Japan and South Korea are challenging Western peers in a shifting research landscape.
Category: futurism – Page 38
Fed study: AI’s slow productivity story fits a century-old historical pattern
From the article
Economists Ozkan and Aakash Kalyani, along with research associate Nicholas Sullivan, scanned roughly 490,000 earnings call transcripts from 5,198 publicly traded U.S. firms between 2000 and 2025, using an AI model to tag sentences about productivity and AI. The share of productivity commentary tied to AI rose from near zero before ChatGPT’s late-2022 debut to roughly 15% of all productivity discussions by the end of 2025.
Approximately 95% of AI-related productivity sentences describe gains executives expect in the future, not gains already realized, a share that has held steady since 2023. When executives do describe AI’s effect, they’re almost uniformly bullish: 95% describe productivity as rising, compared with 75% for non-AI commentary.
Researchers say this is exactly what history predicts.
Ozkan said he wasn’t surprised by the future-tense findings, since aggregate data already showed no meaningful bump in productivity once capital investment was accounted for. He invoked economist Robert Solow’s famous quip that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” drawing a direct line to electrification; it took “several decades,” Ozkan said, to reorganize factories, retrain workers, and change workflows before its productivity payoff showed up in the data.
Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson called this the “productivity paradox” in a 1993 paper for MIT, and lately has taken to describing the current situation as the modern sequel.”
Eye contact helps infants ‘tune in’ to speaker’s brainwaves and learn language
Infants use eye contact with speakers to work out what to pay attention to and synchronize their brainwaves, helping them learn language, scientists in Cambridge and Singapore have shown.
Infants are surrounded by a vast range of stimuli that compete for their attention—sights, sounds and voices—and must somehow work out which things are worth paying attention to and learning from. To do this, they often rely on social cues—eye contact, “baby talk” or someone calling their name, for example—but how this helps with learning is not clear.
Victoria Leong and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, have previously shown that when an infant and adult make eye contact, their brainwaves synchronize with each other.
In 1924, Arctic charr from Lake Geneva were stocked into Lake Allos; a century later, their descendants showed distinct metabolic responses under identical conditions
1924, Arctic charr from Lake Geneva were introduced into Lake Allos. A hundred years later, scientists found that their descendants had developed different metabolic responses, even when raised under the same laboratory conditions.
Breathing polluted air increases risk of osteoporosis, growing evidence shows
Pollutants can interfere with bone growth in numerous ways, studies suggest
Understanding Cell Death: A Guide to Measuring Compound Effects Over Time
Go beyond endpoint viability assays with a guide to kinetic imaging that reveals proliferation, apoptosis, and cell death responses over time. | Ebooks
Emerging PET Imaging Agents and Targeted Radioligand Therapy: A Review of Clinical Applications and Trials
Targeted radioligand therapy (RLT) is an emerging field in anticancer therapeutics with great potential across tumor types and stages of disease. While much progress has focused on agents targeting somatostatin receptors and prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), the same advanced radioconjugation methods and molecular targeting have spurred the development of numerous theranostic combinations for other targets. A number of the most promising agents have progressed to clinical trials and are poised to change the landscape of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. Here, we present recent data on some of the most important emerging molecular targeted agents with their exemplar clinical images, including agents targeting fibroblast activation protein (FAP), hypoxia markers, gastrin-releasing peptide receptors (GRPrs), and integrins. These radiopharmaceuticals share the promising characteristic of being able to image multiple types of cancer. Early clinical trials have already demonstrated superiority to 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) for some, suggesting the potential to supplant this longstanding PET radiotracer. Here, we provide a primer for practicing radiologists, particularly nuclear medicine clinicians, to understand novel PET imaging agents and their clinical applications, as well as the availability of companion targeted radiotherapeutics, the status of their regulatory approval, the potential challenges associated with their use, and the future opportunities and perspectives.
‘Within 20 Km of 2 Million People’: Major Volcano Is Hiding Two Active Magma Chambers
A major volcano in Nicaragua has not one but two active magma chambers, scientists reveal in a new study, shedding important light on the inner workings of a highly active volcano located near a large human population.
Masaya in western Nicaragua is one of the region’s busiest volcanoes, although its activity in modern times has been mostly “passive degassing, lava lake formation, and vent-clearing explosions,” the study’s authors write in Geophysical Research Letters.
It’s a basaltic shield volcano, so that behavior isn’t surprising. Shield volcanoes are known for highly fluid lava that erupts in slow, effusive flows – such as typical Hawaiian eruptions – rather than the violent blasts of stratovolcanoes.