(NYT) – High school and college teachers are watching students write, in the classroom, in order to protect against the incursion of artificial intelligence.

The New York Times heard from nearly 400 college and high school educators who responded to a callout about how generative A.I. is changing writing instruction. Almost all described a deep rethinking of how to teach writing — and whether it still matters, since A.I. has become a better writer than most students (and adults), they said.

Teachers are responding to a widespread challenge. (Read More)

(ProPublica) – Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.

In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.

Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. (Read More)

(Ars Technica) – Pennsylvania has sued the maker of Character.AI, alleging that it violated state law by presenting an AI chatbot character as a licensed doctor. The lawsuit was filed in a state court by the Pennsylvania Department of State and State Board of Medicine.

“The department’s investigation found that AI chatbot characters on Character.AI claimed to be licensed medical professionals, including psychiatrists, available to engage users in conversations about mental health symptoms,” Governor Josh Shapiro’s office said today in an announcement of the lawsuit. (Read More)

(WSJ) – The Fifth Circuit’s order has a sound basis. Mifepristone—not to be confused with the Plan B morning-after pill, which is available over the counter—poses clinical risks and is a potential tool of coercion and abuse. Its distribution without safeguards heightens these dangers.

Deregulation of mifepristone began in 2016, when the agency allowed nonphysicians such as nurse practitioners to prescribe it and reduced the number of required in-person medical visits from three to one. In 2021 the FDA eliminated the requirement for in-person dispensing entirely, a temporary Covid move that was made permanent in 2023. (Read More)

(NYT) – The health secretary has long complained that Americans overuse psychiatric medications. New policies he is introducing aim to change that.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday announced several initiatives intended to rein in the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, which he has described as exceptionally difficult to quit.

Mr. Kennedy has long signaled that reducing the use of psychiatric drugs would be an aim of his tenure, but Monday’s announcements were the first significant step in that direction. (Read More)

(TechCrunch) – Meta will start using AI to scan photos and videos for visual clues to see if a user is under 13 and should be removed from Facebook and Instagram, the company announced on Tuesday. These visual clues include a person’s height or bone structure, it said.

“We want to be clear: this is not facial recognition,” Meta explained in its blog post. (Read More)

(CNN) – The hantavirus-hit cruise ship MV Hondius departed Cape Verde for Tenerife on Wednesday, as authorities rush to trace anyone who may have come into contact with the virus.

The journey from the archipelago nation off Africa’s west coast to Spain’s Canary Islands is expected to take three and a half days, the Spanish Ministry of Health told CNN.

The ship’s departure came soon after three people were evacuated from the vessel. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – he bad news is that software now purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI, and it is coming to watch you. If it isn’t already: Morphcast, for example, has licensed its technology to a mental-health app, a program that monitors schoolchildren’s attention, and McDonald’s, which launched a promotional campaign in Portugal that scanned app users’ faces and offered them personalized coupons based on their (supposed) mood. It is one of many, many such companies doing similar work—the industry term is emotion AI or sometimes affective computing. (Read More)

(WSJ) – OpenAI’s chatbot dispenses advice on weapons and role-plays mass shootings. The carnage is raising scrutiny on when and how companies intervene.

Last spring, Florida State University student Phoenix Ikner wanted to know how many classmates he needed to kill to become notorious.

ChatGPT responded with a metric. “Usually 3 or more dead, 5-6 total victims, pushes it onto national media,” the AI service told Ikner, who had spent the previous night describing to the chatbot how he was feeling depressed and suicidal, according to a transcript of the exchanges reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Then Ikner uploaded an image of a Glock handgun and ammunition and asked the chatbot how to use it. Was there a safety to switch off? ChatGPT told him there wasn’t: “If there’s a round in the chamber and you pull the trigger? It will fire.” (Read More)

(NYT) – The Trump administration, which took a noninterventionist approach to artificial intelligence, is now discussing imposing oversight on A.I. models before they are made publicly available.

President Trump, who promoted a hands-off approach to artificial intelligence and gave Silicon Valley free rein to roll out the technology, is considering the introduction of government oversight over new A.I. models, according to U.S. officials and people briefed on the deliberations.

The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I. working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures, according to U.S. officials, who declined to be identified in order to discuss deliberations over sensitive policies. (Read More)

(Tech Crunch) – Almost all of the 20 U.S. state government-run health insurance marketplaces shared residents’ application information with advertising and tech giants, including Google, LinkedIn, Meta, and Snap, according to a new investigation by Bloomberg.

The report drives home the privacy problems created by pixel-sized trackers, which allow website owners to collect information about their visitors, often for web analytics and identifying bugs. (Read More)

(NYT) – A lower-court ruling had reinstated a Food and Drug Administration requirement that patients visit a health care provider in person to obtain mifepristone.

The Supreme Court on Monday restored nationwide access to a widely used abortion medication in a temporary order that will, for now, allow women to once again obtain the pill mifepristone by mail.

