Universal Music Group CEO & chairman Sir Lucian Grainge has responded to the latest legal claim by Drake against the major.
The Canadian star initially sued the major (his own label) over Kendrick Lamarr’s diss track Not Like Us. In legal papers filed in New York state’s Supreme Court in November, Drake’s company, Frozen Moments, accused the major of artificially boosting streams of Not Like Us, released via UMG’s Interscope.
According to the legal claim, UMG “launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves”.
The legal dispute escalated earlier this year when Drake filed a defamation lawsuit against UMG in relation to the song’s release. At the time, the major described the claims as “untrue” and “illogical’’.
In the latest development, Sir Lucian Grainge has weighed in on the dispute.
In a declaration letter filed in the Southern District of New York and obtained by Music Week, Sir Lucian dismisses the claims of defamation – and suggestions he was involved in the planning and release of the track – as “farcical” and “nonsense”.
Earlier this week, Drake’s lawyers attempted a discovery bid to compel UMG and Sir Lucian to turn over the label’s contract with Lamar alongside other information. The attempt to add Sir Lucian as a document custodian in the case apparently prompted the CEO to make his legal intervention.
In the declaration letter, Sir Lucian states that the allegation that he was involved in attempting to “devalue” Drake’s brand “makes no sense due to the fact that the company that I run, Universal Music Group NV, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Drake, including longstanding and critical financial support for his recording career, the purchase and ownership of the bulk of his recording catalogue, and the purchase of his music publishing rights”.
Sir Lucian added that any suggestion the head of a multi-billion dollar, multi-national public company would be involved in the release and promotion of an individual song was “farcial”.
He confirmed in the declaration that he had not heard the track or seen the video or cover art for Not Like Us until after its release. Kendrick Lamar’s single peaked at No.1 in the UK and US.
“Whilst, as part of my role, I certainly have financial oversight of and responsibility for UMG’s global businesses, the proposition that I was involved in, much less responsible for, reviewing and approving the content of Not Like Us, its cover art or music video, or for determining or directing the promotion of those materials, is groundless and indeed ridiculous,” concluded Sir Lucian in the letter.
In separate submissions to the court, UMG’s lawyers sought to have the motion to make the CEO & chairman a document custodian dismissed, arguing that the “attempts to show Sir Lucian’s relevance are so strained that they defy credulity”.
“Drake’s motion is a transparent attempt to use discovery to harass UMG and force it to waste time and resources out of spite,” stated the legal letter. “The premise of Drake’s motion – that he could not have lost a rap battle unless it was the product of some imagined secret conspiracy going to the top of UMG’s corporate structure – is absurd.”
For more stories like this, and to keep up to date with all our market leading news, features and analysis, sign up to receive our daily Morning Briefing newsletter
A few years back, Texas natives Diana Rubin and her future husband Aaron Rosenthal lived in the exact same building in New York City—but had never met in person. “My doorman, who was like a second father to me, kept teasing me that there was a ‘new guy from Texas’ in the building. I’d just roll my eyes and laugh,” shares Diana, who works in healthcare. “The lesson here: New York doormen have great instincts!” They later met socially through mutual friends. After Aaron made a few attempts at asking her out, Diana finally agreed to a first date—and it wasn’t until that night in a West Village cocktail bar in February 2022 that the two realized they were neighbors. “What was meant to be a quick drink turned into a two-hour conversation, followed by a long walk through the neighborhood. Neither of us wanted the evening to end,” remembers Aaron, who works in finance. “The next day, I called my best friend and told him all about it. I’ll never forget his response: ‘Sounds like you just met your future wife.’ I laughed because earlier that morning at work, my colleagues had said exactly the same thing.”
After a year-and-a-half living in the same building in the West Village, the couple decided to move into the same apartment together in Tribeca. “Our home quickly became our favorite place in the world,” says Diana. The following year, Diana was planning to join Aaron for a birthday dinner at the Italian restaurant where they had one of their first dates. “As I walked back home, I saw Aaron standing in Duane Park, right across from our apartment. It’s a spot where we often had coffee together in the mornings,” shares Diana. “I was a little confused as to why he had crossed the street but didn’t think much of it until suddenly, he was down on one knee. I think I completely blacked out from there.” The newly engaged pair headed to the restaurant, where both of their families were present ready to surprise them and celebrate.
