A playtester for his latest project, Baby Steps, was struggling to navigate the game's lead'Nate, a 35-year-old 'failson' in a stained onesie'up a slippery hill. Each time, the terrain proved to be too much, and Nate skidded uselessly down it. Foddy has a reputation for making onerous games that take a little bit of masochism to master. This was not one of those times. Neatly placed next to the slippery hill was a staircase, which Foddy says the player took note of after the third or fourth fall. However, this modern-day Sisyphus refused to quit; he continued to flop Nate's thick limbs up that hill again and again, and he continued to fall again and again. The playtester's 'intense need to climb that mudslide'it's funny to me, it's gratifying as a designer,' says Foddy. 'I loved that he was doing it. Like, that's not productive.' Unbeknownst to the playtester, he was Foddy's target audience. Baby Steps, launching September 23 for PlayStation 5 and PC, entreats gamers to examine how much they unconsciously adhere to damaging masculine ideas, including an unwillingness to appear weak or incapable, whether that's in how well they play a game or how willing they are to sometimes take the L. It makes its hero less like the muscled protagonists of games past and more like the players: unhelpfully stubborn types with what Foddy calls "slightly problematic" views of what it means to succeed that are actually holding them back....
Inspired by a hitchhiking fish that uses a specialized suction organ to latch onto sharks and other marine animals, researchers from MIT and other institutions have designed a mechanical adhesive device that can attach to soft surfaces underwater or in extreme conditions, and remain there for days or weeks. This device, the researchers showed, can adhere to the lining of the GI tract, whose mucosal layer makes it very difficult to attach any kind of sensor or drug-delivery capsule. Using their new adhesive system, the researchers showed that they could achieve automatic self-adhesion, without motors, to deliver HIV antiviral drugs or RNA to the GI tract, and they could also deploy it as a sensor for gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). The device can also be attached to a swimming fish to monitor aquatic environments. The design is based on the research team's extensive studies of the remora's sucker-like disc. These discs have several unique properties that allow them to adhere tightly to a variety of hosts, including sharks, marlins, and rays. However, how remoras maintain adhesion to soft, dynamically shifting surfaces remains largely unknown....
Therapeutic cancer vaccines are an appealing strategy for treating malignancies. In theory, when a patient is injected with peptide antigens ' protein fragments from mutant proteins only expressed by tumor cells ' T cells learn to recognize and attack cancer cells expressing the corresponding protein. By teaching the patient's own immune system to attack cancer cells, these vaccines ideally would not only eliminate tumors but prevent them from recurring. 'There has been a lot of work to make cancer vaccines more effective,' says Darrell Irvine, a professor in the MIT departments of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. 'But even in mouse and other models, they typically only provoke a weak immune response. And once those vaccines are tested in a clinical setting, their efficacy evaporates.' New hope may now be on the horizon. A vaccine based on a novel approach developed by Irvine and colleagues at MIT, and refined by researchers at Elicio Therapeutics, an MIT spinout that Irvine founded to translate experiments into treatment, is showing promising results in clinical trials ' including Phase 1 data suggesting the vaccine could serve as a viable option for the treatment of pancreatic and other cancers....
Federal Reserve officials held interest rates steady at their monthly policy meeting on Sept. 20, 2023 ' only the second time they have done so since embarking on a rate-raising campaign a year and a half ago. But it is what they hinted at rather than what they did that caught many economists' attention: Fed officials indicated that they don't expect rates to end 2023 higher than they did in June ' when they last issued their projections. Since the hiking cycle began, observers have worried about whether increased rates could push the U.S. economy into a downturn. Some have even speculated that a recession had already begun. However, the economy has been more resilient than many expected, and now many economists are wondering whether the seemingly impossible soft landing ' that is, a slowdown that avoids crashing the economy ' has become a reality. As a finance professor, I think it's premature to start celebrating. Inflation is still almost double the Federal Reserve's target of 2%, and is expected to come in at around 4% for September. What's more, the economy is still growing quite fast, with consensus forecasts showing gross domestic product will rise by nearly 3% this quarter. Some early data suggests that could be a low estimate....
