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Sep 2, 2023

Turbocharged Python: AI Accelerates Computing Speed by Thousands of Times

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Their development Scalene, an open-source tool for dramatically speeding up the programming language Python, circumvents hardware issues limiting computer processing speeds.

A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led by Emery Berger, recently unveiled a prize-winning Python profiler called Scalene. Programs written with Python are notoriously slow—up to 60,000 times slower than code written in other programming languages—and Scalene works to efficiently identify exactly where Python is lagging, allowing programmers to troubleshoot and streamline their code for higher performance.

There are many different programming languages—C++, Fortran, and Java are some of the more well-known ones—but, in recent years, one language has become nearly ubiquitous: Python.

Sep 2, 2023

The Hidden Brain Connections Between Our Hands and Tongues

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Sticking out your tongue while doing delicate work with your hands reveals a history of evolutionary relationships.

Sep 2, 2023

Restoring A Person’s Voice Using A Brain-Computer Interface

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, neuroscience

Being able to vocalize is one of the most essential elements of the human experience, with infants expected to start babbling their first words before they’re one year old, and much of their further life revolving around interacting with others using vocalizations involving varying degrees of vocabulary and fluency. This makes the impairment or loss of this ability difficult to devastating, as is the case with locked-in syndrome (LIS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and similar conditions, where talking and vocalizing has or will become impossible.

In a number of concurrent studies, the use of a brain-computer interface (BCI) is investigated to help patients suffering from LIS (Sean L. Metzger et al., 2023) and ALS (Francis R. Willett et al., 2023) to regain their speaking voice. Using the surgically implanted microelectrode arrays (Utah arrays) electrical impulses pertaining to the patient’s muscles involved in speaking are recorded and mapped to phonemes, which are the elements that make up speech. Each of these phonemes requires a specific configuration of the muscles of the vocal tract (e.g. lips, tongue, jaw and larynx), which can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy.

In the case of the study by Sean L. Metzger et al. as recently published in Nature, the accompanying research article on the University of California San Francisco website details the story of their patient: Ann. At the age of 30, Ann suffered a brainstem stroke which rendered her essentially fully paralyzed. As an LIS patient she lacked for a long time even the ability to move her facial muscles.

Sep 2, 2023

Watch This Russian Hacker Break Into Our Computer In Minutes | CNBC

Posted by in category: cybercrime/malcode

Mikhail Sosonkin, who works for cybersecurity start-up Synack, showed CNBC firsthand how easy it is to break into a computer.
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Sep 2, 2023

Learning by knowing, by doing, by being

Posted by in category: education

A University of Melbourne expert says education cannot only focus on knowing and doing – it must explicitly embrace being to teach the ‘whole child’.

Sep 2, 2023

Innovative insights into effects of hematopoietic changes on colon cancer, unveiling therapeutic avenues

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

In a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, researchers investigated whether bone marrow-derived cells with heterozygous loss of Dnmt3a (Dnmt3a+/Δ), the most common genetic alteration in clonal hematopoiesis (CH), contribute to colitis-associated colon cancer (CAC) pathogenesis.

Study: Hematopoietic-specific heterozygous loss of Dnmt3a exacerbates colitis-associated colon cancer. Image Credit: vetpathologist/Shutterstock.com.

Sep 2, 2023

Promising New Cancer Drug May Kill Cancer Cells with Minimal Side Effects

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

An exciting new cancer drug has recently entered into a phase 1 clinical trial supported by promising pre-clinical work. The drug, named AOH1996, targets a protein called proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), an essential player in the biological processes of DNA replication and repair. A team of researchers from City of Hope published the data describing how they identified and characterized AOH1996 in Cell Chemical Biology last week. Since then, the news of AOH1996 has appeared prominently in both scientific and mainstream media.

Using a rational drug design approach that develops drugs based on their specific biological targets, the researchers identified AOH1996. Lead researcher Linda Malkas named the drug after Anna Oliva Healey, a girl born in 1996 who succumbed to neuroblastoma at age 9.

In the laboratory, the researchers tested AOH1996 on over 70 different kinds of tumor cells as well as some healthy control cells. While the drug killed the cancer cells, it notably does not affect non-cancer cells, including blood cells and the cells lining the airway. This indicates AOH1996 as a selective drug that will suppress tumor growth but likely not cause adverse effects that can occur when a cancer drug damages healthy cells.

Sep 2, 2023

Eye atlas could guide targeted therapies in blindness prevention

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Date August 25, 2023 August 28, 2023

Sep 2, 2023

Unlocking tumor immune evasion: IL1RL1+ Treg cells and CAFs collaborate for immunotherapy resistance

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Researchers demonstrated that the crosstalk between IL1RL1+ regulatory T-cells (Treg) and cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) drives the tissue repairing.

Sep 2, 2023

The art of the prompt: How to get the best out of generative AI

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Generative AI models can crank out anything from poetry and prose to images and code at your command. But to coax your desired output from these AI tools, you need to craft the right input — AKA, the prompt.

Prompts are what guide the AI model’s output and influence its tone, style and quality. And good prompts are what elicit brilliant text and stunning images.

“Writing good prompts is the key to unlocking the power and potential of generative AI,” said Jennifer Marsman, principal engineer in Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer.