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Fine-tuning medical AI can improve diagnosis but also creates privacy risks

Qingyu Chen, PhD, and his team set out to study how artificial intelligence language models are adapted for medicine and found that what these models memorize can be both useful and risky. A model may retain valuable medical knowledge, but in a controlled study using real hospital records, the same fine-tuning—the added training that adapts a model to a specific task—that improved diagnostic performance also made it more likely to reproduce material it had seen during training, including sensitive patient information.

The study, published recently in Nature Communications, reflects a question at the center of Chen’s research: How can medical AI become not only more capable but also more reliable and safer? The study was led by its first author, Anran Li, PhD, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher in Yale’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science.

Chen is an assistant professor of biomedical informatics and data science at Yale School of Medicine, with a secondary appointment in ophthalmology. He leads research on the accuracy and reasoning of medical language models and on multimodal AI-assisted disease diagnosis, which draws on both text and medical images.

Transhumanist Manifestos and Dilemmas: 15 Years Later

Fifteen years ago I asked a question. A few months later I decided I had the answer, and that was my mistake.

The question came from Hamlet: will technology replace biology? It felt like our generation’s version of to be or not to be. Death is a tragedy; technology looked like the only exit, and yet I suspected the trade might cost us something we could never buy back.

Then I stopped asking and started declaring. I went headfirst into #transhumanism and wrote a manifesto calling on everyone to break the chains of biology and death.

Manifestos are seductive that way. Clean, confident, and they hand you your marching orders. Dilemmas do none of that. They just sit there, unresolved, making you uncomfortable.

Fifteen years later, I know which one I trust, and I know why it matters now more than it did then. We are surrounded by action without introspection. By people ready to build a new world on the ruins of the current one, with #AI as the wrecking ball and the blueprint both.

Richard Feynman said something about questions and answers that I have not been able to shake. It is in the essay.

Continue reading “Transhumanist Manifestos and Dilemmas: 15 Years Later” | >

25 Years After 9/11: How the Homeland Security Mission Has Transformed

America was forever altered by September 11, 2001. The memories of that morning are still unforgettable twenty-five years later. The attacks showed with devastating clarity that the United States could no longer be protected from determined adversaries by geography alone. They revealed weaknesses in our knowledge of asymmetric threats, intelligence sharing, aviation security, border controls, emergency communications, interagency coordination, and readiness. They also gave rise to the modern homeland security enterprise, which is something far bigger.

The years after 9/11 were a remarkable time of institutional change for those of us who later got involved in starting and developing that enterprise. In 2002, 22 previously independent federal offices and agencies were combined to form the Department of Homeland Security, a new Cabinet department that started operations in 2003. It was one of the biggest federal government reorganizations since the mid-1900s.

I had the honor of taking part in that crucial time. I was the first Director of Legislative Affairs for the Department’s Science and Technology Directorate and assisted in establishing the Office of Legislative Affairs at DHS. As a result of my subsequent work in government, business, academia, and the cybersecurity community, I have had the opportunity to observe how the homeland security mission has expanded from a primarily counterterrorism-focused endeavor to something much more expansive.

Strange Material Gets Better at Conducting Electricity The Thinner It Gets

Copper is a much sought (and much stolen) metal because it powers the proliferation of data centers, electric vehicles, and energy infrastructure.

Copper also forms interconnects, the wires that transfer electricity between the semiconducting transistors that form the basic building blocks of electronic chips.

Incredibly, a state-of-the-art chip can contain over 100 kilometers (62 miles) in copper interconnects.

HD Hyundai Robotics Tactile Sensor Investment: The $9.7M Bet On Robot Touch

HD Hyundai Robotics invested 13 billion won ($9.7 million) in AIDIN Robotics on September 11, 2026, securing a stake in the company that makes force and tactile sensors for humanoid hands. HD Hyundai Robotics tactile sensor investment targets shipbuilding and heavy-industry applications, where a robot needs to feel the difference between grinding a weld and damaging the hull. For procurement teams, the signal is clear: the humanoid race is shifting from who can build the best body to who can secure the sensing layer that makes the body useful.

HD Hyundai Robotics tactile sensor investment landed on September 11, 2026, when the shipbuilding giant announced it had acquired a stake in AIDIN Robotics for 13 billion Korean won, roughly $9.7 million. The investment secures core technologies for humanoid robots and strengthens HD Hyundai’s position in the physical AI business, according to the company’s announcement.

The procurement implication is not about the dollar figure. It is about what HD Hyundai bought: the layer of the humanoid stack that most vendors treat as a detail and most buyers never ask about until deployment fails. HD Hyundai Robotics tactile sensor investment is a bet that sensing—not actuation, not locomotion, not AI model size—is the bottleneck that determines whether a humanoid robot can do useful work.

Precision optics to make plant health visible from space

When the ESA Earth observation mission FLEX launches into space on September 15, 2026, as scheduled, it will carry high-precision optical components from Jena, Germany. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF have developed and manufactured a silicon-based doubleslit assembly as well as two high-precision mirrors for the spectrometer on board the satellite. The spectrometer is designed to detect the fluorescence of plants excited by sunlight from Earth’s orbit. The data is expected to provide new insights into the photosynthetic activity, health, and stress levels of vegetation.

The FLEX mission will address the question: How much light do plants emit, and what can this light emission tell us about the health of the plants? At the heart of the satellite will be the “Fluorescence Imaging Spectrometer,” or FLORIS for short. Unlike many other spectrometers, FLORIS does not operate with a single light channel but with two: One channel provides particularly high-resolution information on closely adjacent wavelengths, while the second covers a broader range of the light spectrum. This requires an extremely precise dual-slit assembly.

“The fluorescence signals emitted by plants are very weak. For FLORIS to analyze these signals reliably, the optical components must be manufactured and assembled with exceptional precision,” says Dr. Falk Kemper, project manager for the FLEX project at Fraunhofer IOF. “The double slit enables a combination of high spectral resolution and broad spectral coverage. Its fabrication pushed the limits of what is technically feasible.”

Scientists find a new layer of Alzheimer’s hidden in the genome

Scientists found that the 3D organization of DNA is disrupted in several types of brain cells affected by Alzheimer’s disease, altering how important genes are switched on and off. The discovery reveals a previously underexplored layer of the disease that could open new paths for understanding and eventually treating Alzheimer’s.

Penn trial tests ultrafast form of radiation aimed at reducing cancer treatment side effects

The hope, ultimately, is not only to preserve quality of life in patients, but to make radiation therapy more convenient and accessible.

“Instead of 30 to 40 treatments, we can do the treatment in one to five treatments,” said Alexander Lin, a radiation oncologist at Penn and the trial’s lead investigator.

Doctors typically divide a patient’s radiation therapy into dozens of daily treatments over several weeks.

AI-Designed Drug Makes Patients’ Blood Look Biologically Younger, Study Shows

You can’t change the age written on your ID. But what about the age of your body?

A drug designed with the help of artificial intelligence made the blood profiles of people with lung disease look biologically younger, new research reveals.

The result came from six computer models that estimate biological age by examining proteins in the blood. Scientists call them biological aging clocks.

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