A larger celebration was now on the horizon, and the couple would need to get planning. Since the bride studied art history at the American University in Paris, she always dreamed of returning to the city and getting married at one of its storied institutions. The couple chose the Musée Rodin—home to the artist’s famous works The Thinker and The Kiss—as their wedding venue for a springtime ceremony on May 24, 2025. “The museum’s gardens and timeless architecture created an atmosphere that felt both intimate and grand, a perfect reflection of the romance and artistry we hoped to capture on our wedding day,” says Diana. The venue served as the basis for most of the wedding’s design. The building’s French gray-blue doors became central to the wedding’s color palette, and elements of its rococo architecture were echoed in the wedding crest and cake design. Another unique touch? “The museum’s beautiful parquet de Versailles floors were recreated as the pattern for our dance floor, as we wanted the structure built for the reception to feel like an extension of the main building,” says Diana.
LONDON (AP) — Jacob Bethell will break a record which has stood for 136 years when the 21-year-old allrounder becomes England’s youngest ever men’s cricket captain next month.
Bethell will lead England against Ireland in three Twenty20s in Dublin.
Advertisement
The previous youngest England captain was Monty Bowden, who was 23 in 1889 when he took charge for a test in South Africa after regular skipper Aubrey Smith fell ill with fever.
Some senior players will be missing in Ireland including usual white-ball captain Harry Brook, who will be in charge of one-day international and T20 games against visiting South Africa earlier in September.
“Jacob Bethell has impressed with his leadership qualities ever since he has been with the England squads, and the series against Ireland will provide him with the opportunity to further develop those skills on the international stage,” England men’s selector Luke Wright said in a statement on Friday.
The captaincy is part of a rapid rise for Bethell, who made his debuts for England in all three formats only last year.
Super-resolution microscopes showcase the inner lives of cells
Using a tiny, spherical glass lens sandwiched between two brass plates, the 17th-century Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first to officially describe red blood cells and sperm cells in human tissues, and observe “animalcules” — bacteria and protists — in the water of a lake.
Increasingly powerful light microscopes followed, revealing cell organelles like the nucleus and energy-producing mitochondria. But by 1873, scientists realized there was a limit to the level of detail. When light passes through a lens, the light gets spread out through diffraction. This means that two objects can’t be distinguished if they’re less than roughly 250 nanometers (250 billionths of a meter) apart — instead, they’ll appear as a blur. That put the inner workings of cell structures off limits.
Electron microscopy, which uses electron beams instead of light, offers higher resolution. But the resulting black-and-white images make it hard tell proteins apart, and the method only works on dead cells.
Now, however, optics engineers and physicists have developed sophisticated tricks to overcome the diffraction limit of light microscopes, opening up a new world of detail. These “super-resolution” light microscopy techniques can distinguish objects down to 100 nanometers and sometimes even less than 10 nanometers. Scientists attach tiny, colored fluorescent tags to individual proteins or bits of DNA, often in living cells, where they can watch them in action. As a result, they are now filling in key knowledge gaps about how cells work and what goes wrong in neurological diseases and cancers, or during viral infections.
“We can really see new biology — things that we were hoping to see but hadn’t seen before,” says molecular cell biologist Lothar Schermelleh, who directs an imaging center at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Knowable Magazine highlights some of what scientists are learning in this new age of light microscopy.
Overcoming the diffraction limit
Super-resolution microscopy uses a variety of techniques to detect detail that would normally be hidden by the diffraction limit, Schermelleh explains. Single-molecule localization microscopy, for instance, takes advantage of the fact that spots on an image are easier to localize with precision when they appear in isolation rather than clustered together. Scientists label the molecules of interest with fluorescent tags designed to spontaneously emit light. As the probes twinkle on and off, computational models estimate exactly where each molecule is located — and reconstruct a high-resolution image of the sample.
Another technique, stimulated emission depletion, scans the samples with lasers that are surrounded by a second, donut-shaped ring of lasers that cancel out the fluorescent light around the area of interest, sharpening the microscope’s resolution. A third method, called structured illumination microscopy, illuminates samples with a striped pattern of light. These stripes interfere with the light emanating from the sample in ways that allow scientists to infer additional detail about the image.
