- Powerful quake off northern Japan injures dozens and triggers tsunami France 24
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Powerful quake off northern Japan injures dozens and triggers tsunami – France 24
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Google Cloud CEO lays out 3-part AI plan after identifying it as the ‘most problematic thing’
The immense electricity needs of AI computing was flagged early on as a bottleneck, prompting Alphabet’s Google Cloud to plan for how to source energy and how to use it, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco on Monday, he pointed out that the company—a key enabler in the AI infrastructure landscape—has been working on AI since well before large language models came along and took the long view.
“We also knew that the the most problematic thing that was going to happen was going to be energy, because energy and data centers were going to become a bottleneck alongside chips,” Kurian told Fortune’sAndrew Nusca. “So we designed our machines to be super efficient.”
The International Energy Agency has estimated that some AI-focused data centers consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes, and some of the largest facilities under construction could even use 20 times that amount.
At the same time, worldwide data center capacity will increase by 46% over the next two years, equivalent to a jump of almost 21,000 megawatts, according to real estate consultancy Knight Frank.
At the Brainstorm event, Kurian laid out Google Cloud’s three-pronged approach to ensuring that there will be enough energy to meet all that demand.
First, the company seeks to be as diversified as possible in the kinds of energy that power AI computation. While many people say any form of energy can be used, that’s actually not true, he said.
“If you’re running a cluster for training and you bring it up and you start running a training job, the spike that you have with that computation draws so much energy that you can’t handle that from some forms of energy production,” Kurian explained.
The second part of Google Cloud’s strategy is being as efficient as possible, including how it reuses energy within data centers, he added.
In fact, the company uses AI in its control systems to monitor thermodynamic exchanges necessary in harnessing the energy that has already been brought into data centers.
And third, Google Cloud is working on “some new fundamental technologies to actually create energy in new forms,” Kurian said without elaborating further.
Earlier on Monday, utility company NextEra Energy and Google Cloud said they are expanding their partnership and will develop new U.S. data center campuses that will include with new power plants as well.
Tech leaders have warned that energy supply is critical to AI development alongside innovations in chips and improved language models.
The ability to build data centers is another potential chokepoint as well. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently pointed out China’s advantage on that front compared to the U.S.
“If you want to build a data center here in the United States, from breaking ground to standing up an AI supercomputer is probably about three years,” he said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in late November. “They can build a hospital in a weekend.”
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Fatal Thailand-Cambodia clashes spread along contested border area | Thailand
Thailand said it was taking action to expel Cambodian forces from its territory on Tuesday, as renewed fighting between the two South-east Asian neighbours spread along the disputed border.
Each side has blamed the other for the clashes, which…
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NASA Spaceline Current Awareness List #1,177 5 December 2025 (Space Life Science Research Results)
The abstract in PubMed or at the publisher’s site is linked when available and will open in a new window.
- Pham J, Nandi SP, Balaian L, Engstrom C, Chang P, Mack K, van der Werf I, Klacking E, Sneifer J, Katragadda N, Wirtjes K, Ruiz A,…
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Aware Super CIO warns of 'orange' lights in AI financing as valuations soar – Reuters
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Combination therapy may boost survival for people with aggressive lymphoma
A new clinical trial suggests that pairing bispecific antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates with CAR T-cell therapy may sharply boost one-year progression-free survival for people with aggressive lymphoma.
In just a few years, treatment options for aggressive lymphoma have rapidly advanced. However, many patients show a consistent pattern: powerful new therapies act quickly but often fail to keep the lymphoma at bay permanently, says Jay Spiegel, M.D., a transplant and cellular therapy physician at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Spiegel will present the early findings Dec. 8 at the 2025 American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting in Orlando.
We have made huge improvements in lymphoma care. But there are still many patients where the current approaches are not curative.”
Jay Spiegel, M.D., a transplant and cellular therapy physician, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center
That challenge inspired a new clinical trial – the researchers, led by senior author Lazaros Lekakis, M.D., professor of clinical medicine at the Miller School, combined three of the most promising lymphoma treatments, aiming to improve outcomes.
The clinical trial data indicate that combining these treatments may significantly enhance progression-free survival at one year.
Layered therapies extend responses
Large B-cell lymphoma is the most common aggressive lymphoma in adults. Its most frequent subtype, diffuse LBCL, affects about 25,000 people in the U.S. each year. First-round treatments work for approximately 70% of patients.
For the 30% whose lymphoma comes back or never fully disappears, the next step is often CAR T-cell therapy, such as axicabtagene ciloleucel, approved in 2017. It trains a patient’s immune cells to target lymphoma.
