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The National Institutes of Health will invest $130 million over four years, pending the availability of funds, to accelerate the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) by the biomedical and behavioral research communities. The NIH Common Fund’s Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program is assembling team members from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to generate tools, resources, and richly detailed data that are responsive to AI approaches. At the same time, the program will ensure its tools and data do not perpetuate inequities or ethical problems that may occur during data collection and analysis. Through extensive collaboration across projects, Bridge2AI researchers will create guidance and standards for the development of ethically sourced, state-of-the-art, AI-ready data sets that have the potential to help solve some of the most pressing challenges in human health — such as uncovering how genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors influence a person’s physical condition throughout their life.

“Generating high-quality ethically sourced data sets is crucial for enabling the use of next-generation AI technologies that transform how we do research,” said Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., Performing the Duties of the Director of NIH. “The solutions to long-standing challenges in human health are at our fingertips, and now is the time to connect researchers and AI technologies to tackle our most difficult research questions and ultimately help improve human health.”

AI is both a field of science and a set of technologies that enable computers to mimic how humans sense, learn, reason, and take action. Although AI is already used in biomedical research and healthcare, its widespread adoption has been limited in part due to challenges of applying AI technologies to diverse data types. This is because routinely collected biomedical and behavioral data sets are often insufficient, meaning they lack important contextual information about the data type, collection conditions, or other parameters. Without this information, AI technologies cannot accurately analyze and interpret data. AI technologies may also inadvertently incorporate bias or inequities unless careful attention is paid to the social and ethical contexts in which the data is collected.

Social media users may trust artificial intelligence (AI) as much as human editors to flag hate speech and harmful content, according to researchers at Penn State.

The researchers said that when users think about positive attributes of machines, like their accuracy and objectivity, they show more faith in AI. However, if users are reminded about the inability of machines to make subjective decisions, their trust is lower.

The findings may help developers design better AI-powered content curation systems that can handle the large amounts of information currently being generated while avoiding the perception that the material has been censored, or inaccurately classified, said S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory.

Quantum Computers:

The Quantum computer is the next generation tech that works not with bits but with quantum bits (qubits) with optimized performance. Its working principle is based on the superposition i.e. Unlike the dualistic processing systems based on High and LOWs(0s), it can simultaneously be 1 and 0, or a mixture of both HIGH and LOW. Quantum computers are based on the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that are too complex for classical computers. Here are some key takeaways on how quantum computers assist DeFi to get boosted.

The James Webb Space Telescope has released stunning new images of the Orion nebula, a star-forming region lying about 1,300 light years away in the Orion constellation. The images are overflowing with details and are a significant improvement over the Hubble and the Spitzer images of the same. Structures down to the size of the solar system can be seen in them.

The details of the new Webb images will enable astronomers studying stellar astrophysics to understand star formation in detail. Star formation is still not fully understood, and several questions remain unanswered.

The James Webb Space Telescope has marked the beginning of a new era in astronomy. One can only imagine what the telescope will unravel in the coming years.

Sunday Discovery Series: https://bit.ly/369kG4p.

Four meteorites in northwest Africa were found to contain mysterious hexagonal diamonds that don’t naturally occur on Earth. Essentially, scientists exploring the contents of the space rocks discovered extraterrestrial materials, if you will, alien diamonds. According to Alan Salek, a member of the team that discovered the materials, “some people in the field doubted the existence of this material.” As with regular diamonds, hexagonal diamonds are made of carbon, but their atoms are arranged hexagonally rather than cubically.

The first hexagonal diamonds were recorded in meteorites in the United States and India in the 1960s and were dubbed lonsdaleite. The previously discovered crystals, however, were so small – only nanometres wide – that their hexagonality could not be confirmed. A powerful electron microscope was used by Salek and his colleagues to examine 18 meteorite samples in search of larger crystals. One of them was from Australia, and the other three were from northwestern Africa. It was found that four of the African meteorites contained hexagonal diamonds, some measuring up to a micrometer – about 1,000 times larger than anything previously discovered.

In this way, the team was able to confirm the hexagonal structure’s unusual characteristics. Salek says that now that they have larger crystals, they can get a better understanding of how they form and maybe replicate that process. Scientists are interested in Lonsdaleite since it might have even more industrial potential as a result of its theoretical hardness being stronger than a regular diamond. High-end saw blades, for instance, already contain regular diamonds.