Researchers have identified a version of a gene that doubles a person’s risk of severe COVID-19 and doubles the risk of death from the disease for people under 60.
The new Covid pills from Merck and Pfizer offer a ton of promise. But there’s plenty we still don’t know about how well they work.
The new Covid pills from Merck and Pfizer offer a ton of promise. But there’s plenty we still don’t know about how well they work.
The last year has been a story of triumph in the vaccine world, with the rapid development of two highly successful vaccines for Covid-19, one developed by Moderna and the other by Pfizer and BioNTech. Now that flu season is approaching, why are we still using 50-year-old technology for the flu vaccine?
The reason the Covid-19 vaccines were developed so quickly is that they used a new, much faster and easier-to-create type of vaccine technology, based on messenger RNA, or mRNA. What’s even more exciting is that we now have an overwhelming amount of evidence, from real-world experience, that these vaccines are remarkably safe and effective.
Now, anti-vaxxers and the “vaccine hesitant” are claiming they don’t trust the vaccine because it was developed too fast. That’s ridiculous: the real reason they don’t trust the vaccine is because they’re consuming a steady diet of anti-vaccine nonsense, promoted by a combination of right-wing media and the Disinformation Dozen (who include left-wing as well as right-wing zealots). But let’s not go down that rabbit hole today.
Apple and Meta are heading toward a collision course around wearables, AR/VR headsets and home devices. Also: Netflix and Apple mend fences around billing, Tim Cook talks cryptocurrency, and a new Apple Store is coming to Los Angeles. Finally, the App Store is dealt a loss in court.
For the past decade or so, Apple Inc.’s chief rival was considered to be Google. The two have gone toe-to-toe in smartphones, mobile operating systems, web services and home devices.
The next decade, however, could be defined by Apple’s rivalry with another Silicon Valley giant: Meta Platforms Inc.—the company known to everyone other than its own brand consultants as Facebook.
Artificial Intelligence’s biggest Problems is their inability to keep on learning after they’ve completed their training. But now, Google’s Deepmind has created a Meta-Learning AI which keeps on learning and improving indefinitely without any Human supervision. Deepmind created the AI Game: Alchemy, which is a chemistry-based game for AI Agents to play and improve in. But Artificial Intelligence improving without limits also puts some concerns into AI researchers focused on deep learning.
There has been rapidly growing interest in meta-learning as a method for increasing the flexibility and sample efficiency of reinforcement learning.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 The Ultimate kind of AI?
01:02 What is Meta-Learning in AI?
02:24 Alchemy AI Agent.
04:02 How Meta-Learning solved AI Problems.
06:32 What are the dangers of this AI?
08:29 Last Words.
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#ai #metalearning #singularity
I may have already posted about this, but this is more data from The Lancet.
Background.
Recent evidence indicates a potential therapeutic role of fluvoxamine for COVID-19. In the TOGETHER trial for acutely symptomatic patients with COVID-19, we aimed to assess the efficacy of fluvoxamine versus placebo in preventing hospitalisation defined as either retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to a tertiary hospital due to COVID-19.
Methods.
This placebo-controlled, randomised, adaptive platform trial done among high-risk symptomatic Brazilian adults confirmed positive for SARS-CoV-2 included eligible patients from 11 clinical sites in Brazil with a known risk factor for progression to severe disease. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) to either fluvoxamine (100 mg twice daily for 10 days) or placebo (or other treatment groups not reported here). The trial team, site staff, and patients were masked to treatment allocation. Our primary outcome was a composite endpoint of hospitalisation defined as either retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to tertiary hospital due to COVID-19 up to 28 days post-random assignment on the basis of intention to treat. Modified intention to treat explored patients receiving at least 24 h of treatment before a primary outcome event and per-protocol analysis explored patients with a high level adherence (80%). We used a Bayesian analytic framework to establish the effects along with probability of success of intervention compared with placebo. The trial is registered at ClinicalTrials dot gov (NCT04727424) and is ongoing.
Robots eliminate weeds with lasers to solve one of the farming industries’ biggest challenges.
Creating a world where no woman has to die giving life — temitayo erogbogbo, global advocacy director, MSD for mothers, merck sharp & dohme.
Mr. Temitayo (Tayo) Erogbogbo, is Global Advocacy Director of MSD for Mothers (https://www.msdformothers.com/), at Merck Sharp & Dohme.
Tayo has two decades of combined private sector and international development experience, 13 years of which was spent in the pharmaceutical industry in multiple roles across community relations, government affairs, marketing and sales.
In explosive development, China has been threatening U.S. executives, companies and business groups in recent weeks to fight against China-related bills in the U.S. Congress. According to Reuters, letters from China’s embassy in Washington have pressed executives to urge members of Congress to alter or drop specific bills that seek to enhance U.S. competitiveness.
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WIRED sat down with West to sift fantasy from reality and pin down what XR is actually good at. And it may come as a surprise that a lot of it relies on collecting a lot of data. The following interview is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: So let’s start with sort of an ontological question. There’s been this idea that we’ll be in or go to the metaverse, or several metaverses, which tech companies posit will exist in VR or AR. Do you see VR and AR as being more of a tool or a destination?
Timoni West: That’s a great question. I would actually say neither. I see XR as one of the many different mediums you could choose to work in. For example, we actually have an AR mobile companion app [in beta] that allows you to scan a space and gray box it out, put down objects, automatically tag things. So I’m using AR to do the things that AR is best for. I’ll use VR to do the things that VR is best for, like presence, being able to meet together, sculpt, or do anything that’s, you know, sort of intrinsically 3D.
