Technology

A traditional endoscopy, while valuable for detecting high-risk lesions, is an expensive, invasive procedure. There are ingestible cameras but are not controlled by physicians, they are just swallowed and the body does the rest. A pilot study brings remote ones closer to the original kind. Physicians can remotely drive a miniature video capsule to all regions of the stomach to visualize and photograph potential problem areas. The new technology uses an external magnet and hand-held video game style joysticks to move the capsule in three-dimensions in the stomach, nearing the capabilities of a…

A wearable, pocket-sized, automated insulin delivery device has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company calls is the iLet Bionic Pancreas but it's obviously not bionic any more than String Theory is a scientific theory. However, it is now available in this universe for the almost two million Americans with type 1 diabetes. The bionic pancreas combines an insulin infusion pump with algorithm-controlled dosing decision software. Work on it began in the lab of Boston University Professor Ed Damiano when his son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 11 months.…

A revolution is taking place, but we seem to not yet realize it. Paradigm shifting technologies often produce an abrupt transition when they get adopted. However, that transition is not easy to recognize early on: the effects of an exponential trend appear linear at the begninning, so the explosive force of the transition that occurs a little later takes many by surprise. Let us look at the status of development of large language models. This is a relatively new technology that is powered by recent advances in machine learning - in particular, the capability we have acquired to train…

For years, many have feared that artificial intelligence (AI) will take over national security mechanisms, leading to human slavery, domination of human society and perhaps the annihilation of humans. One way of killing humans is medical misdiagnosis, so it seems reasonable to examine the performance of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that is taking the world by storm. This is timely in light of ChatGPT’s recent remarkable performance in passing the US medical licensing exam. Computer-aided diagnosis has been attempted many times over the years, particularly for diagnosing appendicitis. But the…

If a vaccine requires cold storage for shipping, many areas where infrastructure doesn't hold up are unable to receive them. A possible solution to this problem is a mobile vaccine printer that could produce hundreds of vaccine doses in a day. The printer produces patches with hundreds of microneedles containing the vaccine. The patches can be attached to the skin, allowing the vaccine to dissolve without the need for a traditional injection. Once printed, the vaccine patches can be stored for months at room temperature. In their paper, the scientists used the printer to produce…

In what they are calling the first study to systematically identify aggressive driving behaviors, a team believe they have measured the changes in driving that occur in an aggressive state. Obviously non-professional aggressive drivers drive faster and make more mistakes than non-aggressive drivers, they put other road users at risk. They also pose a challenge to engineers working on self-driving car technology. UK officials claim that 80 percent of UK road deaths are “predominantly caused by dangerous and reckless drivers.” There's no clinical trial for this kind of thing, we don't let…

The Restrict Act would ban anyone from accessing a online service ran by a US adverssary, which would mean any and all apps owned by Tencent.   Tik Tok is a very malignant and horrible app that tracks you in so many ways if it is on your phone.  So says even CNN.  However, this law is so sweeping it even mentions things like "Post Quantum Cryptography" and "Synthetic Biology" Some readings of it could imply that accessing such a service via a VPN would be against this law.  However, this act is not intended to go after Joe user trying to find dance or cat videos but…

Some companies profited during the government lockdowns and then lingering social stigma about being outside the home. Exercise bikes, office furniture, and coffee machines all did well. It will be decades before we know how many have been impacted in ways that were unanticipated. Being at home, for example, should have given more time to exercise, yet it often did the opposite. Despair, prevalent media discussing disaster in real time, and social isolation don't lead to a desire to exercise in some. The effects of lockdowns, and even claims you had to wear a mask while on a walk outside, are…

With ChatGPT a huge fad, students may be excited that their next paper will be easy, because if it is truly AI it will start from the unique seed you give it. Yet it does not work that way. Language models that generate text in response to user prompts use a lot of the same training materials, which means they can plagiarize content in multiple ways. For an analysis, scholars focused on identifying three forms of plagiarism: verbatim, or directly copying and pasting content; paraphrase, or rewording and restructuring content without citing the original source; and idea, or using the main…

We already know Chat GPT and the tech behind it can replace comedy acts. Right now a new ongoing stream of “news” totally made up news like stories, is being powered by Chat GPT and animated using the Unreal video game engine. Unreal engine a 3D game engine for which the source is available on Github. It is only a matter of time before realistic enough, GPT powered commentary is added to news feeds. "News" here is in scare quotes because it's not like reading a RSS feed and applying some Chat GPT driven reaction to it. Right now it uses GPT to create news items based on things given to it…