“CAR T works incredibly well upfront,” Spiegel said, “but we’ve learned that it often falls short in the long-term – only about 40% of patients remain in remission after five years.”
So, researchers have designed other new therapies. Mosunetuzumab is a two-headed bispecific antibody that links a T-cell to a lymphoma cell, activating the immune system to attack. Polatuzumab is an antibody–drug conjugate, meaning it delivers a small dose of chemotherapy directly into lymphoma cells. Both are effective initially but don’t reliably keep the disease away when used alone.
To boost the durability of these new treatments, the Sylvester team integrated all three approaches. “Attacking three different antigens at once could help overcome several of the reasons CAR T fails,” Spiegel said. “The hope was that combining them could really jump the efficacy, and so far, it has been quite something.”
The phase 2 study enrolled 25 adults with relapsed or refractory LBCL. They received mosunetuzumab and polatuzumab before and after the CAR T treatment. Of the 24 patients who reached day 90, 90% were in complete remission. At one year, about 80% were still in remission, a significant increase from an estimated 50% at one year with CAR T alone.
“I did not think it would work this well,” Spiegel said. “To take patients with this type of aggressive disease and have so many still in remission at one year, that really surprised me.”
The Sylvester trial might provide a way to achieve longer remissions. “We have an exciting result,” Spiegel said, “but now we need to show it can be done on a larger scale. That is the goal of the next study, to prove the juice is worth the squeeze.”
As encouraging as the findings are, they arrive in a field moving at an extraordinary pace as researchers are continually testing new immunotherapies, improving CAR T treatments, and exploring fresh drug targets. “Everything in lymphoma is happening all at once,” Spiegel said. “It makes the field exciting but also complicated.”
That pace presents both opportunity and complexity as clinicians work to understand how each advancement fits into the broader treatment landscape – and how they can work together. The current challenge is figuring out the best sequences and combinations for these new treatments – and how to use each without exhausting the immune system, Spiegel said.
In this surge of treatment options, the message for patients is increasingly hopeful. “If you have relapsed disease, even aggressive disease, there are multiple approaches now that can still cure your lymphoma,” Spiegel said. “That was not true seven years ago.”
Source:
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
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Aware Super CIO warns of ‘orange’ lights in AI financing as valuations soar
By Scott Murdoch
SYDNEY, Dec 9 (Reuters) – The chief investment officer of Australian pension fund Aware Super says there are flashing “orange” lights in some funding arrangements in the global artificial intelligence industry but earnings growth is backing up the sector’s current valuations.
Simon Warner, who became CIO of the A$210 billion ($135.75 billion) fund last week, said the future trajectory of the AI industry’s economic model was the most prominent financial market risk in 2026.
Soaring AI stock valuations have started to weigh on global markets as investors question when huge capital investments will translate into profits.
“We’ve taken great comfort in most of the last few years that the capital investment into both large language models, but also into the data centers and all the infrastructure to support AI, has been from very stable sources of funding, largely from retained earnings,” Warner told Reuters in an interview.
“There’s been some instances in the last six months or so where that’s softened a bit, there’s more circular financing, a bit more conduit financing. Nothing that flashes red, but things that certainly flash orange.”
Warner said there was an interdependence between capital expenditure valuations in the so called “Magnificent Seven” stocks and broader wealth effects and domestic demand in the U.S.
“I do think there is a dynamic there, but if one of those pillars was to stumble, then we could have a correction,” he said.
“That is something we are watching very closely.”
Meta said in late October it had struck a $27 billion financing deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund its biggest data center project globally, as large technology companies race to build out the infrastructure needed to power their artificial intelligence ambitions.
Microsoft was Aware’s second-largest listed stock investment in its balanced fund at the end of June, according to filings. It also owns Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet and Meta among others.
Warner said while some investors remained wary of AI and tech-related stocks valuations, there were risks to those valuations if capital expenditure levels started to decline.
($1 = 1.5101 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Scott Murdoch; Editing by Sonali Desai)
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Older chemical libraries yield new leads for next-generation COVID-19 antivirals
SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that causes COVID-19, continues to mutate, with some newer strains becoming less responsive to current antiviral treatments like Paxlovid. Now, University of California San Diego scientists and an…
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Council and Parliament strike a deal to simplify sustainability reporting and due diligence requirements and boost EU competitiveness – consilium.europa.eu
- Council and Parliament strike a deal to simplify sustainability reporting and due diligence requirements and boost EU competitiveness consilium.europa.eu
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Study reveals new genetic insights into reticular pseudodrusen in people with AMD
A study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has revealed important insights into the genetics of deposits in the eye, known as reticular pseudodrusen (RPD), that are linked to greater risk of vision loss among…
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