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Tomorrow morning, I head south. Straight down I-95, from central New Jersey to northeast Florida, where I will be setting up my laptop in St. Augustine for the next two months. It’s about as far from Silicon Valley as I can be in the continental U.S., but that’s where you’ll find me gearing up for the first artificial intelligence (AI) news of 2023.

These are the 5 biggest AI stories I’m waiting for:

Hibernation is a state adopted by certain mammals as an adaptation to adverse winter conditions. Typical features of hibernation include greatly reduced metabolic activity and lowered body temperature.

As warm-blooded animals, primates (except lemurs) do not naturally hibernate or even experience torpor. But can we manipulate the body temperature of primates and make them fall into a hypometabolic state or even artificial hibernation?

A research team led by Dr. Wang Hong and Dr. Dai Ji from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has recently reported the first reliable hypothermia in nonhuman primates caused by activating a group of hypothalamic neurons.

The ill-fated queen was a flower fanatic. Here’s how her Versailles garden dazzled then and continues to inspire today.

What image does the name ‘woolly mammoth’ bring to your mind? Huge, majestic creatures with giant tusks walking an Earth yet untouched by modern humans.

They last walked that walk a million years back and since then the majestic animals have lain silent and mostly undisturbed in their permafrost graves. But, now curious scientists have decided to disturb their slumber and attempt to ‘reawaken’ ancient, Stone Age viruses.

Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and… breakthroughs in wireless power transfer? Yep, scientists at a branch of the Walt Disney Company called Disney Research have found a way to charge devices on a room-scale without using any wires.

Wireless power is an idea that goes back to the 19th century, with Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla perhaps being its most famous proponent. But getting it to work has been a bit of a problem, with the extent of modern wireless power coming mostly in the form of electric toothbrushes or flat charging pads for phones.

Continue reading “Disney Researchers Make Wireless Power Transfer Breakthrough” »

The secret to great health is within our control, based on 23 drivers that are largely modifiable.

Vani Kannan and Balaji, a Bengaluru-based couple, built their sustainable dream home using recycled wood and mud.

Immunotherapy is a type of drug that might be an option if you have triple-negative breast cancer.

Triple-negative breast cancer, also called basal-like breast cancer, is not sensitive to hormones. This means that the breast cancer cells don’t use estrogen or progesterone to grow and they don’t have hormone receptors. This type of breast cancer also doesn’t produce too much of the growth-promoting protein called HER2.

“Triple-negative breast cancer is about 10% to 15% of all breast cancer cases,” says Pooja Advani, M.D., a medical oncologist with the Robert and Monica Jacoby Center for Breast Health at Mayo Clinic in Florida.

Although genetically modified foods still get a bit of a bad rap, there are actually many good reasons why modifying an organism’s genetics may be worthwhile. For example, many breeds of genetically modified foods have made them more resistant to disease.

It’s also possible to modify foods to make them more nutritious. Take, for example, golden rice. This grain was engineered to have higher levels of vitamin A in order to tackle deficiencies of this nutrient in impoverished countries.

A purple tomato, created using genetic modification, may be available to buy in the U.S. as soon as 2023.