The fundamentals of these techniques were developed in the early 2000s, but they’ve only recently become widespread and accessible enough for biologists to use routinely, Schermelleh says. “We now have really lots of projects that use super-resolution microscopy as a genuine tool for biological discovery,” he says, “not just for making nice images.”
Revising biology textbooks
These techniques have already revealed new cell structures. Scientists have discovered that neurons have a unique kind of scaffold, called the membrane-associated periodic skeleton, or MPS, which provides rigidity and form and helps to regulate the signals that pass from one neuron to the next and to maintain the cells’ overall function. “The MPS is involved in almost all the neuronal functions,” says Columbia University neurobiologist Victor Macarrón-Palacios, who recently reported with colleagues that a particular protein, paralemmin-1, is responsible for organizing the intricate structure of the MPS.
Specialized microscopy techniques have revealed that nerve cells have a special type of internal skeleton called the membrane-associated periodic skeleton, regulated by a protein called parallemin-1 (fluorescently labeled in this image). – Victor Macarrón-Palacios // Max Planck Institute For Medical Research
Other cell structures, too, turn out to be more complex than they seemed. Earlier in 2025, biophysicist Melike Lakadamyali of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues discovered that organelles called lysosomes, whose textbook role is to break down waste material in cells, can have different combinations of proteins on their surfaces. This likely relates to additional functions that specific lysosomes have, such as sensing nutrients and repairing broken membranes.
Scientists also have been studying how organelles interact with one another. Cell biologist Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, for instance, is scrutinizing the structures that mitochondria use to dock onto the protein-making endoplasmic reticulum, which supplies calcium and fats to mitochondria.
Such studies might help reveal the causes of disease. Last year, Lippincott-Schwartz learned that mutations in the VAPB gene, which is believed to contribute to the nerve-killing disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), may interfere with the ability of the endoplasmic reticulum to connect to mitochondria, she says. This could alter the function of these powerhouses and help explain how ALS arises. “We’re just learning what these various genetic mutations that underlie some of these diseases are actually doing at the cell biological level.”
Gazing into human DNA
Scientists have also been peering into the nucleus and studying the DNA inside it. Human DNA, if removed from a single cell and stretched out, would span about 2 yards. To squeeze inside the nucleus, it wraps itself around proteins called histones, creating a string-of-beads combo known as chromatin. The chromatin further loops and twists to form our chromosomes.
Chromatin loops and bunches, or domains, can only be studied in detail with super-resolution microscopy, for instance by tagging segments of DNA with fluorescent probes, says Schermelleh, who has been studying how the material arranges itself in 3D in mammalian cells. “The size scale is just below the diffraction limit, so it couldn’t be assessed before.”
A composite of two images shows technological advances: the top half was imaged with conventional wide-field fluorescence microscopy; the bottom half was imaged with super-resolution microscopy. Within a fibroblast cell nucleus, the DNA-binding histone protein called H2B is fluorescently labeled in yellow. – M.A. Ricci et al // CELL 2015
Research by Lakadamyali has revealed, for instance, that the DNA-histone strings of beads organize into much more variable structures than scientists had assumed, with some regions of DNA more tightly packed than others.
This packaging determines how accessible a given region of DNA is. And that’s important because different cells in the body, say heart cells or neurons, use only a specific subset of their genes. The ones they use are left in a looser, more accessible state, while the silenced ones are packed tight.
In 2015, Lakadamyali found that embryonic stem cells, which can develop into any cell type, have a very loose chromatin structure compared to more specialized cells, which have silenced the genes they don’t need. “We can actually determine whether a cell is a stem cell or a differentiated cell based on the spatial organization of chromatin,” says Lakadamyali, who coauthored a 2023 overview of super-resolution techniques in the Annual Review of Biophysics.
Improving cancer therapies
Scientists are also examining cells affected by disease. For example, biophysicist Markus Sauer of the University of Würzburg in Germany is studying certain receptor proteins on the surfaces of cancer cells that are used as targets in cancer-killing therapies. For blood cancers, for instance, scientists have genetically engineered immune cells to find and kill cancer cells that have specific surface proteins.
But the techniques commonly used to analyze the proteins in patients’ cancer cells and match patients with effective therapies don’t give a full picture, Sauer says. That was illustrated back in 2015, when physicians discovered they could successfully treat patients with the blood cancer multiple myeloma with therapies that target a receptor called CD19 — even though CD19 hadn’t been spotted on multiple myeloma cancer cells with standard methods.
