(Wired) – The DNA inside our cells isn’t just a series of instructions, but something far more dynamic. Like scientists, AI models don’t yet have the data to properly decode it.

These algorithms don’t worry about the complicated regulatory stuff going on. All of that is supposedly subsumed by the algorithm’s “training,” through which it deduces correlations from cases we already know about.

This approach is likely to be useful, but for those who crave real understanding of how the genome, and ultimately life itself, works, a computational black box will never suffice. And perhaps more to the point, the genome might not submit to the kind of straightforward input-output approach that such AI models ultimately assume. (Read More)

(Nature) – When I acquired a copy of the book A Mother’s Brain by neuroscientist Susana Carmona, I thought: at last, a book about what happens to your brain during pregnancy. I recalled how I’d realized in 1997, when I was a young assistant professor, soon after giving birth to my first child, that books for expectant or new parents were light on what happens to the brain. As a neuroscientist, I was curious. What was going on with my brain? (Read More)

(NYT) – More people are turning to artificial intelligence for help making personal decisions. What does that cost us?

Myra Cheng, a Stanford researcher who studies computer science, told me she understood the appeal. “It’ll never judge you, and it’s always available, and you don’t have to bother anyone,” she explained. Boundaries then often blur. Chatbots, which are so good at logistical support, can become tempting brainstorming partners for personal questions. Cheng argues in a new paper that people are increasingly treating chatbots as oracles — offloading belief formation and decision making onto them.

I’m wondering about the societal costs of that. (Read More)

(CNBC) – Amazon, Google and other makers of voice-activated smart speakers faced similar privacy concerns when their devices first hit the market, in some cases leading to lawsuits and regulatory fines. 

But this new generation of AI devices is also testing the limits of privacy law.

Unlike earlier smart speakers that were activated via a so-called “wake word” and sometimes stored recordings or sent audio to the cloud, some of these products can continuously listen, interpret speech, and extract its meaning without retaining the underlying audio. This capability has raised a largely untested question about whether that processing itself can amount to an unlawful interception. (Read More)

(Vox) – How “deadbots” might reshape grief.

It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief?

This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data. Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead. (Listen Here)

(WSJ) – Health trackers can now alert you to shifts you can’t feel. Doctors warn the data might give you anxiety—or a false sense of security.

Nearly half of U.S. adults—over 119 million people—have high blood pressure, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wouldn’t it be convenient if a wearable health tracker could take measurements without the panic-inducing arm squeeze?

Several devices have recently launched insights into blood-pressure trends, including Hilo, Whoop, Oura Ring, Pixel Watch and Apple Watch.

As someone with a family history of hypertension, I wanted to know if the cuffless tech could help me, or if they’re just pricey, anxiety-inducing doodads. The devices provided a good sense of my long-term trends, but they can’t entirely replace the arm squeeze—at least not yet. (Read More)

(BMJ) – A laboratory worker’s death from unexplained pneumonia exposes how little information is known and shared about high risk pathogen work, writes Ashish Jha

This problem extends well beyond Russia. National biosafety rules and reporting systems differ across countries and there is no common framework for independently assessing a suspected laboratory incident. The Biological Weapons Convention prohibits biological weapons, but it lacks any verification mechanisms so we know little about what countries are building. Other international treaties, such as the International Health Regulations, require governments to report serious public health incidents, but again, they lack the ability to compel countries to comply. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – Doctors have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can predict a cancer patient’s chances of survival from a single photograph of their face.

The AI system was custom-built by experts at Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit, integrated academic healthcare system in Massachusetts, to estimate biological age and directly predict survival outcomes in patients diagnosed with cancer.

It is one of the most comprehensive demonstrations to date of how AI analysis of a selfie could help assess a patient’s health and potentially guide their medical care, and was trained on data from more than 40 million facial photographs across a range of ethnicities and ages. (Read More)

(WSJ) – The alarms keep patients from getting sleep and overwhelm nurses. Now, researchers are making alarms smarter and less annoying.

For hospital patients, the incessant beeping and buzzing of alarms from monitors, pumps and other devices can make sleep almost impossible.

But all that noise isn’t just annoying; it’s also potentially dangerous. For nurses, the barrage of alarms can be overwhelming, making it easier to tune them out—including when they indicate actual patient deterioration.

