Lifeboat Foundation

Mercedes-Benz has officially employed humanoid robots to complete manual tasks on its assembly line. Apptronik’s Apollo robot will complete simple tasks like fetching and carrying, helping lighten the load for its human colleagues.

Announced on Friday, March 15, the robots will also be employed to complete other “low skill” tasks like basic assembly. This will free up human workers to focus on more important tasks and reduce the risk of repetitive strain injuries and other health and safety issues related to manual tasks.

Stanford researchers devised a small, soft skin-like wearable device to monitor health. They are hoping to commercialize their product soon.

A blood test for colon cancer performed well in a study published Wednesday, offering a new kind of screening for a leading cause of cancer deaths.

The test looks for DNA fragments shed by tumor cells and precancerous growths. It’s already for sale in the U.S. for $895, but has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and most insurers do not cover it. The maker of the test, Guardant Health, anticipates an FDA decision this year.

In the study, the test caught 83% of the cancers but very few of the precancerous growths found by colonoscopy, the gold standard for colon cancer screening. Besides spotting tumors, colonoscopies can prevent the disease by removing precancerous growths called polyps.

With coral reefs under attack from ongoing climate change effects, what steps can be taken to reverse the damage? This is what a recent study published in iScience hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated how to monitor coral reef health that is impacted through climate change, specifically with altering biomineralization, which is the driving force behind coral reef formation. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand how climate change impacts coral reef health and potential steps to improve conservation of corals throughout the world.

“The whole ecosystem is dying. You can listen to the death all you want, but what are you going to do to fix it?” said Dr. Mark Martindale, who is the director of the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience and a co-author on the study. “In order to do that, you need to understand what the problems are. And you need an experimental system to do that. Now we have that system.”

Neural networks have been powering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, including the large language models that are now being used in a wide range of applications, from finance, to human resources to health care. But these networks remain a black box whose inner workings engineers and scientists struggle to understand.

How LLM #AI can make a patient-friendly— more understandable, more concise— hospital discharge summary for patients.

Generative artificial intelligence to transform inpatient discharge summaries to patient-friendly language and format.

This cross-sectional study, as part of a larger project to improve care delivery in our health system, was deemed exempt from institutional review board review based on the NYU Langone Health self-certification protocol. The study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline.

Continue reading “Generative AI for Patient-Friendly Language in Discharge Summaries” »

From creating images, generating text, and enabling self-driving cars, the potential uses of artificial intelligence (AI) are vast and transformative. However, all this capability comes at a very high energy cost. For instance, estimates indicate that training OPEN AI’s popular GPT-3 model consumed over 1,287 MWh, enough to supply an average U.S. household for 120 years.

High-intensity exercise induces brain-protective effects that have the potential to not just slow down but possibly reverse the neurodegeneration associated with Parkinson’s disease, a new pilot study suggests.

Prior research has shown that many forms of exercise are linked to improved symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But there has been no evidence that hitting the gym could create changes at the brain level. Now, a small proof-of-concept study involving 10 patients showed that high-intensity aerobic exercise preserved dopamine-producing neurons, the brain cells that are most vulnerable to destruction in patients with the disease.

In fact, after six months of exercise, the neurons actually had grown healthier and produced stronger dopamine signals. Dopamine is a chemical that helps brain cells communicate with one another. The researchers published their findings in npj Parkinson’s Disease on February 9.

Is there a connection between vaping cigarettes or cannabis, irregular mealtimes, and frequent headaches in individuals under 18 years of age? This is what a recent study published in the journal Neurology hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Calgary investigated how lifestyle choices combined with vaping could result in frequent headaches among youth. This study holds the potential to help researchers, medical professionals, and the public better understand the short-and long-term health risks associated with vaping cigarettes or cannabis.

For the study, the researchers enlisted 4,978,370 participants aged between 5 and 17 years for a health survey with the goal of ascertaining a connection between lifestyle choices—vaping, irregular mealtimes, and extended periods of screen time—and the frequency of headaches they reported as part of the survey. In the end, the researchers found that 6.1 percent of the participants experienced frequent headaches who also exhibited the aforementioned lifestyle choices, specifically including e-cigarettes and smoking in the house.

“These results are important because there is surprisingly little research looking at lifestyle and headaches in kids and teens,” said Dr. Serena Orr, MD, who is an assistant professor of pediatrics, community health sciences, and clinical neurosciences at the University of Calgary and a co-author on the study. “As a headache neurologist, I think that it’s critical to understand the role that lifestyle factors play, because prescribing medication alone is not the ideal way of treating headaches at any age.”