The James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of a perfectly formed Einstein ring, which is also the most distant gravitationally lensed object ever detected.
In 2022, a team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine discovered that a little-known enzyme called MAPK4 is involved in the growth of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) and its resistance to certain therapies. Looking into the details of this novel role of MAPK4, the researchers have now identified a strategy that can potentially control MAPK4-promoted growth in TNBC and other cancers. The study, published in PLOS Biology, opens new options for treating this devastating disease.
“Some cancers depend on MAPK4 for their growth, and our team studies cellular processes or pathways that participate in MAPK4-induced cancer growth,” said corresponding author Dr. Feng Yang, associate professor of pathology and immunology and of molecular and cellular biology. He also is a member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor.
Yang and his team knew that in some TNBC cases, MAPK4 activates an enzyme called AKT, which promotes cancer growth. They also knew that in the same cells, another enzyme called PDK1 can also promote cancer growth by activating both AKT and a series of other enzymes of the AGC group. This PDK1-mediated activation of AGC enzymes mostly depends on the amount of PDK1 in the cell.
A University of Portsmouth physicist has explored whether a new law of physics could support the much-debated theory that we are simply characters in an advanced virtual world.
The simulated universe hypothesis proposes that what humans experience is actually an artificial reality, much like a computer simulation, in which they themselves are constructs.
The theory is popular among a number of well-known figures including Elon Musk, and within a branch of science known as information physics, which suggests physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information.
Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei sits down with Stripe head of corporate strategy Alex Komoroske at AI Day.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained a lot of attention for their human-imitating properties. These models are capable of answering questions, generating content, summarizing long textual paragraphs, and whatnot. Prompts are essential for improving the performance of LLMs like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. The way that prompts are created can have a big impact on an LLM’s abilities in a variety of areas, including reasoning, multimodal processing, tool use, and more. These techniques, which researchers designed, have shown promise in tasks like model distillation and agent behavior simulation.
The manual engineering of prompt approaches raises the question of whether this procedure can be automated. By producing a set of prompts based on input-output instances from a dataset, Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) made an attempt to address this, but APE had diminishing returns in terms of prompt quality. Researchers have suggested a method based on a diversity-maintaining evolutionary algorithm for self-referential self-improvement of prompts for LLMs to overcome decreasing returns in prompt creation.
LLMs can alter their prompts to improve their capabilities, just as a neural network can change its weight matrix to improve performance. According to this comparison, LLMs may be created to enhance both their own capabilities and the processes by which they enhance them, thereby enabling Artificial Intelligence to continue improving indefinitely. In response to these ideas, a team of researchers from Google DeepMind has introduced PromptBreeder (PB) in recent research, which is a technique for LLMs to better themselves in a self-referential manner.
The number of kids being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has risen sharply in recent decades, and a new study points to the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA) as a potential reason why.
BPA is used in a lot of plastics and plastic production processes, and can also be found inside food and drink cans. However, previous research has also linked it to health issues involving hormone disruption, including breast cancer and infertility.
In this new study, researchers from Rowan University and Rutgers University in the US looked at three groups of children: 66 with autism, 46 with ADHD, and 37 neurotypical kids. In particular, they analyzed the process of glucuronidation, a chemical process the body uses to clear out toxins within the blood through urine.
While the bacteria in the intestine are helpful for digesting food and fighting infections, they have long been suspected to play an essential role in triggering rheumatoid arthritis. This chronic inflammatory disorder affects the joints.
Mayo Clinic researchers have discovered a link between an abundance of specific gut bacteria and the triggering of an immune response against a person’s tissue. They also found that this happens even before the clinical symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis appear. They published their findings from the study in Science Advances.
“As we age, our gut bacteria and their byproducts change, which impacts our immune system,” says senior author Veena Taneja, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic immunologist. There is a known link between imbalances in gut bacteria, aging, and rheumatoid arthritis, but it is challenging to prove this connection in humans. “This research sheds light on the complex relationship between gut microbiota and rheumatoid arthritis.”
Spiders are incredibly hard to cultivate — let alone farm.
Spider silk, a natural polymeric fiber, breaks this rule. It is somehow both strong and tough. No surprise, then, that spider silk is a source of much study.
The problem, though, is that spiders are incredibly hard to cultivate — let alone farm. If you put them together, they will attack and kill each other until only one or a few survive. If you put 100 spiders in an enclosed space, they will go about an aggressive, arachnocidal Hunger Games. You need to give each its own space and boundaries, and a spider hotel is hard and costly. Silkworms, on the other hand, are peaceful and productive. They’ll hang around all day to make the silk that has been used in textiles for centuries. But silkworm silk is fragile. It has very limited use.
Mo Gawdat openly discusses the current rate of advancement of AI and the expected technological innovation that will follow at the Nordic Business Forum 2023 in Helsinki on September 27, 2023.
Learning points:
#evolution.
Promptbreeder is a self-improving self-referential system for automated prompt engineering. Give it a task description and a dataset, and it will automatically come up with appropriate prompts for the task. This is achieved by an evolutionary algorithm where not only the prompts, but also the mutation-prompts are improved over time in a population-based, diversity-focused approach.
