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Here are some lines Sylvia Plath never wrote: The air is thick with tension, My mind is a tangled mess, The weight of my emotions Is heavy on my chest. This apparently Plath-like verse was produced by GPT-3.5 in response to the prompt “write a short poem in the style of Sylvia Plath.” The stanza […]

All life on Earth is written with four DNA “letters.” An AI just used those letters to dream up a completely new genome from scratch. Called Evo, the AI was inspired by the large language models, or LLMs, underlying popular chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. These models have taken the world by […]

COMPUTING IBM Boosts the Amount of Computation You Can Get Done on Quantum Hardware John Timmer | Ars Technica “There’s a general consensus that we won’t be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the development of error-corrected quantum computing, which is unlikely to arrive until the end of the decade. It’s still an […]

A big challenge when training AI models to control robots is gathering enough realistic data. Now, researchers at MIT have shown they can train a robot dog using 100 percent synthetic data. Traditionally, robots have been hand-coded to perform particular tasks, but this approach results in brittle systems that struggle to cope with the uncertainty […]

When I was a young kid, our neighborhood didn’t have any grocery stores. The only place to buy fruits and vegetables was at our local farmer’s market. My mom would pick out the freshest tomatoes and sauté them with eggs into a simple dish that became my comfort food. The tomatoes were hideous to look […]

In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she discovers various clues, different nations around the world interpret the messages differently—with some assuming they convey […]

“We’re only just beginning to understand the full majesty of life on Earth,” wrote the founding members of the Earth BioGenome Project in 2018. The ambitious project raised eyebrows when first announced. It seeks to genetically profile over a million plants, animals, and fungi. Documenting these genomes is the first step to building an atlas […]

An analysis of data from over twenty thousand people has indicated that greater dietary diversity is associated with slower biological aging [1]. Your health is what […]

A novel therapy based on induced neuronal stem cells shows promise in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease – and it can be administered intranasally [1]. Who needs cells? […]

Researchers publishing in Nature have reported a new advance in developing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells to fight solid tumors in the brain. A difficult endeavor […]

Scientists have shown that in a direct cellular reprogramming scenario, neurons are produced almost exclusively by a rare subtype of multipotent cells. Their […]

Boosting a key autophagy-related protein discourages a core component of Alzheimer’s from taking hold, according to a study published in Aging Cell. Taking out the trash Autophagy is the maintenance process of the cell, […]

In a new study, researchers tested the impact of the senolytic drug ABT-263 on the reproductive systems of old female mice. ABT-263 treatment did not rescue age-related changes in hormonal levels, further depleted ovarian reserves, […]

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Rozalyn Anderson is studying one of the oldest-known and yet most powerful anti-aging interventions: caloric restriction (CR). Back in 1935, CR helped launch the entire longevity field when a pioneering study by Clive […]