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Point-of-care diagnoses occur when a doctor can quickly diagnose a patient during an examination without sending biological samples to a laboratory or consulting with other specialists. The stress and anxiety that can come with waiting for the results of medical testing, and the cost associated with in-depth laboratory testing, make point-of-care testing a gold standard. However, point-of-care diagnostics remain rare in oncology.

Research shows that women suspected of endometrial cancer experience stress and anxiety while waiting for a confirmed diagnosis. While the procedures and waiting time associated with endometrial cancer diagnoses vary, endometrial biopsies can take weeks to return results. Of added concern, since most endometrial cancers require surgical intervention, usually a hysterectomy, delays in diagnosis lead to delays in treatment. Indeed, these surgical delays can negatively impact survival. Thus, rapid endometrial cancer diagnostic strategies would significantly improve patient care.

To address the need for new, more efficient endometrial cancer diagnostics, a group of researchers initiated a study to assess the ability of an intelligent knife (iKnife) to identify malignancy in endometrial tissue biopsies. The researchers published the results of the study in the journal Cancers.

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On Tuesday, Meta AI announced the development of Cicero, which it claims is the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the strategic board game Diplomacy. It’s a notable achievement because the game requires deep interpersonal negotiation skills, which implies that Cicero has obtained a certain mastery of language necessary to win the game.

Even before Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, board games were a useful measure of AI achievement. In 2015, another barrier fell when AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Sedol. Both of those games follow a relatively clear set of analytical rules (although Go’s rules are typically simplified for computer AI).

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The transport of mercury ions across intestinal epithelial cells can be studied for toxicology assessments by using animal models and static cell cultures. However, the concepts do not reliably replicate conditions of the human gut microenvironment to monitor in situ cell physiology. As a result, the mechanism of mercury transport in the human intestine is still unknown.

In a new report now published in Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering, Li Wang and a research team in and in China developed a gut-on-a-chip instrument integrated with transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER) sensors and electrochemical sensors.

They proposed to explore the dynamic concept to simulate the physical intestinal barrier and mirror biological transport and adsorption mechanisms of mercury ions. The scientists recreated the cellular microenvironment by applying fluid shear stress and cyclic mechanical strain.

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Have you ever been cut off while driving and found yourself swearing and laying on the horn? Or come home from a long day at work and lashed out at whoever left the dishes unwashed? From petty anger to the devastating violence we see in the news, acts of aggression can be difficult to comprehend. Research has yielded puzzling paradoxes about how rage works in the brain. But a new study from Caltech, pioneering a machine-learning research technique in the hypothalamus, reveals unexpected answers on the nature of aggression.

The hypothalamus is a region linked to many innate survival behaviors like mating, hunting, and the fight-or-flight response. Scientists have long believed that neurons in the hypothalamus are functionally specific—that is, certain groups of neurons correlate to certain specific behaviors. This seems to be the case in mating behavior, where neuron groups in the medial preoptic area (MPOA) of the hypothalamus, when stimulated, cause a to mount a female mouse. These same neurons are active when mounting behavior occurs naturally. The logical conclusion is that these neurons control mounting in mice.

But when looking at the analogous neurons that control in another part of the hypothalamus, the VMHvl, researchers found a different story. These neurons could be stimulated to cause a male mouse to attack another male mouse, yet they did not show specific activity when the same neurons were observed in naturally fighting mice. This paradox indicated that something distinct was happening when it came to aggression.

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Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

The faster attackers can gain control over human or machine identities during a breach attempt, the easier it becomes to infiltrate core enterprise systems and take control. Attackers, cybercriminal gangs and advanced persistent threat (APT) groups share the goal of quickly seizing control of identity access management (IAM) systems.

Impersonating identities is how attackers move laterally across networks, undetected for months. IAM systems — in particular, older perimeter-based ones not protected with zero-trust security — are often the first or primary target.

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