Sauer and colleagues found in 2019 that the CD19 proteins were clearly visible with super-resolution microscopy. They learned that to do their killing job, the immune therapies require as few as 10 CD19 proteins among hundreds or thousands of other proteins on a cancer cell surface.
A new microscopy technique can light up the protein CD-19 on the surface of cancer cells which can help determine which patients could benefit from CD-19-targeting therapies. – Markus Sauer
These microscopy techniques can be used to better match patients to effective therapies, Sauer says. His more recent research has identified a new receptor protein for therapies to target, and helped elucidate the exact process of tumor killing — knowledge that could help improve the potency of immune therapies. “You have to visualize those processes at molecular level,” he says.
Filming viral invasions
The wily tricks viruses use to infect human cells and reproduce are also under investigation. Understanding such dynamics could help scientists develop new antiviral medicines, says virologist Christian Sieben of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Germany.
Earlier in 2025, for example, Sieben reported how the influenza A virus infects human cells. By tagging viral and human proteins, he and colleagues watched the virus first latch onto single receptor proteins on the cell surface. The virus then waited until other receptor proteins, moving around in the fluid cell membrane, accumulated nearby. Only when the virus attached to multiple receptors could it enter the cell, Sieben and his colleagues learned.
And in 2024, a team of scientists at Stanford University examined how the COVID-19 virus replicates inside human cells. Using fluorescent tags to label the virus’s genetic material, biophysicist Leonid Andronov and colleagues found that SARS-CoV-2 makes a bubble with a double membrane in which it copies its genetic material. This probably prevents destruction by the cell, Andronov says.
Image of how the Covid-19 virus hides from the cell’s immune system by wrapping itself inside double-membrane bubbles when replicating. The bubbles are seen as clumpy aggregates of the virus’s fluorescently labeled genetic material and the dark circle in the middle is the cell nucleus. – L. Andronov et al // Nature Communications 2024
As more and more scientists use super-resolution microscopy to illuminate the goings-on inside cells, how much more detail can they expect to see? Refinements like creating smaller fluorescent probes — so that one can label multiple sites along a single protein — could push the resolution further, Lakadamyali says.
Perhaps one day super-resolution advances might rival those of electron microscopy. After all, just two decades ago, “we didn’t know that we could break the diffraction limit,” she says. “We’ve made so much progress in a 20-year period. I think it’s possible.”
This story was produced by Knowable Magazine and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Tom Cruise’s Ray-Bans in “Top Gun.” The trail of Reese’s Pieces E.T. follows into the bedroom. That Vespa Jennifer Coolidge rides while cruising through Sicily in “The White Lotus.” cruising through Sicily in “The White Lotus.”
Product placement in film and TV is everywhere, whether you notice or not. Sure, brands have been integrated in Hollywood since the birth of cinema, but product placement has always been more of an art than a science. Without viewership guarantees or full creative control over how a product is presented, it’s impossible for brands to know whether a placement is working — or if their money would be better spent on a traditional advertisement.
An in-house product placement department at United Talent Agency aims to change that. Using proprietary information, access to Hollywood deal flow and a small but mighty team of statistics nerds, the agency aims to forecast the impact of a placement and help brands determine where to put their ad dollars.
UTA’s investment in this world comes at a time when film and TV producers are more interested than ever in brand integration. “With budget cuts to content happening, producers are trying to figure out more ways to pad their budgets,” says Jillian Raskin, vice president of UTA, who heads the agency’s product placement wing. “They’re taking more of an active interest in the space.”
Whereas the practice used to trickle down from the network, which would sell ads and then force TV shows to integrate the products, today many producers are cutting out ad sales teams and working directly with brands. This awards season alone, the UTA team helped sneak Lyft into “Shrinking” and Montblanc into “The Bear,” and also place products in “The Pitt,” “The White Lotus,” “Abbott Elementary,” “The Studio,” “The Penguin” and 12 other Emmy-nominated shows.
There are essentially three ways for a product to land in a movie or TV show. One is a paid placement, a deal brokered between a brand and a network or studio, that can carry contingencies such as how visible the brand name is or how long it stays on-screen. Another is organic placement, in which a company offers a free supply of product with no guarantee of placement. (This type of arrangement is common with cars, phones and laptops.)
