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The one-time treatment helped relieve symptoms of disease and could free patients from the need for bone marrow transplants or regular blood transfusions, Beach said, adding that the drug hopefully offers a permanent fix for the condition.

The MHRA said it identified no significant safety concerns during the trials and will continue to closely monitor Casgevy’s safety after approval.

Vertex CEO and President Reshma Kewalramanit celebrated Casgevy’s approval as “a historic day in science and medicine” and Samarth Kulkarni, CEO and Chairman of Crispr Therapeutics, said it will hopefully mark “the first of many applications of this Nobel Prize winning technology to benefit eligible patients with serious diseases.” The two companies are hoping for similarly positive decisions from the MHRA’s counterparts in the Europe Union and the U.S., which are in the process of evaluating Casgevy, also known as exa-cel. The Food and Drug Administration is expected to make a decision in early December and has a deadline of December 8. The agency appears poised to follow the MHRA and approve the treatment, with its advisors confident of the drug’s efficacy and benefit but wary of theoretical unintended consequences of genetic modifications.

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You’re familiar with the states of matter we encounter daily – such as solid, liquid, and gas – but in more exotic and extreme conditions, new states can appear, and scientists from the US and China found one earlier this year.

They’re calling it the chiral bose-liquid state, and as with every new arrangement of particles we discover, it can tell us more about the fabric and the mechanisms of the Universe around us – and in particular, at the super-small quantum scale.

States of matter describe how particles can interact with one another, giving rise to structures and various ways of behaving. Lock atoms in place, and you have a solid. Allow them to flow, you have a liquid or gas. Force charged partnerships apart, you have a plasma.

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A set of novel attack methods has been demonstrated against Google Workspace and the Google Cloud Platform that could be potentially leveraged by threat actors to conduct ransomware, data exfiltration, and password recovery attacks.

“Starting from a single compromised machine, threat actors could progress in several ways: they could move to other cloned machines with GCPW installed, gain access to the cloud platform with custom permissions, or decrypt locally stored passwords to continue their attack beyond the Google ecosystem,” Martin Zugec, technical solutions director at Bitdefender, said in a new report.

A prerequisite for these attacks is that the bad actor has already gained access to a local machine through other means, prompting Google to mark the bug as not eligible for fixing “since it’s outside of our threat model and the behavior is in line with Chrome’s practices of storing local data.”

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A US national lab has started training a massive AI brain that could ultimately become the must-have computing resource for scientific researchers.

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) is creating a generative AI model called AuroraGPT and is pouring a giant mass of scientific information into creating the brain.

The model is being trained on its Aurora supercomputer, which delivers more than an half an exaflop performance at ANL. The system has Intel’s Ponte Vecchio GPUs, which provide the main computing power.

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An executive at one of generative AI’s leading companies has quit over the startup’s controversial use of copyrighted content.

Ed Newton-Rex had been VP of audio at Stability AI, which produces the popular image-generator Stability Diffusion, but resigned due to the firm’s treatment of creators.

“I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’,” Newton-Rex announced Wednesday on X.

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USA: Timely diagnosis and treatment are critical to restore blood flow and reduce injury to the heart muscle and increase a person’s chance of recovery after a heart attack.

A recent study has revealed that technology incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and electrocardiogram (EKG) testing for patients having a heart attack decreased the time to diagnose and send patients for treatment by almost 10 minutes. The findings from the late-breaking science study conducted in a hospital in Taiwan were presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2023 held from Nov. 11–13, in Philadelphia.

“Modern AI may now be as good as expert cardiologists in diagnosing serious heart attacks,” said lead study author Chin-Sheng Lin, M.D., Ph.D., a professor, director of the Medical Technology Education Center and vice dean at the School of Medicine, at the National Defense Medical Center, in Taipei, Taiwan. “Hospitals can use AI tools more to help front-line doctors, especially those with less experience. This could lead to faster treatment and less mistakes when it comes to treating patients who are experiencing heart attacks.”

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Teleportation might just be the next big thing – and no, we’re not talking about sci-fi dreams! Scientists are seriously delving into quantum teleportation, where information about particles is transmitted instantly. It’s currently happening on the teeny-tiny scale, but progress is zooming at warp speed. While teleporting your morning commute might take a bit, the future seems to be knocking at the teleportation door, and it’s saying, “Open up, it’s science!” 🚀🔮

#brightside.

Animation is created by Bright Side.

Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/

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The blue hue of the Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) is seen inside a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland during recent thruster qualification testing. This 12-kilowatt Hall thruster is the most powerful electric propulsion thruster in production, and it will be critical to future science and exploration missions at the Moon and beyond.

The blue plume is a steady stream of ionized xenon gas ejected to produce low, highly efficient thrust. These electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft to extremely high speeds over time using only a fraction of the fuel chemical propulsion systems require, making electric propulsion an excellent choice for deep-space exploration and science missions.

Three AEPS thrusters will be mounted on the Power and Propulsion Element, a foundational component of Gateway. The small lunar space station is critical to the agency’s Artemis missions that will help prepare for human missions to Mars. The Power and Propulsion Element will provide Gateway with power, high-rate communications, and allow it to maintain its unique orbit around the Moon.

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As part of its announcement at the Aspen Cyber Summit in New York City today, Google also said that in 2024 it will give 100,000 of the new Titan keys to high-risk individuals around the world. The effort is part of Google’s Advanced Protection Program, which offers vulnerable users expanded account monitoring and threat protection. The company has given away Titan keys through the program in the past, and today it cited the rise of phishing attacks and upcoming global elections as two examples of the need to continue expanding the use of secure authentication methods like passkeys.

Hardware authentication tokens have unique protective benefits because they are siloed, stand-alone devices. But they still need to be rigorously secured to ensure they don’t introduce a different point of weakness. And as with any product, they can have vulnerabilities. In 2019, for example, Google recalled and replaced its Titan BLE-branded security key because of a flaw in its Bluetooth implementation.

When it comes to the new Titan generation, Google tells WIRED that, as with all of its products, it conducted an extensive internal security review on the devices and it also contracted with two external auditors, NCC Group and Ninja Labs, to conduct independent assessments of the new key.

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