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Yoshua Bengio is known as one of the “three musketeers” of deep learning, the type of artificial intelligence (AI) that dominates the field today.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, is credited with making key breakthroughs in the use of neural networks — and just as importantly, with persevering with the work through the long cold AI winter of the late 1980s and the 1990s, when most people thought that neural networks were a dead end.

He was rewarded for his perseverance in 2018, when he and his fellow musketeers (Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun) won the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of computing.

Mount Sinai researchers have designed an innovative experimental therapy that may be able to stop the growth of triple-negative breast cancer, the deadliest type of breast cancer, which has few effective treatment options, according to a study published in Nature Chemical Biology in December.

The therapy is known is MS1943. In a cell line and mouse models, it degraded a called EZH2 that drives the growth of triple-negative breast cancer.

Research teams led by Jian Jin, Ph.D., Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Therapeutics Discovery, and Ramon Parsons, MD, Ph.D., Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai, developed MS1943 as a first-in-class small-molecule agent that selectively degrades EZH2. They also showed that agents that inhibit the enzymatic activity of EZH2 but do not degrade EZH2 did not work in triple-negative breast cancer.

Scientists have discovered yet another life-giving treatment for disease using adult stem cells, while the number of substantial medical breakthroughs from life-taking embryonic stem cell research remains essentially zero.

Neuromyelitis optica (NMO), also known as Devic’s disease, causes the immune system to react against the body’s own cells in the central nervous system, particularly the eyes and spinal cord. Those who contract the disease usually lose their eyesight and ability to walk within five years.

Stem cells are the body’s cell factories, aiding in growth and damage repair. In a study published Oct. 2 in Neurology, researchers from Northwestern University and the Mayo Clinic tested a new adult stem cell treatment on 12 people with NMO. They drew hematopoietic stem cells (also known as blood stem cells) from the patient’s bone marrow or blood. Then they used chemotherapy to shut down the patient’s malfunctioning immune system. When they transplanted the stem cells back into the patient’s body, the immune system restarted from scratch.

Scientists at Harvard have created a texture in meat grown in a lab close to the actual animal meat we’re used to. Would you eat it?
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Human meat consumption is bad for the planet—livestock raised for food makes up for approximately 14–18% of our greenhouse gas emissions, and the land requirements to grow their food is responsible for nearly 80% of all deforestation in the Amazon.

80%!

So scientists have been working to create a realistic imitation for animal meat in a lab, and with a recent breakthrough researchers from Harvard have come one step closer to making lab-grown meat taste and feel like the real deal.

How?

Gelatin.