And the third way, which Raskin estimates accounts for 90% of all product placement, is for a product to be written into a scene without the company’s knowledge. For the brand, that can be pure serendipity, like Eggo waffles becoming Eleven’s preferred snack in “Stranger Things,” or a PR nightmare — like when Duke University publicly called out “The White Lotus” for dressing a drug-addled character contemplating suicide in a Blue Devils tee. Or when Peloton’s stock dropped 11% overnight after a character on “And Just Like That …” had a heart attack and died after a stationary bike session.
Using brands without permission rarely escalates to a lawsuit due to fair use protections, which is why networks like HBO seem unconcerned about brand backlash. “Still, some people play it very safe,” Raskin says. “Like, don’t have a character who is an alcoholic shown drinking a Budweiser. That’s going to come back and be bad for us.”
Aside from boosting production budgets, brands also can enhance the world-building of a show or movie, whereas “fake or nondescript brands can take a viewer out of the experience,” says Raskin. It can be jarring to spot soda labeled “Cola,” or even made-up brands like Heisler beer, which has been sipped in series like “New Girl” and “Parks and Recreation,” and Morley cigarettes, which have been puffed in “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men.”
For brands, a big benefit of product placement is that traditional ads are fleeting blips — annoying interruptions that can send viewers fumbling for the remote or sticking their hand out of the shower to hit “Skip.” Film and television are forever. Especially in the streaming era, where any old show or movie is prone to a random resurgence.
That said, it’s famously difficult to predict a hit in Hollywood. For example, General Motors couldn’t have known “Barbie” would bag $1.4 billion at the box office when it paid to have its cars parked outside the protagonist’s Dreamhouse. That’s partly why that partnership is considered the “Holy Grail” of brand integration, says entertainment marketing strategist Victoria Anorve, and one that “700 people claim credit for.”
Another recent placement those in the biz often hail is Coca-Cola in Season 2 of “The Bear.” As part of the deal, the beverage company purchased ads across Hulu and paid for a bottle of Coke Zero to sit next to Ayo Edebiri’s character, Sydney, in a scene where she and her father reminisce about her late mother on her birthday. UTA helped get Coca-Cola early access to Season 2 scripts, and it pinpointed the scene as a perfect venue for its “Recipe for Magic” campaign, which celebrated the small moments of human connection over food and a Coke. The spot worked because it was subtle — and because Season 2 launched to a 70% viewership spike compared with the first season.
Product placement can also put brands in the hands of celebrities who might otherwise be budgetarily out of their reach. One of UTA’s proprietary tools attempts to quantify a celebrity’s “star power,” but of course, not everything can be predicted by an algorithm.
“One of the examples we always talk about is ‘Suits,’” says data analyst Zachary Schwartz. “Your actress could become a princess, and then all of a sudden the show gets a trillion views.”
1.3 million people tuned into the first hour of Taylor Swift’s podcast appearance. That’s nearly twice as many that initially tuned into Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Trump, who had a nine-month headstart, has more overall listeners, but Swift’s appearance is catching up quickly.
Back in May, President Trump took to social media to declare Taylor Swift was “no longer ‘HOT’.” He might want to rethink that position.
The pop star’s appearance on the New Heights podcast this week attracted 1.3 concurrent million viewers in its first hour. That’s just shy of twice as many people who tuned into The Joe Rogan Experience last October, when Trump was a guest. Trump’s appearance brought in 800,000 viewers in its first hour.
Swift’s appearance also led to a massive boost in subscribers for the Travis and Jason Kelce podcast, with the total jumping from 2.85 million to 2.91 million people. The appearance was such an event that it overwhelmed YouTube. An hour and 44 minutes into the podcast, the live premiere cut to black. The show’s official account on X/Twitter posted minutes later that the stream “will be back shortly” once technical issues were corrected.
In the longer run, Trump’s appearance still has more overall views. To date, it has been watched 59 million times in the past nine months. Meanwhile, as of Friday morning, the YouTube version of the New Heights podcast had hit 15 million viewers. But Swift could catch up swiftly, though. On Thursday, Spotify said the New Heights episode, where she announced her new album and gave fans an insight into her life, was one of its most popular podcasts of the last year, increasing the average number of listeners by 3,000%.
