Tag Archives: Sparing

Technology

Thank You, Hi-Fi Rush, For Sparing Us From Video Game Marketing

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Screenshot: Hi-Fi Rush

Hi-Fi Rush, a game built around the concept of pure joy, was notable last week for two things. One, it’s really, really good! And two, it achieved that rarest of video game feats: a successful surprise release.

By surprise I mean absolute surprise. One minute nobody knew the game even existed, the next it was available to download and play on Xbox and PC. In this, The Year Of Our Lord 2023, how often does that happen…to anything? Anywhere? Never, that’s how often!

As a result the game doesn’t feel like a breath of fresh air, it feels like gust blowing us off our feet, and while I don’t want to undersell any aspect of the game itself when talking about its success, let’s be honest here: this game feels so fresh not just because it’s an amazing game, but because it wasn’t wrung dry for 12 months by a drawn-out marketing campaign.

What I’m about to say here isn’t meant to directly disparage anyone working in video game marketing: you have jobs to do selling video games, and in the vast majority of cases that involves people doing very good work. Whether it’s putting together blockbuster trailers or just chatting with (potential) fans on social media, it’s a tough job and one that in the majority of cases I completely understand and empathise with, especially since the system within which they’re operating—selling games on shopfronts obsessed with preorders and wishlists—demands it.

But I’m not responsible for making a single advertising campaign. I, like you, am on the receiving end of thousands of them, all at once, everywhere we look. From previews on big sites to YouTube to Twitter to Discord anyone interested in video games on the internet is under siege from the second we log on to the second the log off. Here’s a thing, preorder it, learn more about this thing, preorder it.

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I’ve covered this in my Deathblood saga pieces previously, but video game marketing always has a certain predictability to it. Not in terms of specific aspects of their campaign—a AAA blockbuster obviously has a different marketing budget to a small indie release—but in the way that they can so often be guaranteed to leave us feeling exhausted.

It’s not enough that we are shown a game’s world, genre and premise. We have to be told each major character’s backstory. Shown a lore explainer for the world. We’re told how many lines of dialogue are in the script, how many thousands of hours it might take to finish, who every voice actor is. We’re conditioned, and in many cases expected, to by the time of release be fans of a game that we haven’t even played yet. Which, of course, is the whole point.

Screenshot: Hi-Fi Rush

Imagine if, instead of appearing out of nowhere, Hi-Fi Rush had been subjected to a traditional Bethesda marketing campaign. Picture seeing it revealed at The Game Awards back in December 2021, its bright light dimmed by the weight of the bigger, more expensive games it was revealed alongside. Imagine being subjected to Chai’s worst lines as part of a character reveal trailer on YouTube, instead of warming to his Fry-From-Futurama-esque charms over the course of the game’s opening hours. What if instead of the game being able to take so much delight in revealing its cast and world on its own terms we’d had that spoiled for us already by a Meet Project Armstrong documentary?

It would have sucked! The game itself would still have been great, of course, but so much of the joy of discovery that has accompanied its release, a modern day schoolyard buzz, would have been lost. To be clear, like I’ve said already, I don’t say any of this to shame any particular worker, studio or agency involved in marketing any other video game. The trees aren’t the problem here. It’s the forest.

Which is what makes Hi-Fi Rush so special. It’s one of the only games that could get away with this. Note I haven’t called for an end to video game marketing here, or said more games should try this, because the former would be pointless (it’s a big forest!) and the latter would be reckless advice. As much as Hi-Fi Rush feels like a remastered GameCube game, and unlike anything else out there, it was developed by a noted AAA studio and published by Bethesda, then released on Xbox Game Pass so people could try it for “free”. It was blessed to be perhaps the only possible combination of style, scope and pedigree that could afford to even try this, let alone hope to get away with it.

So I don’t want to say Hi-Fi Rush should be an example. I just want to say we should all treasure this game for what it is, and how it came to us, because in both cases the circumstances are as perfect as we could ever have hoped them to be, and we may never see them align like this again. Surprises are nice, but few are as nice as a good video game surprise.

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Health

‘Masked’ cancer drug stealthily trains immune system to kill tumors while sparing healthy tissues, reducing treatment side effects

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Many cancer treatments are notoriously savage on the body. Drugs often attack both healthy cells and tumor cells, causing a plethora of side effects. Immunotherapies that help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells are no different. Though they have prolonged the lives of countless patients, they work in only a subset of patients. One study found that fewer than 30% of breast cancer patients respond to one of the most common forms of immunotherapy.

But what if drugs could be engineered to attack only tumor cells and spare the rest of the body? To that end, my colleagues and I at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have designed a method to keep one promising cancer drug from wreaking havoc by “masking” it until it reaches a tumor.