Hospitals have tried many strategies to combat alarm fatigue over the years, with mixed results. Now researchers are broadening the focus beyond simply reducing the number of alarms, with a larger goal of improving patient safety. (Read More)

(Wired) – Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren’t widely seeking justice. Instead, they’re being encouraged to adopt those same tools.

Knowingly providing fictitious information about a crime to police is a misdemeanor in Pennsylvania, but so far, authorities have not pressed charges against Anthropic, and it’s unclear if they ever will. Solomon Leach, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia district attorney, says the office “does not comment on whether something is being actively investigated.” (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – The virus used to deliver healing DNA in gene therapy is under renewed scrutiny.

In recent months, news came out about several distressing cases that have underscored the risks of gene therapy, which delivers DNA to a patient’s cells to treat disease. All of these cases have one thing in common that’s not apparent at first glance.

A child in China, enrolled in a clinical trial for gene therapy, died of acute respiratory distress syndrome, in which fluid builds up in the lungs and oxygen cannot enter. In a separate clinical trial in China, a child died after clots formed in their small blood vessels, likely disrupting the delivery of oxygen to organs such as the kidneys and brain. And earlier this year, researchers reported that a 5-year-old boy treated in Philadelphia had a brain tumor that was likely caused by gene therapy. (He’s doing okay now.) In each of these cases, the gene therapies relied on a versatile but unpredictable type of virus: adeno-associated virus, or AAV for short. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Artificial-intelligence industry’s phenomenal rate of growth means claims have potential to outpace limits on existing coverage

A string of artificial-intelligence safety incidents is exposing a gaping hole for the fast-growing industry: the lack of available insurance.

Rogue agents have hacked into websites. AI chatbots have been accused of encouraging suicides and murders. An agent submitted fake unsolved murder tips. The latest episodes add to existing lawsuits AI companies face alleging chatbot harm and copyright violations when models are trained.

The seemingly limitless possibilities of AI to change the world also include a wide-ranging capacity for harm that could leave companies that produce or use AI legally vulnerable. (Read More)

(Mere Orthodoxy) – The advice to “use AI like a tool, not a person,” is insufficient. The very nature of the product is personal because the medium is personified. And as the latest friendship statistics keep repeating: we live in a lonely age. It’s not enough to tame this desire with suppression.

I agree with Challies that GenAI offers many benefits. He gave good advice on how to use AI. But he could have said more. In fact, what most surprised me is that he didn’t say more, given his 2011 book, The Next Story.

In that work, Challies said “Technology is Ecological,” agreeing with arguments from Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan. The missing element of Challies’ article is this: the benefits of GenAI messages must be considered in light of the medium of those messages. Technology is more than efficient — it’s ecological — changing its users and our society according to its design. (Read More)

(Washington Post) – Studies show that artificial intelligence can distort memories, raising questions about what happens when machines become keepers of the past.

New research that involves perception of political events, crimes and even new movies suggests AI-generated images and conversations can implant false details into our brains, even leaving us confident things happened when they did not.

Memory does more than preserve the past. It supplies the knowledge and experience with which we understand the present and anticipate the future. It helps construct a sense of self, sustain relationships, and guide both individual and collective decisions. (Read More)

(NYT) – A Russian researcher, who died from an unknown illness, worked at a remote anti-plague facility. Few foreigners have visited these labs, which dot the former Soviet states, and are shrouded in secrecy.

The institute in Irkutsk never functioned as a military facility, but it was part of the broad yet secretive “Anti-Plague System.” At hundreds of field sites and labs across the Soviet Union, thousands of researchers were responsible for tracking emerging strains of plague and other endemic diseases, exterminating disease-causing rodents and developing vaccines. These facilities, experts said, had also provided pathogen samples to the military labs responsible for creating bioweapons during the Soviet era.

Most of these facilities are still functioning, and while those in Russia remain closely-guarded, some in former Soviet states have opened their doors to international researchers looking to learn about the fabled system. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – One day human organs could also be banked safely for future transplantation.

Pig kidneys that were cooled to -150 °C and stored in a freezer for months have been successfully rewarmed and shown to work again for the first time, say scientists. They hope to replicate the findings with human organs.