Trump has had something of a one-sided feud with Swift since 2020, when she endorsed Biden in the presidential race. He attempted to revive that in May and then again early August, calling the singer “woke” and claiming “Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying … that I can’t stand her (HATE!). She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became, NO LONGER HOT.”
Swift has not replied to Trump’s taunts.
Introducing the 2025 Fortune Global 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in the world. Explore this year’s list.
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
“Retro blue headband on, hard drive in hand — science and repair in the same orbit,” wrote Expedition 73 flight engineer Mike Fincke with NASA on social media. “In space, versatility isn’t optional; it’s survival. Every skill we sharpen here points us toward the Moon… and beyond to Mars.”. | Credit: NASA/Mike Fincke
From ultrasounds to spacesuit assembly, Earth observations and monitoring blood flow, the seven members of the second half of Expedition 73 were kept busy this week aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Orbital observation
“Yesterday [Aug. 11] was a very busy day on the ISS. But we got through it by helping each other as a crew! I had little time to take photos, so I’ll share some pictures I took before bedtime,” wrote JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui on social media.
“The views from the ISS are all spectacular, but the collaboration between Earth and the starry sky is simply the best,” he wrote. “I’m busy, so I don’t have time to indulge in meditation, but it’s the kind of scenery that makes you crave such moments.”
Expedition 73 flight engineer Kimiya Yui of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) captured this photo of a starry sky over Earth from on board the International Space Station on Aug. 11, 2025. | Credit: NASA/JAXA/Kimiya Yui
Science status
Among the research that was conducted by the Expedition 73 crew aboard the space station this week was:
Ultrasound 2 — The four recently-arrived members of Expedition 73 took turns using an ultrasound to scan their necks, shoulders and legs for blood clots formed since leaving Earth. Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke of NASA, Kimiya Yui of JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, all flight engineers, will repeat these scans periodically throughout their six to eight month stay in orbit.
CIPHER — The “Complement of Integrated Protocols for Human Exploration Research on Varying Mission Durations” includes 14 different studies. This week, Cardman monitored her cardiovascular and respiratory fitness while exercising, while fellow NASA astronaut and flight engineer Jonny Kim collected blood and urine samples for analysis back on Earth.
ISAFE —Fincke and Cardman also took part in the “Investigating Structure and Function of the Eye” experiment, another component of CIPHER. After applying electrodes to Cardman’s forehead and around her eyes, Fincke sent signals to gauge how her retinas responded to light.
Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineer Alexey Zubritsky studied their “microcirculatory system,” the tiny veins in their hands, feet, fingers and toes.
Station keeping
The Expedition 73 crewmates also took part in activities to maintain the space station’s systems and prepare for future research.
EMU prep — Kim and Cardman, working together inside the U.S. Quest airlock, replaced parts on a couple of extravehicular mobility units (EMU), or spacesuits, to be ready for spacewalks planned for later this year.
Cold Atom Lab — Yui, working inside NASA’s Destiny Laboratory, swapped out computer components for this apparatus which lowers atoms below the mean temperature of the universe, enabling the observation of atomic wave functions and quantum characteristics that cannot be reproduced on the ground.
Cargo inspections — SpaceX CRS-33, the company’s next resupply mission to the ISS, is due to launch on Aug. 24. Fincke spent time this week assessing the areas where the Dragon spacecraft’s cargo will be unloaded and made sure the tools needed for the job were assembled.
Astronaut activity
Zena Cardman’s first page of “a new chapter in what feels already like a great story” is a video worth thousands of words.
A NASA astronaut and Expedition 73 flight engineer, Cardman arrived at the space station on Aug. 2 as the commander of SpaceX’s Crew-11. This is her first spaceflight.
“I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll start here: my view from one Dragon to another. I don’t have words yet for the whole experience, so a picture will have to do,” wrote Zena in her first social media post from Earth orbit.
“This was my first attempt at a time-lapse … Aurora over the South Pacific, Orion rising, satellites in the distance, and my favorite planet, all from a wild new perspective,” she wrote.
By the numbers
As of Friday (Aug. 15), there are 7 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov of Roscosmos; fellow cosmonauts Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov; Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke of NASA; and Kimiya Yui of JAXA, all flight engineers.
There are two docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX’s Dragon “Endeavour” attached to the zenith port of the Harmony module and Roscosmos’ Soyuz MS-27 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Prichal node.
