Science, Time, and Spirit

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) The new PanMAN data compression breakthrough from UC San Diego could revolutionize prostate cancer care by enabling researchers to analyze genetic data from millions of patients simultaneously, accelerating discovery of treatment-resistant mutations, improving genetic risk prediction, and making personalized genomic medicine more accessible and affordable. This technology addresses a critical bottleneck that has limited large-scale genomic studies in prostate cancer, where understanding tumor evolution and inherited risk factors is increasingly central to diagnosis and treatment decisions. What Patients Need to Know The Promise and Challenge of Genomic Medicine in Prostate Cancer If you've been diagnosed with prostate cancer in recent years, there's a good chance genomics has already played a role in your care. Perhaps your doctor ordered Decipher testing on your tumor biopsy to predict how aggressive your cancer might be. Maybe you had germline...

Compressed Data Technique Enables Pangenomics at Scale BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) UC San Diego engineers have developed PanMAN (Pangenome Mutation-Annotated Network), a revolutionary data compression technique that reduces genetic data storage by up to 3,000-fold while preserving complete evolutionary histories. This breakthrough enables analysis of millions of genomes simultaneously, addressing a critical bottleneck in pangenomics that has limited large-scale studies of genetic variation, disease evolution, and drug resistance. The Compression Revolution: How New Data Architecture Could Transform Genomic Medicine A Storage Crisis Threatens the Genomics Era The cost of sequencing a human genome has plummeted from $100 million in 2001 to under $1,000 today, fulfilling the promises of the Human Genome Project era.[1] Yet this technological triumph has created an unexpected crisis: the flood of genetic data threatens to overwhelm our ability to store, share, and analyze it. A single...

Green Steel: Industry to Decarbonize as Regulatory Pressure Mounts BLUF: The global steel industry, responsible for 7-9% of direct CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion, is pursuing multiple pathways to "green steel" production including hydrogen-based direct reduction, electrification of blast furnaces, carbon capture technologies, and increased scrap recycling. While several pilot projects have achieved commercial milestones in 2024-2025, the transition faces significant challenges including hydrogen availability, energy infrastructure requirements, capital costs exceeding $10 billion for integrated plant conversions, and limited premium pricing acceptance in commodity markets. The Carbon Challenge Steel production released approximately 3.7 billion metric tons of CO2 globally in 2023, making it one of the most carbon-intensive industrial processes. Traditional blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) steelmaking, which produces roughly 70% of global crude steel,...