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For many years doctors have been able to get a look inside a person’s body using X-ray scans, or placing a tiny camera inside the body. But those tools provide a limited view and can only reveal so much. A recently developed camera, however, may give doctors the ability to see everything happening in the human body, no matter where it is.

The camera was developed by researchers from the University of Edinburgh, and it’s meant to work while paired with an endoscope — a long, slender piece of equipment that usually has a camera, sensors, and lights at its tip.

Light emitted by the endoscope typically scatters when it comes into contact with structures within the body, such as body tissue, but the new camera is able to pick up on it thanks to the photon detectors inside of it. The camera is able to detect light sources behind as much as 20 centimeters (7.9 inches) of bodily tissue.

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By using insights from one job to help it do another, a successful new artificial intelligence hints at a more versatile future for machine learning.

Backstory: Most algorithms can be trained in only one domain, and can’t use what’s been learned for one task to perform another, new one. A big hope for AI is to have systems take insights from one setting and apply them elsewhere—what’s called transfer learning.

What’s new: DeepMind built a new AI system called IMPALA that simultaneously performs multiple tasks—in this case, playing 57 Atari games—and attempts to share learning between them. It showed signs of transferring what was learned from one game to another.

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New targeted cancer therapies have emerged to fight tumors, and scientists have much more in the pipeline.


Summary: New targeted cancer therapies have been highlighted this month as emerging technologies to fight tumors, and scientists have much more in the pipeline. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Targeted cancer therapies – the most famous of which are immunotherapies such as CAR T-cell therapy – are the current focus of excitement in cancer treatment. New therapies and developments in the immunotherapy field prompted the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to update their guidance on targeted cancer therapies a little over a week ago. As the NCI says.

“Many targeted cancer therapies have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat specific types of cancer.”

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