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Palantir CTO Warns AI Safety ‘Effective Altruists’ Are Attempting a ‘Coup’ — Says ‘Tiny Group of Technocrats’ Shouldn’t Decide for Everyone
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Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir Technologies Inc., expressed his concern over the politicization of AI safety.
In a post on X on Monday, Sankar criticized the “Effective Altruists,” accusing them of attempting a coup by deciding the pace of technological progress for everyone else.
Cancer drug pushes mutant blood stem cells to become short-lived immune cells
The biologic drug interferon-alpha can benefit patients with blood cancers called myeloproliferative neoplasms by forcing mutant blood stem cells to become shorter-lived white blood cells, according to a study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. Because the broad activity of interferon-alpha can induce significant side effects, developing more focused strategies based on these mechanistic findings could meet an important need in cancer therapy.
Myeloproliferative neoplasms arise when DNA mutations in blood stem cells lead to the excess production of specific types of blood cells, such as megakaryocytes, which make platelets. Interferon-alpha often helps patients by reducing these imbalances and depleting the pool of mutant blood cells.
In the study, published in Nature Genetics, the investigators used advanced single-cell profiling tools to discover how interferon-alpha exerts these effects.
The Mythology Of Conscious AI
Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.
Osteoporosis fractures fall by 94% in small first-in-human stem cell trial
Somewhere in the world, a woman over 50 will have fractured a bone by the time you finish reading this sentence due to osteoporosis, a silent bone disease that can weaken the structural integrity of the skeletal system and a person’s quality of life. The disease weakens bones and makes them more likely to break because of reduced bone mineral density and bone mass, and it affects an estimated 75 million people across Europe, the USA, and Japan.
Menopause-associated estrogen loss makes the burden of this disease higher in women globally, as 1 in 3 women over age 50 is at risk of suffering an osteoporosis-related fracture.
A recent study published in Cell explored a novel stem cell therapy for advanced osteoporosis that cleverly uses a patient’s own stem cells as a biological targeting tag, binding to blood vessels in the bone marrow and guiding the infused stem cells directly to damaged bone tissue.
Nanoscale mechanics could enable brain-inspired computing
MIT researchers have created a new computing platform that could be used to develop intelligent and adaptive next-generation electronics that can simultaneously perform multiple functions, like computing and memory, all within one extremely compact, energy-efficient device.
Such a platform opens opportunities for low-power edge computing applications, interactive medical and environmental monitoring systems, and smart robots.
The researchers accomplished this by leveraging the unique mechanical response of soft polymers at the nanoscale. A mechanical response is how a structure changes when a force is applied to it.
Weighing 600 million buildings to help construct a more efficient future
A new study helps show how builders and city planners can minimize the materials needed to accommodate the planet’s future population.
“How we plan cities today will shape their material demand for decades,” said Jinchao Song, the first author of the new study and a U-M research fellow with the School for Environment and Sustainability, or SEAS. “Using materials more efficiently can help cities accommodate future population growth while reducing the emissions associated with construction. If we use less material, we will have less energy consumption and carbon emissions.”
In the study, published in the journal Nature Cities, Song and colleagues combined high-resolution satellite imagery and other geospatial data with building material information to calculate the weight of 606 million buildings around the world. Working with experts from China, Denmark and the Netherlands, she then analyzed how economic conditions, population density and characteristics of the built environment, including urban form, were associated with material-use efficiency across cities.
Continuous video of black hole radio observations challenges shock wave theory
For years, scientists have relied primarily on radio imaging from techniques like very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) to study jets from the active galactic nuclei of supermassive black holes. This allows for the detection of broad, unresolved features, called components, moving at what appear to be faster-than-light speeds. However, traditional imaging has poor resolution and treats each observation as a separate snapshot in time, limiting information about how the features move.
Astronomers have overcome this issue, but only to a degree, by reconstructing unknown aspects with the help of algorithms. Newer modeling methods can sharpen static radio images, but dynamic imaging has remained difficult, especially across large monitoring datasets. But now, a team of researchers has developed an AI-based method that turns scattered radio observations into a continuous, polarized video.
Their new study, published in Nature, applies this method to blazar 3C 345, a type of energetic active galactic nucleus, and the results have upended their understanding of the blazar.
Scientists create mice with part-human brains
Researchers have created mice with half-human brains in an effort to understand and develop new treatments for disorders such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability and rare forms of dementia.
The scientists transplanted lab-grown human brain cells into animals that were engineered to be born without a cortex or hippocampus. This made space for the human tissue to grow inside the rodents’ skulls.
The procedure means scientists can now take cells from patients with brain disorders, turn them into brain tissue in the laboratory, and grow that tissue in living animals. The animals can then be studied to see how the disorder takes hold in human brain tissue, and how drugs might treat the conditions.