Researchers at Google DeepMind have used artificial intelligence to predict whether mutations in human genes are likely to be harmful, in one of the first examples of the technology helping to accelerate the diagnosis of diseases caused by genetic variants. The AI tool, called AlphaMissense, assessed all 71mn ‘‘missense” mutations, in which a single […]
Direct air capture is slowly getting off the ground, with plants up and running in Iceland, Switzerland, the US, and Canada. Much of the carbon these facilities capture is either turned into a solid and stored underground or reused to manufacture various chemicals and industrial products. Now a startup called Twelve is planning to use captured CO2 to make […]
The world’s first lab-grown burger was completed in 2013 after five years of research and development and with a price tag of $330,000. Since then, the cultured meat industry has slowly but surely advanced – gaining funding, diversifying the types of meat produced, building factories for large-scale production, going on the market in Singapore and Israel, ...
Neuroscientists usually investigate one brain at a time. They observe how neurons fire as a person reads certain words, for example, or plays a video game. As social animals, however, those same scientists do much of their work together – brainstorming hypotheses, puzzling over problems and fine-tuning experimental designs. Increasingly, researchers are ...
Microsoft is one of the key players in the artificial intelligence revolution. So how does the software giant, which has been integrating ChatGPT technology into the products most of us use, go about making its AI products responsible and ethical? In the second episode of the World Economic Forum’s podcast series on generative AI, Microsoft’s […]
Robots are nothing new. They build our cars, vacuum our floors, prepare our e-commerce orders, and even help carry out surgeries. But now the sci-fi vision of a general-purpose humanoid robot seems to be edging closer. While disembodied artificial intelligence has seen rapid improvements in performance in recent years, most robots are still relatively dumb. […]
To build a machine, one must know what its parts are and how they fit together. To understand the machine, one needs to know what each part does and how it contributes to its function. In other words, one should be able to explain the “mechanics” of how it works. According to a philosophical approach called mechanism, […]
Cultured meat is gaining momentum, with large production facilities under construction and the arduous approval process for the finished products inching forward. Most of the industry’s focus thus far has been on ground beef, chicken, pork, and steak. Save for one startup that was working on lab-grown salmon, fish have been largely left out of the fray. But last ...
