In the not-so-distant past, artificial intelligence was being hailed as the savior of modern business. Grand predictions floated around boardrooms and tech expos alike: AI would automate the mundane, streamline operations, and cut labor costs.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia say they have developed a new tool to detect common drink-spiking drugs.
They say they plan to test the device, known as Spikeless, in the hopes it will one day be used widely to combat drugs being added to drinks and to prevent sexual assaults.
The university said in a news release that the “seemingly ordinary stir stick” can detect drugs such as GHB and ketamine within 30 seconds, changing colour if a beverage is contaminated.
Sasha Santos, an anti-violence activist working with the researchers on the project, says the technology has the potential to be a game-changer, adding that other drug testing tools are marketed to customers in a problematic way.
An anti-violence activist says the invention, which can detect drugs within 30 seconds, aims to make the stir sticks ubiquitous in bars, clubs and pubs, so every single drink served comes with a safety test.
Stanford researchers have created the first lab-grown heart and liver organoids with their own blood vessels, paving the way for new regenerative therapies.
Some 45 labs in the prestigious sciences center were damaged and might take years — and tens of millions — to rebuild. Multiple researchers lost their life’s work
When Vijay Sankaran was an MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School in the mid-2000s, one of his first clinical encounters was with a 24-year-old patient whose sickle cell disease left them with almost weekly pain episodes.
“The encounter made me wonder, couldn’t we do more for these patients?” said Sankaran, who is now the HMS Jan Ellen Paradise, MD Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital.
In 2008, Orkin, Sankaran, and colleagues achieved their vision by identifying a new therapeutic target for sickle cell disease.
In December 2023, through the development efforts of CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, their decades-long endeavor reached fruition in the form of a new treatment, CASGEVY, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The decision has ushered in a new era for sickle cell disease treatment — and marked the world’s first approval of a medicine based on CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology.
How a genetic insight paired with gene editing technology led to a life-changing new therapy.
Schematic diagram illustrating the protective role of protein disulphide isomerase (PDI) against DNA damage via non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ), which repairs double stranded DNA breaks (DSBs). Ind…
The goal is to understand and control the formation of alumina-supported iron nanoparticles using a high-tech microscope and machine learning.
Researchers, in a recent Physical Review Letters paper, introduce a new mechanism that may finally allow ultralight dark photons to be considered serious candidates for dark matter, with promising implications for detection efforts.
Around 85% of all matter is believed to be dark matter, yet this elusive substance continues to puzzle scientists because it cannot be observed directly.
One of the candidates for dark matter particles is dark photons. These hypothetical particles are similar to regular photons but have mass and interact only weakly with normal matter.
Scientists have developed an exact approach to a key quantum error correction problem once believed to be unsolvable, and have shown that what appeared to be hardware-related errors may in fact be due to suboptimal decoding.
The new algorithm, called PLANAR, achieved a 25% reduction in logical error rates when applied to Google Quantum AI’s experimental data. This discovery revealed that a quarter of what the tech giant attributed to an “error floor” was actually caused by their decoding method, rather than genuine hardware limitations.
Quantum computers are extraordinarily sensitive to errors, making quantum error correction essential for practical applications.