Author: zppiot
This lack of research goes some way to explaining why women are much more likely to experience side effects from drugs—some of them fatal. Over the last couple of decades, greater effort has been made to include people with ovaries and uteruses in clinical research. But we still have a long way to go. Women are also often subjected to medical advice designed to protect a potential fetus, whether they are pregnant or not. Official guidelines on how much mercury-containing fish it is safe to eat can be different for “women of childbearing age,” according to the US Environmental Protection…
The big story How environmental DNA is giving scientists a new way to understand our world February 2024Environmental DNA is a relatively inexpensive, widespread, potentially automated way to observe the diversity and distribution of life.Unlike previous techniques, which could identify DNA from, say, a single organism, the method also collects the swirling cloud of other genetic material that surrounds it. It can serve as a surveillance tool, offering researchers a means of detecting the seemingly undetectable.By sampling eDNA, or mixtures of genetic material in water, soil, ice cores, cotton swabs, or practically any environment imaginable, even thin air, it is…
A grad student in Michigan received a threatening response during a chat with Google’s AI chatbot Gemini.In a back-and-forth conversation about the challenges and solutions for aging adults, Google’s Gemini responded with this threatening message:”This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.” The 29-year-old grad student was seeking…
Neuronpedia, a platform for mechanistic interpretability, partnered with DeepMind in July to build a demo of Gemma Scope that you can play around with right now. In the demo, you can test out different prompts and see how the model breaks up your prompt and what activations your prompt lights up. You can also mess around with the model. For example, if you turn the feature about dogs way up and then ask the model a question about US presidents, Gemma will find some way to weave in random babble about dogs, or the model may just start barking at…
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, facing courtroom battle – CBS News Watch CBS News On Wednesday, a judge allowed a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit to move forward that accuses Meta of creating an illegal monopoly with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. CBS News MoneyWatch correspondent Kelly O’Grady explains. Be the first to know Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Not Now Turn On #Facebooks #parent #company #Meta #facing #courtroom #battle
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind” We don’t know exactly how AI works, or why it works so well. That’s a problem: It could lead us to deploy an AI system in a highly sensitive field like medicine without understanding that it could have critical flaws embedded in its workings. A team at Google DeepMind that studies something called mechanistic interpretability has been working on new ways to let us peer under…
As I covered last week, Trump’s election will almost certainly result in less progress on cutting emissions than we might have seen under a more climate-focused administration. But arguably an even bigger deal than domestic progress (or lack thereof) will be how Trump shifts the country’s climate position on the international stage. The US has emitted more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than any other country, it currently leads the world in per capita emissions, and it’s the world’s richest economy. If anybody should be a leader at the table in talks about climate finance, it’s the US. And yet,…
Trump’s “Department of government Efficiency” Trump gives Musk and Ramaswamy roles leading “Department of Government Efficiency” 06:20 The Guardian will no longer post its content under its official account on X, the British newspaper announced on Wednesday.The Guardian stated the move had been under consideration for a while, “given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism.” The media outlet added that the U.S. presidential election campaign underscored its view that the social media platform is “toxic” and that its owner, Elon Musk, used it to shape political discourse. The London-based paper’s announcement…
Amazon on Wednesday debuted a new online shopping service called Amazon Haul that experts said could help the e-commerce giant compete with Chinese retailers Temu and Shein. Amazon Haul — whose name is a play on social media “hauls,” where people show off their purchases — focuses on selling items for $20 or less, or what Amazon calls “crazy low prices.” In a blog post, Amazon said the new service is available in its shopping app and mobile website.Temu and Shein have won over many Gen Z shoppers and other bargain hunters by offering low-cost clothing, electronics and other items that typically…
Agentic AI is not just another tool in the scientific toolkit but a paradigm shift: by allowing autonomous systems to not only collect and process data but also to independently hypothesize, experiment, and even make decisions, agentic AI could fundamentally change how we approach biology. The mindboggling complexity of biological systems To understand why agentic AI holds so much promise, we first need to grapple with the scale of the challenge. Biological systems, particularly human ones, are incredibly complex—layered, dynamic, and interdependent. Take the immune system, for example. It simultaneously operates across multiple levels, from individual molecules to entire organs,…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could follow simple word prompts to depict fantasylands or whimsical chairs made of avocados. But artists saw this technological wonder as a new kind of theft. They felt the models were effectively stealing and replacing their work.Ben Zhao, a computer security researcher at the University of…
Yet it is “simplistic to think that if you have a real security problem in the wild and you’re trying to design a protection tool, the answer should be it either works perfectly or don’t deploy it,” Zhao says, citing spam filters and firewalls as examples. Defense is a constant cat-and-mouse game. And he believes most artists are savvy enough to understand the risk. Offering hope The fight between creators and AI companies is fierce. The current paradigm in AI is to build bigger and bigger models, and there is, at least currently, no getting around the fact that they…
Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds and asked to do the same tasks in the real one. Now, there’s potentially a better option: a new system that uses generative AI models in conjunction with a physics simulator to develop virtual training grounds that more accurately mirror the physical world. Robots trained…
Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics. Those expectations have been especially high in physics and chemistry, where the weird effects of quantum mechanics come into play. In theory, this is where quantum computers could have a huge advantage over conventional machines. Enter AI: But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental…
Researchers used the system, called LucidSim, to train a robot dog in parkour, getting it to scramble over a box and climb stairs, despite never seeing any real world data. The approach demonstrates how helpful generative AI could be when it comes to teaching robots to do challenging tasks. It also raises the possibility that we could ultimately train them in entirely virtual worlds. The research was presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) last week. “We’re in the middle of an industrial revolution for robotics,” says Ge Yang, a postdoc scholar at MIT CSAIL who worked on the…
Some of these changes will be well outside our lane as a publication. But very many of President-elect Trump’s stated policy goals will have direct impacts on science and technology. Some of the proposed changes would have profound effects on the industries and innovations we’ve covered regularly, and for years. When he talks about his intention to end EV subsidies, hit the brakes on FTC enforcement actions on Big Tech, ease the rules on crypto, or impose a 60 percent tariff on goods from China, these are squarely in our strike zone and we would be remiss not to explore the…