Google DeepMind’s chief business officer says Alphabet’s drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs “is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs,” according to a report in Fortune, “pairing cutting-edge AI with pharma veterans to design medicines faster, cheaper, and more accurately.””There are people sitting in our office in King’s Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to...
“The China Film Foundation, a nonprofit fund under the Chinese government, plans to use AI to revitalize 100 kung fu classics including Police Story, Once Upon a Time in China and Fist of Fury, featuring Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee, respectively,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “The foundation said it will partner with businesses including Shanghai Canxing Culture & Media Co., which will...
“A growing group of young, college-educated Americans are struggling to find work,” reports the Minnesota Star Tribune, “as the unemployment rate for recent graduates outpaces overall unemployment for the first time in decades.”While the national unemployment rate has hovered around 4% for months, the rate for 20-something degree holders is nearly 6%, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New...
Investigators of a deadly Boeing 787 crash “are studying possible dual engine failure as a scenario that prevented the Boeing Co. 787 jet from staying airborne,” reports Bloomberg:Pilots from the airline reenacted the doomed aircraft’s parameters in a flight simulator, including with the landing gear deployed and the wing flaps retracted, and found those settings alone didn’t cause a crash,...
“California residents who lit illegal fireworks over the July 4 holiday may be in for a nasty surprise in the mail thanks to covert fire department operations,” reports SFGate. “A number of California cities, including Sacramento, have begun using drones to locate people shooting off illegal fireworks.”From Wednesday to Saturday night, the Sacramento Fire Department’s special fireworks task...
China “is pouring money into building an AI supply chain with as little reliance on the U.S. as possible,” reports the Wall Street Journal. And now Chinese AI companies “are loosening the U.S.’s global stranglehold on AI,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “challenging American superiority and setting the stage for a global arms race in the technology.”In Europe, the Middle East, Africa and...
The Free Software Foundation’s services face “ongoing (and increasing) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks,” senior systems administrator Ian Kelling wrote Wednesday. But “Even though we are under active attack, gnu.org, ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org are up with normal response times at the moment, and have been for the majority of this week, largely thanks to hard work from the...
Three space probes are leaving our solar system — yet are still functioning. After the two Voyager space probes, New Horizons “was launched in 2006, initially to study Pluto,” remembers New Scientist. But “it has since travelled way beyond this point, ploughing on through the Kuiper belt, a vast, wide band of rocks and dust billions of miles from the sun. It is now speeding at tens of...
A Maine police department has now acknowledged “it inadvertently shared an AI-altered photo of drug evidence on social media,” reports Boston.com:The image from the Westbrook Police Department showed a collection of drug paraphernalia purportedly seized during a recent drug bust on Brackett Street, including a scale and white powder in plastic bags. According to Westbrook police, an officer...
Detectorists and archaeologists sometimes clash, but the recent find of two Roman swords was the thrilling result of collaboration
The discovery of two swords at a dig in Gloucestershire has fuelled speculation that a Roman villa may once have stood there, at a period in the second or third century AD when Saxons were making inroads in the region. Experts think that the blades may even have...
“Scientists have created the first lasers made entirely from edible materials,” reports Science magazine “which could someday help monitor and track the properties of foods and medications with sensors that can be harmlessly swallowed.”[The researchers’ report] shows that tiny droplets of everyday cooking oils can act like echo chambers of light, otherwise known as lasers. By providing the...
Cardiologist who empowered paramedics and the general public to restart hearts and save lives
If you had a cardiac arrest before the 1970s, an ambulance might arrive quickly, but almost all its crew could do was transport you to hospital, where your treatment would begin – if indeed you survived the journey. The cardiologist Douglas Chamberlain, who has died aged 94, realised that in order...
“Apple quietly dropped a new AI model on Hugging Face with an interesting twist,” writes 9to5Mac. “Instead of writing code like traditional LLMs generate text (left to right, top to bottom), it can also write out of order, and improve multiple chunks at once.” “The result is faster code generation, at a performance that rivals top open-source coding models.”Traditionally, most LLMs have been...
Diquat is banned in the UK, EU, China and other countries. The US has resisted calls to regulate it
The herbicide ingredient used to replace glyphosate in Roundup and other weedkiller products can kill gut bacteria and damage organs in multiple ways, new research shows.
The ingredient, diquat, is widely employed in the US as a weedkiller in vineyards and orchards, and is increasingly sprayed...
An anonymous reader shared this report from the San Francisco Standard:About an hour into my meeting with the undisputed hackathon king of San Francisco, Rene Turcios asked if I wanted to smoke a joint with him. I politely declined, but his offer hardly surprised me. Turcios has built a reputation as a cannabis-loving former professional Yu-Gi-Oh! player who resells Labubus out of his...