The kidneys—which are similar in size to human ones—were left in a glass-like state, in one case for over a year. Once they had been rewarmed, tested in machines, and transplanted into pigs, the kidneys regained their color and made urine—key signs they were working. (Read More)

(CBS News via MSN) – The incident raises some unusual legal questions. Under German law, the criminal offense of sexual harassment generally requires direct physical contact between people. Legal experts told the television network RTL that the use of a robot could therefore make it difficult to prosecute the robot’s owners under existing harassment laws.

Instead, police are investigating the case on suspicion of a sexually motivated insult. Possible violations involving the unauthorized publication of images may also be examined. (Read More)

(Wired) – The second iteration of the viral Friend AI necklace is louder and less interesting.

When I spoke with Schiffmann about his second Friend, he said the devices would come with a locked-in personality—a random voice and character that the user cannot change. I was intrigued by the idea. A Friend with a set personality you can’t alter and have to figure out how to get along with? Sounds like the hallmark of a real human friendship to me.

Alas, that is not the case. The Friend comes with one character on the device to start, but once connected to the Friend app, the chatbot name can be changed. And multiplied. I created a dozen Friends, each with their own name and personality. They have names like Sage, Nova, Onyx, River, Echo, Willow, and Wren. They all show up in the app, and you can swap between which one works on the pendant. (Read More)

(The Hedgehog Review) – What mechanisms do humans have to talk back about the values and risks of AI?

As I took all this in, I found myself turning over a phrase that I had been hearing with increasing frequency in the previous weeks as the Hugging Face incident caught the public’s attention: the alignment problem. For years, I’d used the phrase in armchair philosophy sessions to name what I understood to be a difficult but clearly defined problem: making sure that powerful AI systems would abide by human ethical codes, particularly to guarantee that the machines wouldn’t endanger human welfare. As I considered the issues swirling around the developers of AI and their products, the definite article in front of the problem started to bother me. (Read More)

(NYT) – Some experts are optimistic that science will eventually find ways to extend life, but many longevity claims are unrealistic.

Exciting as this is, much of this longevity work focuses on health span — helping people to live more healthily into their 80s, 90s and even 100s — rather than extending the human life span. Researchers continue to debate how possible that will be in the future. The problem is that their answers are often hypothetical and impossible to prove. (Read More)

(Business Insider via Yahoo!) – Forget sleepmaxxing and cold plunging: smoking is the new lifestyle flex among AI researchers.

At least, that’s according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who said some AI researchers are taking up smoking to signal their belief that AI will eventually cure cancer.

“So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said in an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. (Read More)

(Nature) – Compounds inspired by the blockbuster weight-loss drugs are also being trialled for schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease, among other conditions.

The quest for GLP-1 drugs that can treat brain disorders is getting a fresh infusion of energy and funding. Pharmaceutical companies have plunged into developing GLP-1-related compounds to treat addiction, schizophrenia, depression and other conditions — building on years of work by academic scientists.

Last month, pharma giant Eli Lilly presented the first clinical results of brenipatide, a compound related to the company’s blockbuster obesity drug tirzepatide, for treatment of alcohol-use disorder. Last week, biotechnology firm Kariya Pharmaceuticals shared early clinical results of a similar compound, called KP405, for Parkinson’s disease. And biotechnology company Baseline Therapeutics plans to start a clinical trial in early 2027 of a GLP-1 compound for alcohol-use disorder. (Read More)

(ABC News) – Miniature organs being sent into space for the very first time may soon help scientists understand how spaceflight impacts certain organs and may accelerate aging.

In a joint effort by researchers from Mount Sinai, NASA and aerospace company Space Tango, these mini organs will be exposed to the increased radiation and microgravity astronauts face in space, especially on long-duration missions. (Read More)

(STAT News) – Veteran journalist’s coverage was marked by clarity and nuance at times of crisis

Helen Branswell, a renowned infectious disease reporter who earned the respect of experts and public health officials around the world with her accessible, prescient dispatches on scourges from influenza to polio and Ebola to Covid-19, becoming a vital source of information for the public during the most chaotic of times, died Tuesday at age 69.

The cause was complications from cancer, said her sister, Brenda Branswell. She died in a hospital in Ottawa. (Read More)