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AI-generated news anchors show off superhuman abilities

There’s a new global news network launching in 2024 which completely ditches humans for AI-generated newsreaders – and they’re showing off some superhuman capabilities that make it very clear: the days of the human news presenter are numbered.

Channel 1’s photorealistic news anchors come in all shapes and sizes. They can all speak more or less any language, while evoking the stiff, formal body language familiar to anyone that still watches news on the TV. They’re even capable of making news-anchor-grade attempts at humor.

This will be a fully personalized, localized news aggregation service; Channel 1 isn’t using AI to produce its own news stories. Instead, it’ll round up human reporting by “trusted sources” around the world, then re-package it as fully narrated, hosted and edited news stories that’ll run together in a list curated to your personal topics of interest, complete with footage and images from the event, like a personal TV station.

Unlocking the human genome: Innovative machine learning tool predicts functional consequences of genetic variants

In a novel study, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have introduced LoGoFunc, an advanced computational tool that predicts pathogenic gain and loss-of-function variants across the genome.

Unlike current methods that predominantly focus on loss of function, LoGoFunc distinguishes among different types of harmful mutations, offering potentially valuable insights into diverse disease outcomes. The findings are described in Genome Medicine.

Genetic variations can alter , with some mutations boosting activity or introducing new functions (gain of function), while others diminish or eliminate function (loss of function). These changes can have significant implications for and the treatment of disease.

Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms

All living systems perpetuate themselves via growth in or on the body, followed by splitting, budding, or birth. We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines may be realized.