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Amid a flurry of Google and Microsoft generative AI releases last week during SXSW, Garry Kasparov, who is a chess grandmaster, Avast Security Ambassador and Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, told me he is less concerned about ChatGPT hacking into home appliances than he is about users being duped by bad actors.

“People still have the monopoly on evil,” he warned, standing firm on thoughts he shared with me in 2019. Widely considered one of the greatest chess players of all time, Kasparov gained mythic status in the 1990s as world champion when he beat, and then was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer.


Despite the rapid advancement of generative AI, chess legend Garry Kasparov, now ambassador for the security firm Avast, explains why he doesn’t fear ChatGPT creating a virus to take down the Internet, but shares Gen’s CTO concerns that text-to-video deepfakes could warp our reality.

GARMI will also serve meals, open a bottle of water and place emergency calls.

Robots are gradually making their way into a variety of industries, from restaurant service to healthcare. Scientists have been working hard to rapidly expand robot capabilities, and it is clear that robotics will shape our daily lives in the near future.

Now, it’s time to meet “GARMI”. This white-colored humanoid which has come to the aid of doctors, nurses, and elderly citizens in need.


CHRISTOF STACHE — AFP/Getty Images.

“We have taken a vital first step towards harnessing quantum light for practical use.”

Scientists have for the first time shown that they can control and distinguish tiny quantities of interacting photons — or packets of light energy — with high correlation, according to a study published in Nature.

Harnessing quantum light for practical use.


Inkoly/iStock.

The powerful psychedelic can give you a near-death experience. Here is how it affects your brain on the inside.

Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, is a powerful psychedelic whose effect on the human brain lasts for only some minutes, but in that short span of time, the user experiences some high-level mental changes.

The researchers examined the brain activity of the participants before, during, and after the DMT test. Here is what they found.


Agsandrew/iStock.

TEMPO will study pollutants like asthma-inducing nitrogen dioxide and cancer-causing formaldehyde.


A new space instrument called TEMPO will target North America’s air pollution problem, and highlights one of its big challenges.

The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution instrument, or TEMPO, will gather pollution data across North America. On Tuesday, representatives from NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts) spoke about the soon-to-launch project, in an event held at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

AI technologies invented by scientists at the University of British Columbia and B.C. Cancer has succeeded in discovering a previously-unknown treatment pathway for an aggressive form of liver cancer, designing a new drug to treat it in the process.

The team also deployed AI to determine a patient’s life expectancy, by having it analyze doctors’ notes. The AI reportedly has an 80 percent accuracy rate in its predictions.

The medical advances came about thanks to AlphaFold, a protein structure database featuring AI analysis that can design potential medicines. The team’s work focused on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which is a common and aggressive form of liver cancer.

Recently biologists discovered how to generate new neurons in the adult brain. This is an incredible breakthrough that has enormous potential to revolutionize neurodegenerative disease research. By generating genetically-mutated mice with a unique gene that activates dormant neural stem cells, scientists were able to generate new neurons in the brain. For years, scientists have been searching for ways to promote the growth of new neurons in the brain, especially in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. This new discovery could lead to new treatments and therapies that could help to restore brain function and improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world.

Leslie Samuel, founder of Interactive Biology, gives some context for the importance of genetic trading between organisms for scientific research, and notes how the loss of nerve cells in the brain is one of the hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases. The ability to generate new neurons in the adult brain could be a game-changer in the field of neurology.

Leslie’s Thoughts