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The Chang'e-3 probe carried the Yutu rover to the lunar surface in 2013. (credit: CNSA)

China plans to become the first nation to land a probe on the far side of the Moon, according to Xinhua News Agency, the country's official press organization.

Launching possibly as early as 2018, the mission represents the next step in China's plans to explore the Moon with robotic probes and, within the next decade, to return a couple of kilograms of lunar material to Earth. The proposed Chang'e-4 probe follows the successful soft landing of the Chang'e-3 probe on the near side of the Moon in December 2013.

Although the new probe was built as the engineering backup to the Chang'e-3 lander, Chinese officials said the structure could handle a larger payload. China plans to use the probe to study "geological conditions" on the far side of the moon. The Chang'e probes are named after the Chinese goddess of the Moon.

A T cell, the basis for immune therapies against cancer. (credit: NIAID)

One of the more exciting developments in cancer research involves tweaking the immune system to attack cancer. It's possible to engineer the immune system's T cells to attack and kill tumor cells based on the specific proteins those tumors produce. It's a relatively new anti-cancer therapy, but initial tests have shown it to be clinically effective, especially against leukemias (wherein B cells become cancerous).

But as with chemotherapy, the side effects are severe—when immune cells run amok, bad things can happen. The T cells raised to fight the tumor can elicit what's called a "cytokine storm," setting off an intense immune reaction. They can also overstep their bounds to kill all of a patient's B cells rather than just the cancerous ones.

One of the most promising strategies employed to alleviate these side effects is to make the anti-tumor T cells dependent upon a ”switch.” Rather than using one of the T cell's normal receptors to latch on to cancer cells, it's possible to engineer one that only sticks in the presence of an exogenous small molecule—drug-dependent killing, in effect. This way, the T cell is only activated in the presence of the switch molecule, which can be administered or removed at will or dosed as desired.

A musical "dot comedy" (see what they did there?) about tech rivals Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will open on Broadway later this year. It will feature, amongst other things, on-stage holograms and projection mapping, and will actively encourage mobile phone use during the show with an app that lets audience members interact with each other and select the show's ending. No, I am not making this up.

The show, cringingly called "Nerds," will chronicle the rise of Jobs and Gates and the subsequent rivalry between their two companies. Jobs famously declared Microsoft had "no taste," of course, and that Gates was "basically unimaginative" and "shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas." So, lots of material to draw from then.

Nerds is penned by Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner, both of whom grew up in the tech hubs of Paolo Alto and San Francisco. Their writing credits include the hit Cartoon Network series Robot Chicken, as well as the 1999 play The Bomb-itty of Errors, a hip-hop adaptation of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.

Earlier this week, the upcoming Hitman reboot was quietly removed from the PlayStation Store in Europe, with Square Enix cancelling pre-orders for the PlayStation 4 version. With the game scheduled for release in just a few months, fans were understandably concerned. Was the game being pushed back? Was it being cancelled entirely? The accompanying message, that the "configuration of the product... has changed significantly," didn't help matters.

It turns out that Hitman was pulled because the game will now be released episodically. When it launches on March 11, Hitman will include a prologue mission and just one location, Paris, for the cost of £12/$15. Its next location, Italy, will launch in April, with Morocco following in May. Each additional episode will cost £8/$10, or £37/$50 for a season pass. "Regular monthly content updates" that will include three additional locations—Thailand, the US, and Japan—will arrive later in the year.

Or, players can pay for the whole lot upfront for £45/$60. The complete season will also launch on disc at the end of the year.

Seven years ago, Twitter began its rise to prominence by billing itself as a space where people could speak freely because nobody was censored. The company's rules enshrined this ideal, promising "we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances." But in 2015 all of that changed.

There were changes in Twitter's rules here and there before 2015, usually to make it easier for the company to ban people engaging in spam and fraud. But as more high-profile Twitter users began to experience abuse and harassment firsthand, the company began to reverse its earlier policies.

Writing for Motherboard, legal analyst Sarah Jeong offers a short history of how Twitter's rules changed over the year. Without ever touching the language in its rules page, Twitter began to add links out to other documents that explained the "limited circumstances" that could lead to censorship.