Lifeboat Foundation

In a recent study posted to the bioRxiv server, researchers in Germany investigated the effectiveness of the antibiotic nitroxoline against the currently circulating mpox viruses, previously called monkeypox virus (MPXV). This antibiotic has been used in Europe for about fifty years and has been proven effective in fighting biofilm infections.

Study: Repurposing of the antibiotic nitroxoline for the treatment of mpox. Image Credit: Dotted Yeti / Shutterstock.

Did you know that you can keep your device anywhere in your house, but you should not keep it in your bedroom? The concern is privacy breach. Watch this to know more.

In 2022, artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators seemed to take over the internet, but what can we expect from AI in 2023?

By dr simon coghlan, university of melbourne.

Researchers tested GPT-3.5 with questions from the US Bar Exam. They predict that GPT-4 and comparable models might be able to pass the exam very soon.

In the U.S., almost all jurisdictions require a professional license exam known as the Bar Exam. By passing this exam, lawyers are admitted to the bar of a U.S. state.

In most cases, applicants must complete at least seven years of post-secondary education, including three years at an accredited law school.

Benjamin Franklin stated, “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”

MIT’s well-known late Director of Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Patrick Winston, expanded upon this adage, saying, “Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order.”

We are at a precarious point in human development, with the positive and negative impact of technology surrounding us as individuals and as a society. Technology has helped improve our living standards, extended our lives, cured diseases, fed our growing populations, and expanded our frontiers. But it has also helped create greater economic and digital divides, increased pollution and harm to our environment, and potentially endangered the intellectual development of our human population.

The United States is considering sampling wastewater taken from international aircraft to track any emerging new Covid-19 variants as infections surge in China, as UK-based health experts estimate about 9,000 people a days are now dying of the disease in China.

The proposed of testing wastewater by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would provide a better solution to tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the US than new travel restrictions announced this week, three infectious disease experts said.

Boosting vaccination rates, widespread mask use and reimposing some restrictions on movement could reduce the number of deaths.

BRUSSELS, Jan 3 (Reuters) — The European Union has offered free COVID-19 vaccines to China, the EU executive said on Tuesday, as infections there surged following Beijing’s relaxation of its “zero-COVID” policies.

China has not responded to the offer yet, a spokesperson for the European Commission told journalists at a regular briefing. He did not specify the amount of vaccines the EU was offering or their manufacturers.

“In view of the COVID situation in China, (Health) Commissioner Stella Kyriakides has reached out to her Chinese counterparts to offer EU solidarity and support,” he said.

Year 2022 😗

Testing multiple treatments for heterogeneous (varying) effectiveness with respect to many underlying risk factors requires many pairwise tests; we would like to instead automatically discover and visualize patient archetypes and predictors of treatment effectiveness using multitask machine learning. In this paper, we present a method to estimate these heterogeneous treatment effects with an interpretable hierarchical framework that uses additive models to visualize expected treatment benefits as a function of patient factors (identifying personalized treatment benefits) and concurrent treatments (identifying combinatorial treatment benefits). This method achieves state-of-the-art predictive power for COVID-19 in-hospital mortality and interpretable identification of heterogeneous treatment benefits. We first validate this method on the large public MIMIC-IV dataset of ICU patients to test recovery of heterogeneous treatment effects. Next we apply this method to a proprietary dataset of over 3,000 patients hospitalized for COVID-19, and find evidence of heterogeneous treatment effectiveness predicted largely by indicators of inflammation and thrombosis risk: patients with few indicators of thrombosis risk benefit most from treatments against inflammation, while patients with few indicators of inflammation risk benefit most from treatments against thrombosis. This approach provides an automated methodology to discover heterogeneous and individualized effectiveness of treatments.