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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,140

Shape-Shifting Antibiotics — A New Weapon Against Drug-Resistant Superbugs

Antibiotic resistance is a major public health threat, ranked as one of the top 10 by the World Health Organization. Every year, in the United States alone, nearly 3 million people are infected by drug-resistant bacteria and fungi, resulting in the death of around 35,000. While antibiotics are crucial in treating infections, overuse has led to the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. These infections pose a significant challenge to treatment.

Now, Professor John E. Moses of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has developed a new weapon to combat drug-resistant superbugs – an innovative antibiotic that has the ability to shape-shift by rearranging its atoms.

Moses came up with the idea of shape-shifting antibiotics while observing tanks in military training exercises. With rotating turrets and nimble movements, the tanks could respond quickly to possible threats.

The Looming Marburg Crisis: How Virus Outbreaks Escalate and Spread

The World Health Organization confirmed an outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus disease in the central African country of Equatorial Guinea on February 13, 2023. To date, there have been 11 deaths suspected to be caused by the virus, with one case confirmed. Authorities are currently monitoring 48 contacts, four of whom have developed symptoms and three of whom are hospitalized as of publication. The WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are assisting Equatorial Guinea in its efforts to stop the spread of the outbreak.

Marburg virus and the closely related Ebola virus belong to the filovirus family and are structurally similar. Both viruses cause severe disease and death in people, with fatality rates ranging from 22% to 90% depending on the outbreak. Patients infected by these viruses exhibit a wide range of similar symptoms, including fever, body aches, severe gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting, lethargy and sometimes bleeding.

We are virologists who study Marburg, Ebola, and related viruses. Our laboratory has a long-standing interest in researching the underlying mechanisms of how these viruses cause disease in people. Learning more about how Marburg virus is transmitted from animals to humans and how it spreads between people is essential to preventing and limiting future outbreaks.

Study finds evidence of no common blood microbes in healthy humans

There is no stable microbial community residing in the bloodstream of healthy humans, according to a new study led by a UCL researcher.

The new Nature Microbiology paper makes an important confirmation as are a crucial part of medical practice. Understanding what types of microbes may be found in blood may allow the development of better microbial tests in blood donations, which would minimize the risk of transfusion-related infections.

Lead author, Ph.D. student Cedric Tan (UCL Genetics Institute and Francis Crick Institute) said, Human blood is generally considered sterile. While sometimes microorganisms will enter the bloodstream such as via a wound or after tooth-brushing, mostly this is quickly resolved by the immune system.

Danger or pleasure? How we learn to tell the difference

Deep within our brain’s temporal lobes, two almond-shaped cell masses help keep us alive. This tiny region, called the amygdala, assists with a variety of brain activities. It helps us learn and remember. It triggers our fight-or-flight response. It even promotes the release of a feel-good chemical called dopamine.

Scientists have learned all this by studying the amygdala over hundreds of years. But we still haven’t reached a full understanding of how these processes work.

Now, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientist Bo Li has brought us several important steps closer. His lab recently made a series of discoveries that show how called somatostatin-expressing (Sst+) central amygdala (CeA) neurons help us learn about threats and rewards. He also demonstrated how these neurons relate to dopamine. The discoveries could lead to future treatments for anxiety or .

Generative AI’s future in enterprise could be smaller, more focused language models

The amazing.

But maybe the future of these models is more focused than the boil-the-ocean approach we’ve seen from OpenAI and others, who want to be able to answer every question under the sun.

The amazing abilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT wouldn’t be possible without large language models. These models are trained on billions, sometimes trillions of examples of text. The idea behind ChatGPT is to understand language so well, it can anticipate what word plausibly comes next in a split second. That takes a ton of training, compute resources and developer savvy to make happen.

In the AI-driven future, each company’s own data could be its most valuable asset. If you’re an insurance company, you have a completely different lexicon than a hospital, automotive company or a law firm, and when you combine that with your customer data and the full body of content across the organization, you have a language model. While perhaps it’s not large, as in the truly large language model sense, it would be just the model you need, a model created for one and not for the masses.

How AI Can Look Into Your Eyes And Diagnose A Devastating Brain Disease

“The eyes are the windows to the soul.” It’s an ancient saying, and it illustrates what we know intuitively to be true — you can understand so much about a person by looking them deep in the eye. But how? And can we use this fact to understand disease?

One company is making big strides in this direction. Israel’s NeuraLight, which just won the Health and Medtech Innovation award at SXSW, was founded to bring science and AI to understanding the brain through the eyes.

A focal disease for NeuraLight is ALS, which is currently diagnosed through a subjective survey of about a dozen questions, followed by tests such as an EEG and MRI.

The patient’s eyes follow dots on a screen, and the AI system measures 106 parameters such as dilation and blink rate in less than 10 minutes. In other words, this will be an AI-enabled digital biomarker.

AI chip race: Google says its Tensor chips compute faster than Nvidia’s A100

It also says that it has a healthy pipeline for chips in the future.

Search engine giant Google has claimed that the supercomputers it uses to develop its artificial intelligence (AI) models are faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia Corporation’s. While processing power for most companies delving into the AI space comes from Nvidia’s chips, Google uses a custom chip called Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).

Google announced its Tensor chips during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when businesses from electronics to automotive faced the pinch of chip shortage.

AI-designed chips to further AI development

Interesting Engineering reported in 2021 that Google used AI to design its TPUs. Google claimed that the design process was completed in just six hours using AI compared to the months humans spend designing chips.

For most things associated with AI these days, product iterations occur rapidly, and the TPU is currently in its fourth generation. As Microsoft stitched together chips to power OpenAI’s research requirement, Google also put together 4,000 TPUs to make its supercomputer.

Continue reading “AI chip race: Google says its Tensor chips compute faster than Nvidia’s A100” | >

AGI Unleashed: Game Theory, Byzantine Generals, and the Heuristic Imperatives

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/daveshap.
GitHub: https://github.com/daveshap.
Cognitive AI Lab Discord: https://discord.gg/yqaBG5rh4j.

Artificial Sentience Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialSentience/
Heuristic Imperatives Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HeuristicImperatives/

DISCLAIMER: This video is not medical, financial, or legal advice. This is just my personal story and research findings. Always consult a licensed professional.

I work to better myself and the rest of humanity.

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