A first-ever stretchy electronic skin could equip robots and other devices with the same softness and touch sensitivity as human skin, opening up new possibilities to perform tasks that require a great deal of precision and control of force.
The following is a summary of “Comparative Effectiveness of Partial Gland Cryoablation Versus Robotic Radical Prostatectomy for Cancer Control,” published in the April 2024 issue of Urology by Zhu et al.
In this study, researchers address the notable gap in high-level evidence comparing oncologic endpoints for partial gland ablation, where most existing series rely on prostate-specific antigen (PSA) rather than biopsy endpoints. The objective was to conduct a comprehensive comparison of oncologic outcomes between partial gland cryoablation (PGC) and radical prostatectomy (RP) for the management of prostate cancer.
Through a retrospective, single-center analysis, investigators examined a cohort of subjects treated with either PGC (n = 98) or RP (n = 536) as primary treatment for intermediate-risk (Gleason grade group [GG] 2–3) prostate cancer between January 2017 and December 2022. Key oncologic endpoints included surveillance biopsies per protocol after PGC and serial PSA testing after RP. The primary outcome of interest was treatment failure, which is defined as the necessity for salvage treatment or metastatic disease development. The study group conducted treatment failure and survival analyses using Cox proportional-hazard regression and Kaplan-Meier survival curves. After carefully applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, they compared the PGC (n = 75) and RP (n = 298) groups.
We’re finally starting to see what can happen when we put an advanced AI “brain” in a state-of-the-art robot “body” — and it’s remarkable.
Responsible AI will depend on human beings being able to protect their identities. In order to achieve that, we need four things:
Critics will try to muddy the waters by raising supposed implications for news reporting or parodies. And any proposed legislation should expressly acknowledge the First Amendment’s broad protections — while also forbidding serious harms that fall outside them. As always, the music community will stand up for freedom of speech.
I am excited to see what the future holds; it’s a road we need to travel thoughtfully but swiftly. Ultimately, the question isn’t where AI is taking humanity, it’s where humanity will take AI. Together, we share in that opportunity and responsibility.
Continue reading “Four rules to make artificial intelligence work for humans” »
The new method developed by the Swedish researchers utilizes artificial intelligence for rapid and cost-effective assessment of chemical toxicity. It can therefore be used to identify toxic substances at an early phase and help reduce the need for animal testing.
“Our method is able to predict whether a substance is toxic or not based on its chemical structure. It has been developed and refined by analyzing large datasets from laboratory tests performed in the past. The method has thereby been trained to make accurate assessments for previously untested chemicals,” says Mikael Gustavsson, researcher at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers University of Technology, and at the Department of Biology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Gothenburg.
“There are currently more than 100,000 chemicals on the market, but only a small part of these have a well-described toxicity towards humans or the environment. To assess the toxicity of all these chemicals using conventional methods, including animal testing, is not practically possible. Here, we see that our method can offer a new alternative,” says Erik Kristiansson, professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers and at the University of Gothenburg.
Sam Altman isn’t sure the future of artificial intelligence requires new hardware.
Despite a flurry of new devices hitting the market, the OpenAI CEO told MIT Technology Review we might not need to buy separate devices to engage with AI in the future.
“I don’t think it will require a new piece of hardware,” he said while in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for events hosted by Harvard University and the venture-capital firm Xfund.
The open CMS detector during the second long shutdown of CERN’s accelerator complex. (Image: CERN) When we look at ourselves in a mirror, we see a virtual twin, identical in every detail except with left and right inverted. In particle physics, a transformation in which charge–parity (CP) symmetry is respected swaps a particle with the mirror image of its antimatter particle, which has opposite properties such as electric charge. The physical laws that govern nature don’t respect CP symmetry, however. If they did, the Universe would contain equal amounts of matter and antimatter, as it is believed to have done just after the Big Bang. To explain the large imbalance between matter and antimatter seen in the present-day Universe, CP symmetry has to be violated to a great extent. The Standard Model of particle physics can account for some CP violation, but it is not sufficient to explain the present-day matter–antimatter imbalance, prompting researchers to explore CP violation in all its known and unknown manifestations. One way CP violation can manifest itself is in the “mixing” of electrically neutral mesons such as the strange beauty meson, which is composed of a strange quark and a bottom antiquark. These mesons can travel macroscopic distances in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors before decaying into lighter particles, and during this journey they can turn into their corresponding antimesons and back. This phenomenon, called meson mixing, could be different for a meson turning into an antimeson versus an antimeson turning into a meson, generating CP violation. To see if that’s the case, researchers need to count how many mesons or antimesons survive a certain duration before decaying, and then repeat the measurement for a given range of durations. To do so, they have to separate mesons from antimesons, a task called flavour tagging. This task is crucial to pinning down CP violation in meson mixing and in the interference between meson mixing and decay. At a seminar held recently at CERN, the CMS collaboration at the LHC reported the first evidence of CP violation in the decay of the strange beauty meson into a pair of muons and a pair of electrically charged kaons. By deploying a new flavour-tagging algorithm on a sample of about 500 000 decays of the strange beauty meson into a pair of muons and a pair of charged kaons, collected during Run 2 of the LHC, the CMS collaboration measured with improved precision the parameter that determines CP violation in the interference between this meson’s mixing and decay. If this parameter is zero, CP symmetry is respected. The new flavour-tagging algorithm is based on a cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technique called a graph neural network, which performs accurate flavour tagging by gathering information from the particles surrounding the strange beauty meson and those being produced alongside it. The collaboration then combined the result with its previous measurement of the parameter based on data from Run 1 of the LHC. The combined result is different from zero and is consistent with the Standard Model prediction and with previous measurements from CMS and the ATLAS and LHCb experiments. Notably, the combined result is comparable in precision to the world’s most precise measurement of the parameter, obtained by LHCb, a detector specifically designed to perform measurements of this kind. Moreover, the result has a statistical significance that crosses the conventional “3 sigma” threshold, providing the first evidence of CP violation in the decay of the strange beauty meson into a pair of muons and a pair of charged kaons. The result marks a milestone in CMS’s studies of CP violation. Thanks to AI, CMS has pushed the boundary of what its detector can achieve in the exploration of this fundamental matter–antimatter asymmetry. Find out more on the CMS website.
Since before ChatGPT was even a thing, Laurie Anderson, the widow and longtime collaborator of the late Lou Reed, has been talking to an AI chatbot modeled after her late partner — and now, she’s hooked.
In a new interview with The Guardian, the 76-year-old experimental artist who just won a “Lifetime Achievement” award at this year’s Grammys acknowledged the outrageousness of her regular conversations with an AI built to mimic her superstar husband that died a decade ago.
Continue reading “Lou Reed’s Widow Resurrected Him as an AI, ‘Sadly Addicted’ to Talking to It” »
Scientists inside and outside of particle physics and astrophysics are leaning on AI for assistance with complex tasks.
