little or none.
To better understand the limitations of CAR therapy in these tumors, Sophie Hanina and colleagues developed patient-derived xenograft laboratory models that recreate the patchwork expression of CD70 seen in patients with kidney cancer. Hanina et al. found that CD70 expression exists on a spectrum in all tumor cells; even those labeled CD70-negative expressed very low levels of CD70, though not at a level high enough to be detected and destroyed by conventional CAR T cells. Building on this finding, the authors engineered a far more sensitive and highly selective chimeric antigen receptor called HLA-independent T cell (HIT) receptor and show in mouse and cell models that it can detect and eliminate tumor cells with very low CD70 expression. According to the findings, these CD70-HIT cells completely and durably eradicated tumors with mixed levels of CD70 expression across models of renal, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers. “Twenty or more solid tumor types express CD70 heterogeneously,” write the authors. “Our findings position CD70 as a pan-cancer target and provide a model for uncovering additional stealth targets amenable to sensitive immunotherapeutic approaches in the face of apparent tumor antigen heterogeneity.”