Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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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.

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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%.

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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.”

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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.

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Harvard University geneticist Dr. David Sinclair’s lab is developing a cheek swab test kit so that you can check your biological age at home. You then get updates on how to slow down and reverse your aging.

Find out how fast you’re aging with Tally Health. The future of healthy aging is here.

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Washington, Scientists have found a novel immunotherapy that could bolster the effectiveness of cancer treatment, according to a study. Rather than rally T cells against cancer, scientists have used different human immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells as a novel means to fight cancer, according to a study.

The team of scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine described findings that could boost the impact of immune-checkpoint therapy, the study said. Findings have been published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI).

Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as Keytruda and Opdivo work by unleashing the immune system’s T cells to attack tumour cells. Their introduction a decade ago marked a major advance in cancer therapy, but only 10 per cent to 30 per cent of treated patients experience long-term improvement, the study said.

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