The promise of IL-12

Cytokines are proteins that can modulate how the immune system responds to threats. One way they do this is by activating killer T cells, a type of white blood cells that can attack cancer cells. Because cytokines can train the immune system to kill tumors, this makes them very promising as cancer treatments.

One such cytokine is interleukin-12, or IL-12. Though it was discovered more than 30 years ago, IL-12 still isn’t an FDA-approved therapy for cancer patients because of its severe side effects, such as liver damage. This is in part because IL-12 instructs immune cells to produce a large amount of inflammatory molecules that can damage the body.

Scientists have since been working to reengineer IL-12 to be more tolerable while retaining its powerful cancer-killing effects.

Masking the killer

To create a safer version of IL-12, my colleagues and I took advantage of one of the main differences between healthy and cancerous tissue: an excess of growth-promoting enzymes in cancers. Because cancer cells proliferate very rapidly, they overproduce certain enzymes that help them invade the nearby healthy tissue and metastasize to other parts of the body. Healthy cells grow at a much slower pace and produce fewer of these enzymes.

With this in mind, we “masked” IL-12 with a cap that covers the part of the molecule that normally binds to immune cells to activate them. The cap is removed only when it comes into contact with enzymes found in the vicinity of tumors. When these enzymes chop off the cap, IL-12 is reactivated and spurs nearby killer T cells to attack the tumor.

When we applied these masked IL-12 molecules to both healthy and tumor tissue donated by melanoma and breast cancer patients, our results confirmed that only the tumor samples were able to remove the cap. This indicated that masked IL-12 could potentially drive a strong immune response against tumors without causing damage to healthy organs.

We then examined how safe masked IL-12 is by measuring liver damage biomarkers in mice. We found that immune-related side effects typically associated with IL-12 were notably absent in mice treated with masked IL-12 over a period of several weeks, indicating improved safety.

In breast cancer models, our masked IL-12 resulted in a 90% cure rate, while treatment with a commonly used immunotherapy called a checkpoint inhibitor resulted in only a 10% cure rate. In a model of colon cancer, masked IL-12 showed a 100% cure rate.

Our next step is to test the modified IL-12 in cancer patients. While it will take time to bring this encouraging development directly to patients, we believe a promising new treatment is on the horizon.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Aslan Mansurov, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

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Aslan Mansurov consults to and owns shares in Arrow Immune Inc, which is developing the technology presented in the article.

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Science

Good News! Red Dwarfs Blast Their Superflares out the Poles, Sparing Their Planets From Destruction

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The only known life in the universe lives on a mid-size rocky planet that orbits a mid-size yellow star. That makes our planet a bit unusual. While small rocky planets are common in the galaxy, yellow stars are not. Small red dwarf stars are much more typical, making up about 75% of the stars in the Milky Way. This is why most of the potentially habitable exoplanets we’ve discovered orbit red dwarfs.

All things being even, you would expect then that red dwarf planets are the ones most likely to harbor life. But all things aren’t equal. Red dwarfs can be much more active than Sun-like yellow stars. They can emit enormous solar flares and strong x-rays. And since red dwarfs are much cooler than the Sun, planets must orbit very close to them to be potentially habitable. All of this paints a grim picture for life on red dwarf planets. A red dwarf would likely strip the atmospheres of close planets, and fry any life those worlds might harbor. But a new study finds that things might not be as bad as we thought.

The planets of Trappist-1 orbit their star very closely. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The team used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). While the primary goal of the TESS mission is to study exoplanets that transit their stars, the TESS survey also contains data on stellar flares. So the team looked for the stellar flares of red dwarfs. From this, they could determine the latitude of solar flares on the star. They found that the distribution of flares on red dwarfs is very different from that of our Sun.

Solar flares generally occur within the equatorial region. Because of this, the energy and particles from these flares can strike planets in the inner solar system. This most recently happened in 1859 with the Carrington Event. But Earth’s strong magnetic field does a good job protecting us. If such an event happened today it would disrupt our electronic infrastructure, but it wouldn’t threaten Earth-life as a whole. If Earth orbited the Sun much closer than Mercury, such a flare would be much more dangerous.

It’s been generally thought that red dwarfs also emit flares from their equatorial regions, but this new study found that the largest flares tend to appear close to the star’s poles. The red dwarf flares they observed all appeared above the 60-degree latitude. Their sample size was small, so they couldn’t entirely rule this out as a fluke, but if further observations support the trend that’s good news for red dwarf planets. It means that most flares will be directed out of the orbital plane, and potentially habitable worlds will be spared from an apocalypse.

Reference: Ilin, Ekaterina, et al. “Giant white-light flares on fully convective stars occur at high latitudes.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2021.

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