Netflix’s annual virtual event “Geeked Week” pre-announces its biggest upcoming shows. This year Netflix released a trailer for its upcoming adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, and for its new live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series. (And there’s also going to be some kind of live-action Stranger Things stage show opening in London in December.)

Variety noted the “explosive” new trailer for Zach Snyder’s new “action-packed space opera” Rebel Moon. The film — which will also have a one-week theatrical run in December — takes place in the same universe as Snyder’s Army of the Dead. But instead of being set in Las Vegas, “The story centers on a young woman living on the outskirts of a galaxy who must find a group of warriors to save the galaxy from an invasion from a tyrant.”

The Verge pulled together a good rundown of all the other announcements — one of which involves Neil Gaiman:
Following last year’s The Sandman, Netflix is bringing even more beloved Neil Gaiman characters to the small screen. This time it’s Dead Boy Detectives — which was originally slated to stream on Max — based on a crime-solving duo who made their debut in a Sandman comic in the ’90s. The news was paired with the first trailer for the series, which shows off a pretty fun-looking supernatural whodunit…
Netflix says the new eight-episode series is part of its growing “Sandman universe”… with Gaiman serving as one of the executive producers. [Coming sometime in 2024]
They’re also launching several animated series. Netflix released a short teaser for Terminator: the Anime Series.
An animated new take on Ultraman.
An animated He-Man reboot, Masters of the Universe: Revolution (with Mark Hamill providing the voice of Skeletor).
An adult animated comedy series based on the card game Exploding Kittens. (The Verge writes that its trailer “features god in the body of a cat and a very confounding garage door” — and that there will also be an accompanying mobile game.)
Netflix also has a new Chicken Run movie coming in December with its own tie-in game called Eggstraction.

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Source: Slashdot – Netflix Announces Neil Gaiman Series, Zach Snyder Movie, Anime ‘Terminator’ and ‘Exploding Kittens’

There’s already a powerful immunotherapy that “involves engineering a patient’s T cells so they recognize and attack cancer cells,” writes one of America’s top cancer hospitals. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center notes that CAR T cell therapy has already begun to revolutionize cancer treatment,” with these “chimeric” T cells “multiplied in a lab and given back to the patient to be a continual fighting force against the cancer.”
But now “New research from the lab of physician-scientist Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, shows that disrupting a single gene in the CAR T cells can make them more potent and able to fight tumors longer.”
In a paper published in Cancer Discovery, the team demonstrated that disrupting the gene SUV39H1 causes a ripple effect: It restores the expression of multiple genes that help sustain the T cells’ longevity. The researchers showed that this approach improved CAR T cell effectiveness against multiple cancers in mice…

The researchers used the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 to alter SUV39H1 in human CAR T cells. They placed these modified CAR T cells into mice that had been implanted with either human leukemia cells or prostate cancer cells. For both cancers, the CAR T cells were able to sustain their function without becoming exhausted, leading to tumor elimination. By contrast, mice with unedited CAR T cells did not survive the cancer. “The edited CAR T cells can maintain their anti-cancer effects, even when we challenged them repeatedly by exposing them to new tumors over time,” Dr. Zhao says. “These results suggest that SUV39H1-edited CAR T cells may reduce tumor relapse in patients.”

There did not appear to be serious side effects in the mice, although researchers will need to confirm the safety of this approach in humans. The biotechnology company Mnemo Therapeutics is exploring the possibility of conducting clinical trials based on this research.

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Source: Slashdot – Cancer Researchers Show CRISPR-Edited CAR T Cells Could Improve Immunotherapy

Cells have a protein receptor that will cause that cell to die — in theory. Unfortunately, “Previous efforts to target this receptor have been unsuccessful,” says Jogender Tushir-Singh, an associate professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, Davis.

But he’s now led a team of researchers at the university’s Comprehensive Cancer Center that’s identified a receptor-activating protein section. And more importantly, “now that we’ve identified this epitope, there could be a therapeutic path forward” for targeting that receptor… in tumors.