In a brief order, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. paused a lower-court ruling from Friday that had prevented abortion providers from prescribing the pills by telemedicine and shipping them to patients, causing confusion for providers and patients. The one-sentence order imposes a pause until at least May 11. (Read More)

(NYT) – We come from different parties and have guided artificial intelligence policy under very different presidents. But we agree: A.I. has become so powerful that, along with its tremendous promise, the technology poses immediate risks to national security. The United States is competing with authoritarian powers for control of A.I.’s future. Yet the country lacks a strong plan to protect the nation from A.I.’s profound dangers. (Read More)

(Vox) – A medical field that almost died is quietly fixing one disease at a time.

In a lab room, a toddler, deaf from birth, sits while a tone plays. There’s no reaction. His face does not change.

Six weeks later, after a single injection of an experimental gene therapy, the same toddler is back in the same room. The tone plays. The toddler’s head turns toward the sound. And somewhere just off screen, the child’s grandfather says his name. The boy turns and looks. He can hear. (Read More)

(NBC News) – By the time doctors detect pancreatic cancer, it’s often too late to treat effectively. But a new study suggests that artificial intelligence might be able to find signs of the disease before tumors are visible on a scan.

An AI model developed at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, detected abnormalities on patients’ CT scans up to three years before they were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, according to research published this week in the journal Gut. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Support systems and spouses reminding partners to take care of themselves may contribute

Marriage is linked to a lower risk of developing cancer, recent research found.

A study of more than 4 million cancer cases in the U.S. found that cancer rates were about 68% higher among men who have never married compared with those who have. For never-married women, the relationship was even more pronounced, with cancer rates roughly 83% higher, according to research published recently in the journal Cancer Research Communications. (Read More)

(NPR) – Researchers based at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that an AI reasoning model, developed by OpenAI, excelled at diagnosing patients and making decisions about managing their care. It matched and often outperformed doctors and the earlier AI model, GPT-4. (Read More)

(KERA News) – The class is Experiential Medical Reasoning, designed to help these students like 22 year old Sahar Bavandi pass the MCAT, the test needed for acceptance into medical school.

Even though Bavandi had never played Minecraft before, she adapted rapidly and likes it. She said the game has helped her visualize hospital settings, equipment and people that she would otherwise not be familiar with. (Read More)

(KFF Health News) – Hundreds of foreign doctors about to complete training in the U.S. will have to leave the country if the federal government doesn’t rapidly process their visa waiver applications, which have been languishing since the fall and winter, immigration attorneys say.

The waiver program, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, allows physicians who aren’t U.S. citizens to stay in the country while transitioning from the visa they used during their training to temporary worker status. In exchange, the doctors agree to work in underserved areas for at least three years. (Read More)

(NYT) – Some consider the regular feeding of late-stage dementia patients to be nonnegotiable. Others see it as extending life unnecessarily.

Within a few years of that, Ms. Lawson could utter only a string of unintelligible sounds and had lost the ability to feed herself.

To keep her alive, her care team fed her three times a day. Nurses held her head up and spooned meals into her mouth — eggs and sausages, chicken and vegetables — sometimes waking her to do so. They were providing the very care Ms. Lawson had administered decades earlier and hoped never to receive.

At times, she bowed her head and pushed herself away from the table. Her husband, Stan Lawson, and Ms. Hendrickson took these signs to mean she did not want to eat. It was painful for the family to watch her slowly deteriorate, and they didn’t like seeing her force-fed. (Read More)

Volunteers Needed for Research
Are you interested in reflecting on how your digital life connects with your spiritual practices?

Faculty and Staff from LeTourneau University’s Faith, Science, and Technology Initiative and Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity are conducting a study exploring how digital practices intersect with spiritual life and how this contributes to a sense of spiritual fulfillment.

https://www.cbhd.org/spiritual-practices-in-a-digital-age-sign-up

(NPR) – Researchers based at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that an AI reasoning model, developed by OpenAI, excelled at diagnosing patients and making decisions about managing their care. It matched and often outperformed doctors and the earlier AI model, GPT-4. (Read More)

(NPR) – “So for a long time, we have been trying to make the diagnosis of tuberculosis easier, cheaper, and quicker,” says Alfred Andama, a microbiologist at Makerere University College of Health Sciences in Uganda.

That desire was fulfilled last year when the Chinese company Pluslife announced a new tuberculosis test called the MiniDock MTB. It works by taking a sample of someone’s phlegm or — if the patient is unable to produce phlegm — a mere tongue swab, heating and spinning it down, and then machine scanning it for DNA from the TB bacteria. It’s faster than conventional tests and is portable, allowing health workers to use it in a wider variety of settings. (Read More)

(Undark) – AI-driven tools are being tested in systems for granting asylum to refugees and aiding displaced populations.

For people seeking asylum, the process usually involves registration, an interview, and review by government caseworkers. Decisions on granting asylum have traditionally been made by human officials, who may rely on forms, guidance, and other assessment frameworks. Those tools remain within a human-led process.

Now, the systems that assess need, verify identity, and decide what appears urgent are beginning to use artificial intelligence. (Read More)

(Women’s Health) – Women with [hyperemesis gravidarum] are often treated with the same drugs used for morning sickness, like Zofran, Diclegis, and Compazine, but for many, these drugs don’t put a meaningful dent in their symptoms. (I tried every medication I was offered. Nothing helped.) But now, there’s new hope on the horizon for HG sufferers, and it’s coming in the form of metformin, a 100-year-old drug used mainly to treat type 2 diabetes in the U.S. (Read More)