There are two docked cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos’ Progress MS-30 (91P) attached to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, and Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module.
As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 24 years and 9 months and 13 days.
From ultrasounds to spacesuit assembly, Earth observations and monitoring blood flow, the seven members of the second half of Expedition 73 were kept busy this week aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Orbital observation
“Yesterday [Aug. 11] was a very busy day on the ISS. But we got through it by helping each other as a crew! I had little time to take photos, so I’ll share some pictures I took before bedtime,” wrote JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui on social media.
“The views from the ISS are all spectacular, but the collaboration between Earth and the starry sky is simply the best,” he wrote. “I’m busy, so I don’t have time to indulge in meditation, but it’s the kind of scenery that makes you crave such moments.”
Expedition 73 flight engineer Kimiya Yui of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) captured this photo of a starry sky over Earth from on board the International Space Station on Aug. 11, 2025. (Image credit: NASA/JAXA/Kimiya Yui)
Ultrasound 2 — The four recently-arrived members of Expedition 73 took turns using an ultrasound to scan their necks, shoulders and legs for blood clots formed since leaving Earth. Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke of NASA, Kimiya Yui of JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, all flight engineers, will repeat these scans periodically throughout their six to eight month stay in orbit.
CIPHER — The “Complement of Integrated Protocols for Human Exploration Research on Varying Mission Durations” includes 14 different studies. This week, Cardman monitored her cardiovascular and respiratory fitness while exercising, while fellow NASA astronaut and flight engineer Jonny Kim collected blood and urine samples for analysis back on Earth.
ISAFE —Fincke and Cardman also took part in the “Investigating Structure and Function of the Eye” experiment, another component of CIPHER. After applying electrodes to Cardman’s forehead and around her eyes, Fincke sent signals to gauge how her retinas responded to light.
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineer Alexey Zubritsky studied their “microcirculatory system,” the tiny veins in their hands, feet, fingers and toes.
Station keeping
The Expedition 73 crewmates also took part in activities to maintain the space station’s systems and prepare for future research.
Cold Atom Lab — Yui, working inside NASA’s Destiny Laboratory, swapped out computer components for this apparatus which lowers atoms below the mean temperature of the universe, enabling the observation of atomic wave functions and quantum characteristics that cannot be reproduced on the ground.
Cargo inspections — SpaceX CRS-33, the company’s next resupply mission to the ISS, is due to launch on Aug. 24. Fincke spent time this week assessing the areas where the Dragon spacecraft’s cargo will be unloaded and made sure the tools needed for the job were assembled.
Astronaut activity
I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll start here: my view from one Dragon to another. I don’t have words yet for the whole experience, so a picture will have to do.This was my first attempt at a time-lapse (thank you, @Astro_Ayers, for many great tips). Aurora over the South… pic.twitter.com/SykVJJc2ZNAugust 14, 2025
Zena Cardman’s first page of “a new chapter in what feels already like a great story” is a video worth thousands of words.
A NASA astronaut and Expedition 73 flight engineer, Cardman arrived at the space station on Aug. 2 as the commander of SpaceX’s Crew-11. This is her first spaceflight.
“I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll start here: my view from one Dragon to another. I don’t have words yet for the whole experience, so a picture will have to do,” wrote Zena in her first social media post from Earth orbit.
“This was my first attempt at a time-lapse … Aurora over the South Pacific, Orion rising, satellites in the distance, and my favorite planet, all from a wild new perspective,” she wrote.
By the numbers
As of Friday (Aug. 15), there are 7 people aboard the International Space Station: Expedition 73 commander Sergey Ryzhikov of Roscosmos; fellow cosmonauts Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov; Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke of NASA; and Kimiya Yui of JAXA, all flight engineers.
There are two docked crew spacecraft: SpaceX’s Dragon “Endeavour” attached to the zenith port of the Harmony module and Roscosmos’ Soyuz MS-27 attached to the Earth-facing port of the Prichal node.
There are two docked cargo spacecraft: Roscosmos’ Progress MS-30 (91P) attached to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, and Progress MS-31 (92P) docked to the space-facing port of the Poisk module.
As of Friday, the space station has been continuously crewed for 24 years and 9 months and 13 days.
Using artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies.
After training a machine-learning model to analyze thousands of existing delivery particles, the researchers used it to predict new materials that would work even better. The model also enabled the researchers to identify particles that would work well in different types of cells, and to discover ways to incorporate new types of materials into the particles.