The findings were published Oct. 14 in the Nature journal Cell Death & Differentiation… Death receptors do precisely what their name implies — when targeted, they trigger programmed cell death of tumor cells. They offer a potential workaround that could simultaneously kill tumor cells and pave the way for more effective immunotherapies and CAR T-cell therapy…
Tushir-Singh and his colleagues knew they might be able to target cancer cells selectively if they found the right epitope. Having identified this specific epitope, he and other researchers can now design a new class of antibodies to selectively bind to and activate Fas to potentially destroy tumor cells specifically.
Singh says their research “sets the stage” to develop antibodies that selectively kill tumor cells.

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Source: Slashdot – Researchers Identify a ‘Switch’ That Might Someday Kill Tumor Cells

Around 40% of goods entering and leaving Australia are managed by a single ports operator. But from Friday to Monday morning, they were suffering from a cyberattack that had “crippled” their facilities in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, reports the BBC:
The outage has not affected the supply of goods to major Australian supermarkets, the BBC understands. DP World Australia, a unit of the Dubai state-owned DP World, said its ports resumed operations at 9am local time “following successful tests of key systems overnight”. It added “The company expects that approximately 5,000 containers will move out of the four Australian terminals today….”

DP World said it halted internet connectivity at its ports on Friday to prevent “any ongoing unauthorised access” to its network. Going offline meant trucks had been unable to transport containers in and out of the affected sites. The resumption of service on Monday is the first step towards tackling the attack on its network. DP World said it was still in the process of investigating the disruption and guarding its systems against cyber attacks.

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Source: Slashdot – Australia Ports Operator Recovers From Two-Day ‘Crippling’ After Cyber-Attack

MacRumors writes that the second beta of iOS 17.2 “adds a new feature that allows an iPhone 15 Pro or âOEiPhone 15 ProâOE Max to record Spatial Video” — that is, in the immersive 3D format for the yet-to-be-released Apple Vision Pro (where it can be viewed in the “Photos” app):

Spatial Video recording can be enabled by going to the Settings app, tapping into the Camera section, selecting Formats, and toggling on “Spatial Video for âOEApple Vision ProâOE…” Spatial Videos taken with an âOEiPhone 15 ProâOE can be viewed on the âOEiPhoneâOE as well, but the video appears to be a normal video and not a Spatial Video.
Tech blogger John Gruber got to test the technology, watching the videos on a (still yet-to-be-released) Vision Pro headset. “I’m blown away once again,” he wrote, calling the experience “astonishing.”

“Before my demo, I provided Apple with my eyeglasses prescription, and the Vision Pro headset I used had appropriate corrective lenses in place. As with my demo back in June, everything I saw through the headset looked incredibly sharp…”
The Vision Pro experience is highly dependent upon foveated rendering, which Wikipedia succinctly describes as “a rendering technique which uses an eye tracker integrated with a virtual reality headset to reduce the rendering workload by greatly reducing the image quality in the peripheral vision (outside of the zone gazed by the fovea)…” It’s just incredible, though, how detailed and high resolution the overall effect is…

Plain old still photos look amazing. You can resize the virtual window in which you’re viewing photos to as large as you can practically desire. It’s not merely like having a 20-foot displayâ — âa size far more akin to that of a movie theater screen than a television. It’s like having a 20-foot display with retina quality resolution, and the best brightness and clarity of any display you’ve ever used… And then there are panoramic photos… Panoramic photos viewed using Vision Pro are breathtaking. There is no optical distortion at all, no fish-eye look. It just looks like you’re standing at the place where the panoramic photo was takenâ — âand the wider the panoramic view at capture, the more compelling the playback experience is. It’s incredible…

As a basic rule, going forward, I plan to capture spatial videos of people, especially my family and dearest friends, and panoramic photos of places I visit. It’s like teleportation… When you watch regular (non-spatial) videos using Vision Pro, or view regular still photography, the image appears in a crisply defined window in front of you. Spatial videos don’t appear like that at all. I can’t describe it any better today than I did in June: it’s like watchingâ — âand listening toâ — âa dream, through a hazy-bordered portal opened into another world…

Nothing you’ve ever viewed on a screen, however, can prepare you for the experience of watching these spatial videos, especially the ones you will have shot yourself, of your own family and friends. They truly are more like memories than videos… [T]he ones I shot myself were more compelling, and took my breath away… Prepare to be moved, emotionally, when you experience this.

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Source: Slashdot – iOS Beta Adds ‘Spatial Video’ Recording. Blogger Calls Them ‘Astonishing’, ‘Breathtaking’, ‘Compelling’