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Patient Walking Around Hospital After Transplant of Gene-Hacked Pig Kidney
In a world’s first, surgeons at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a gene-hacked pig into a living 62-year-old man.
Researchers are hoping the procedure could reduce our reliance on both hard-to-come-by human donor kidneys, and the expensive dialysis machines that treat kidney disease and failure.
Fortunately, the surgeons’ efforts appear to have paid off — at least for now. The pig kidney started producing urine not long after the surgery last weekend, the New York Times reports. The patient’s condition also continues to improve, according to the report.
Researcher devise AI robotic exoskeleton requiring no training
This robot is equipped with AI-backed deep learning algorithms to autonomously manage assisting users with underlying physiological conditions.
The robot illustrated seamless functioning that supports users in walking, standing, and climbing stairs or ramps. Scientists call it, a “unified control framework.”
A bioelectronic mesh capable of growing with cardiac tissues for comprehensive heart monitoring
A team of engineers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and including colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced in Nature Communications that they had successfully built a tissue-like bioelectronic mesh system integrated with an array of atom-thin graphene sensors that can simultaneously measure both the electrical signal and the physical movement of cells in lab-grown human cardiac tissue.
Activating a specific pathway in a subset of immune cells eradicates immunologically ‘cold’ tumors, study shows
A nanoparticle-based therapy developed by UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists stimulated an immune pathway that eradicated tumors in mouse models of various cancer types. Their findings, published in Science Immunology, offer a new way to potentially harness the power of the body’s immune system against cancer.
Mathematician Who Tamed Randomness Wins Abel Prize
Michel Talagrand innovative work has allowed others to tackle problems involving random processes.
Google might let Apple use Gemini, but Apple still has its own LLM coming
Apple quietly submitted a research paper last week related to its work on a multimodal large language model (MLLM) called MM1. Apple doesn’t explain what the meaning behind the name is, but it’s possible it could stand for MultiModal 1.
Being multimodal, MM1 is capable of working with both text and images. Overall, its capabilities and design are similar to the likes of Google’s Gemini or Meta’s open-source LLM Llama 2.
An earlier report from Bloomberg said Apple was interested in incorporating Google’s Gemini AI engine into the iPhone. The two companies are reportedly still in talks to let Apple license Gemini to power some of the generative AI features coming to iOS 18.
Google used AI to accurately predict floods up to 7 days in advance
Google just announced that it has been riverline floods, up to seven days in advance in some cases. This isn’t just tech company hyperbole, as the findings were actually published Nature. Floods are the most common natural disaster throughout the world, so any early warning system is good news.
Floods have been notoriously tricky to predict, as most rivers don’t have streamflow gauges. Google got around this problem by with all kinds of relevant data, including historical events, river level readings, elevation and terrain readings and more. After that, the company generated localized maps and ran “hundreds of thousands” of simulations in each location. This combination of techniques allowed the models to accurately predict upcoming floods.
