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NASA officials say Artemis 1 mission teams are “giddy” after witnessing how well their Orion spacecraft has been performing so far on its way towards lunar orbit.

Artemis 1 launched at 1:47 a.m. EST (0647 GMT) on Nov. 16, blasting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida in a spectacular display of the sheer power of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The Orion spacecraft reached Earth orbit shortly after, and then at 87 minutes after launch performed a so-called Trans Lunar Injection burn to send it hurtling towards the moon. On Monday (Nov. 21), Orion performed another burn to send the spacecraft close enough to the lunar surface to leverage the moon’s gravity to pull the spacecraft around the moon into a distant retrograde lunar orbit.

Breast cancer is one of the five commonest cancers in India. But it should be understood that all breast cancers are not the same. They have different characteristics because of genetic mutations. The new tests now available can help us identify these mutations. This helps oncologists to determine the specific therapy approach required for each type of breast cancer. Now, science has given us a new therapy called ‘targeted therapy’ to target specific mutations. These new tests and therapies can make the management of breast cancer more individualized by matching the therapies to the cancer we have to treat and improve chances of disease-free survival.

New tests to identify the individual characteristics of breast cancer

Identification of the genetic causes of breast cancer: Next generation sequencing.

MUSC Hollings Cancer Center researcher Ashish Deshmukh, Ph.D., has identified a dramatic recent rise in cervical cancer incidence among women in their early 30s. This work was published Nov. 21 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Cervical cancer is mostly related to human papillomavirus (HPV), and has made this cancer preventable. Yet, it is estimated that over 14,000 new cases will be diagnosed this year and more than 4,000 deaths will be attributed to .

“HPV is a group of over 200 viruses. At least 14 high-risk HPV types can cause several types of cancers, including cervical, anal and head and neck cancers. In the era of the overall decline in cancer incidence, cancers caused by HPV are unfortunately rising,” said Deshmukh, an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at MUSC.

In a recent study published in Cancer Cell, researchers assessed several approaches for a circulating cell-free deoxyribonucleic acid (cfDNA)-based multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test. Defining the clinical limit of detection (LOD) based on circulating tumor allele fraction (cTAF) enables the comparison of different approaches.

An MCED test is a blood test that helps early detection of a shared cancer signal across multiple cancers using blood samples. Currently, available MCED tests have a low false-positive rate of less than 1%.

GitHub Copilot dubs itself as an “AI pair programmer” for software developers, automatically suggesting code in real time. According to GitHub, Copilot is “powered by Codex, a generative pretrained AI model created by OpenAI” and has been trained on “natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub.”

However, a class-action lawsuit filed against GitHub Copilot, its parent company Microsoft, and OpenAI claims open-source software piracy and violations of open-source licenses. Specifically, the lawsuit states that code generated by Copilot does not include any attribution to the original author of the code, copyright notices, or a copy of the license, which most open-source licenses require.

“The spirit of open source is not just a space where people want to keep it open,” says Sal Kimmich, an open-source developer advocate at Sonatype, machine-learning engineer, and open-source contributor and maintainer. “We have developed processes in order to keep open source secure, and that requires traceability, observability, and verification. Copilot is obscuring the original provenance of those [code] snippets.”

In May 2020, AI research laboratory OpenAI unveiled the largest neural network ever created—GPT-3—in a paper titled, ‘Language Models are Few Shot Learners’. The researchers released a beta API for users to toy with the system, giving birth to the new hype of generative AI.

People were generating eccentric results. The new language model could transform the description of a web page into the corresponding code. It emulates the human narrative, by either writing customised poetry or turning into a philosopher—predicting the true meaning of life. There’s nothing that the model can’t do. But there’s also a lot it can’t undo.

As GPT-3 isn’t that big of a deal for some, the name remains a bit ambiguous. The model could be a fraction of the futuristic bigger models that are yet to come.