“What we did was apply machine-learning tools to help accelerate the identification of optimal ingredient mixtures in lipid nanoparticles to help target a different cell type or help incorporate different materials, much faster than previously was possible,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the senior author of the study.
This approach could dramatically speed the process of developing new RNA vaccines, as well as therapies that could be used to treat obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders, the researchers say.
Alvin Chan, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, and Ameya Kirtane, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, are the lead authors of the new study, which appears today in Nature Nanotechnology.
Particle predictions
RNA vaccines, such as the vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, are usually packaged in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for delivery. These particles protect mRNA from being broken down in the body and help it to enter cells once injected.
Creating particles that handle these jobs more efficiently could help researchers to develop even more effective vaccines. Better delivery vehicles could also make it easier to develop mRNA therapies that encode genes for proteins that could help to treat a variety of diseases.
In 2024, Traverso’s lab launched a multiyear research program, funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), to develop new ingestible devices that could achieve oral delivery of RNA treatments and vaccines.
“Part of what we’re trying to do is develop ways of producing more protein, for example, for therapeutic applications. Maximizing the efficiency is important to be able to boost how much we can have the cells produce,” Traverso says.
A typical LNP consists of four components — a cholesterol, a helper lipid, an ionizable lipid, and a lipid that is attached to polyethylene glycol (PEG). Different variants of each of these components can be swapped in to create a huge number of possible combinations. Changing up these formulations and testing each one individually is very time-consuming, so Traverso, Chan, and their colleagues decided to turn to artificial intelligence to help speed up the process.
“Most AI models in drug discovery focus on optimizing a single compound at a time, but that approach doesn’t work for lipid nanoparticles, which are made of multiple interacting components,” Chan says. “To tackle this, we developed a new model called COMET, inspired by the same transformer architecture that powers large language models like ChatGPT. Just as those models understand how words combine to form meaning, COMET learns how different chemical components come together in a nanoparticle to influence its properties — like how well it can deliver RNA into cells.”
To generate training data for their machine-learning model, the researchers created a library of about 3,000 different LNP formulations. The team tested each of these 3,000 particles in the lab to see how efficiently they could deliver their payload to cells, then fed all of this data into a machine-learning model.
After the model was trained, the researchers asked it to predict new formulations that would work better than existing LNPs. They tested those predictions by using the new formulations to deliver mRNA encoding a fluorescent protein to mouse skin cells grown in a lab dish. They found that the LNPs predicted by the model did indeed work better than the particles in the training data, and in some cases better than LNP formulations that are used commercially.
Accelerated development
Once the researchers showed that the model could accurately predict particles that would efficiently deliver mRNA, they began asking additional questions. First, they wondered if they could train the model on nanoparticles that incorporate a fifth component: a type of polymer known as branched poly beta amino esters (PBAEs).
Research by Traverso and his colleagues has shown that these polymers can effectively deliver nucleic acids on their own, so they wanted to explore whether adding them to LNPs could improve LNP performance. The MIT team created a set of about 300 LNPs that also include these polymers, which they used to train the model. The resulting model could then predict additional formulations with PBAEs that would work better.
Next, the researchers set out to train the model to make predictions about LNPs that would work best in different types of cells, including a type of cell called Caco-2, which is derived from colorectal cancer cells. Again, the model was able to predict LNPs that would efficiently deliver mRNA to these cells.
Lastly, the researchers used the model to predict which LNPs could best withstand lyophilization — a freeze-drying process often used to extend the shelf-life of medicines.
“This is a tool that allows us to adapt it to a whole different set of questions and help accelerate development. We did a large training set that went into the model, but then you can do much more focused experiments and get outputs that are helpful on very different kinds of questions,” Traverso says.
He and his colleagues are now working on incorporating some of these particles into potential treatments for diabetes and obesity, which are two of the primary targets of the ARPA-H funded project. Therapeutics that could be delivered using this approach include GLP-1 mimics with similar effects to Ozempic.
Reference: Chan A, Kirtane AR, Qu QR, et al. Designing lipid nanoparticles using a transformer-based neural network. Nat Nanotechnol. 2025. doi: 10.1038/s41565-025-01975-4
This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source. Our press release publishing policy can be accessed here.
