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In this interview, News Medical speaks to Assistant Professor Ryan Jackson about his latest work, published in tandem Nature papers, detailing the discovery of a new CRISPR immune system.

Please can you introduce yourself and tell us about your professional background?

I am an Assistant Professor at Utah State University (USU). I use biochemical and structural techniques to understand how the molecules that perform the reactions of life function. I’ve been working in the CRISPR field since 2011. I started as a postdoc in Blake Wiedenheft’s lab at Montana State University, and in 2016 I started my own research lab at USU. I earned both of my degrees (a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry) from USU, so joining the faculty was like coming home. My research lab specializes in determining the structure and function of newly discovered and obscure CRISPR systems.

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The FAA said normal operations were “resuming gradually” after ordering a nationwide pause on all domestic departures until 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning following a computer failure that has impacted flights around the country.

“The ground stop has been lifted,” officials said at about 8:50 a.m. ET. “We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem”

Departures were resuming at about 8:15 a.m. ET at two of the nation’s busiest hubs — Newark and Atlanta — FAA officials said on Twitter, adding, “We expect departures to resume at other airports at 9 a.m. ET.”

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Mosquitoes that transmit dengue and other viruses have evolved growing resistance to insecticides in parts of Asia, and novel ways to control them are desperately needed, new research warns.

Health authorities commonly fog mosquito-infested areas with clouds of insecticide, and resistance has long been a concern, but the scale of the problem was not well understood.

Japanese scientist Shinji Kasai and his team examined mosquitos from several countries in Asia as well as Ghana and found a series of mutations had made some virtually impervious to popular pyrethroid-based chemicals like permethrin.

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I imagine, this could hurt a lot of people. This could easily be resolved with better ventilation and planning; not really outright banning.

A federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves, a source of indoor pollution linked to childhood asthma.

In an interview with Bloomberg, a US Consumer Product Safety commissioner said gas stove usage is a “hidden hazard.”

“Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned,” agency commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg. The report said the agency plans “to take action” to address the indoor pollution caused by stoves.

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On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker’s emotional tone.

Microsoft calls VALL-E a “neural codec language model,” and it builds off of a technology called EnCodec, which Meta announced in October 2022. Unlike other text-to-speech methods that typically synthesize speech by manipulating waveforms, VALL-E generates discrete audio codec codes from text and acoustic prompts.

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On Friday, Koko co-founder Rob Morris announced on Twitter that his company ran an experiment to provide AI-written mental health counseling for 4,000 people without informing them first, The Verge reports. Critics have called the experiment deeply unethical because Koko did not obtain informed consent from people seeking counseling.

On Discord, users sign into the Koko Cares server and send direct messages to a Koko bot that asks several multiple-choice questions (e.g., “What’s the darkest thought you have about this?”). It then shares a person’s concerns—written as a few sentences of text—anonymously with someone else on the server who can reply anonymously with a short message of their own.

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