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Blood transfusions save lives. In the US alone, people receive around 10 million units each year. But blood banks are always short in supplyespecially when it comes to the universal donor type O.

Surprisingly, the gut microbiome may hold a solution for boosting universal blood supplies by chemically converting other blood types into the universal O.

Infusing the wrong blood typesay, type A to type Btriggers deadly immune reactions. Type O blood, however, is compatible with nearly everyone. Its in especially high demand following hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other crises because doctors have to rapidly treat as many people as possible.

Sometimes, blood banks have an imbalance of different blood typesfor example, too much type A, not enough universal O. This week, a team from Denmark and Sweden discovered a cocktail of enzymes that readily converts type A and type B blood into the universal donor. Found in gut bacteria, the enzymes chew up an immune-stimulating sugar molecule dotted on the surfaces of type A and B blood cells, removing their tendency to spark an immune response.

Compared to previous attempts, the blend of enzymes converted A and B blood types to type O blood with remarkably high efficiencies, the authors wrote.

Blood types can be characterized in multiple ways, but roughly speaking, the types come in four main forms: A, B, AB, and O.

These types are distinguished by what kinds of sugar moleculescalled antigenscover the surfaces of red blood cells. Antigens can trigger immune rejection if mismatched. Type A blood has A antigens; type B has B antigens; type AB has both. Type O has neither.

This is why type O blood can be used for most people. It doesnt normally trigger an immune response and is highly coveted during emergencies when its difficult to determine a persons blood type. One obvious way to boost type O stock is to recruit more donors, but thats not always possible. As a workaround, scientists have tried to artificially produce type O blood using stem cell technology. While successful in the lab, its expensive and hard to scale up for real-world demands.

An alternative is removing the A and B antigens from donated blood. First proposed in the 1980s, this approach uses enzymes to break down the immune-stimulating sugar molecules. Like licking an ice cream cone, as the antigens gradually melt away, the blood cells are stripped of their A or B identity, eventually transforming into the universal O blood type.

The technology sounds high-tech, but breaking down sugars is something our bodies naturally do every day, thanks to microbes in the gut that happily digest our food. This got scientists wondering: Can we hunt down enzymes in the digestive track to convert blood types?

Over a half decade ago, a team from the University of British Columbia made headlines by using bacterial enzymes found in the gut microbiome to transform type A blood to type O. Some gut bugs eat away at mucusa slimy substance made of sugary molecules covering the gut. These mucus linings are molecularly similar to the antigens on red blood cells.

So, digestive enzymes from gut microbes could potentially chomp away A and B antigens.

In one test, the team took samples of human poop (yup), which carry enzymes from the gut microbiome and looked for DNA that could break down red blood cell sugar chains.

They eventually discovered two enzymes from a single bacterial strain. Tested in human blood, the duo readily stripped away type A antigens, converting it into universal type O.

The study was a proof of concept for transforming one blood type into another, with potentially real-world implications. Type A bloodcommon in Europe and the USmakes up roughly one-third of the supply of donations. A technology that converts it to universal O could boost blood transplant resources in this part of the world.

This is a first, and if these data can be replicated, it is certainly a major advance, Dr. Harvey Klein at the National Institutes of Healths Clinical Center, who was not involved in the work, told Science at the time.

Theres one problem though. Converted blood doesnt always work.

When tested in clinical trials, converted blood has raised safety concerns. Even when removing A or B antigens completely from donated blood, small hints from earlier studies found an immune mismatch between the transformed donor blood and the recipient. In other words, the engineered O blood sometimes still triggered an immune response.

Why?

Theres more to blood types than classic ABO. Type A is composed of two different subtypesone with higher A antigen levels than the other. Type B, common in people of Asian and African descent, also comes in extended forms. These recently discovered sugar chains are longer and harder to break down than in the classic versions. Called extended antigens, they could be why some converted blood still stimulates the immune system after transfusion.

The new study tackled these extended forms by again peeking into gut bacteria DNA. One bacterial strain, A. muciniphila, stood out. These bugs contain enzymes that work like a previously discovered version that chops up type A and B antigens, but surprisingly, they also strip away extended versions of both antigens.

These enzymes werent previously known to science, with just 30 percent similarity when compared to a previous benchmark enzyme that cuts up B and extended B antigens.

Using cells from different donors, the scientists engineered an enzyme soup that rapidly wiped out blood antigens. The strategy is unprecedented, wrote the team.

Although the screen found multiple enzymes capable of blood type conversion, each individually had limited effects. But when mixed and matched, the recipe transformed donated B type cells into type O, with limited immune responses when mixed with other blood types.

A similar strategy yielded three different enzymes to cut out the problematic A antigen and, in turn, transform the blood to type O. Some people secrete the antigen into other bodily fluidsfor example, saliva, sweat, or tears. Others, dubbed non-secreters, have less of these antigens floating around their bodies. Using blood donated from both secreters and non-secreters, the team treated red blood cells to remove the A antigen and its extended versions.

When mixed with other blood types, the enzyme cocktail lowered their immune response, although with lower efficacy than cells transformed from type B to O.

By mapping the structures of these enzymes, the team found some parts increased their ability to chop up sugar chains. Focusing on these hot-spot structures, scientists are set to hunt down other naturally-derived enzymesor use AI to engineer ones with better efficacy and precision.

The system still needs to be tested in humans. And the team didnt address other blood antigens, such as the Rh system, which is what makes blood types positive or negative. Still, bacterial enzymes appear to be an unexpected but promising way to engineer universal blood.

Image Credit: Zeiss Microscopy / Flickr

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Scientists Find a Surprising Way to Transform A and B Blood Types Into Universal Blood - Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Cognition Emerges From Stealth to Launch AI Software Engineer Devin Shubham Sharma | VentureBeat The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devins chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works.

Covariant Announces a Universal AI Platform for Robots Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum [On Monday, Covariant announced] RFM-1, which the company describes as a robotics foundation model that gives robots the human-like ability to reason. Thats from the press release, and while I wouldnt necessarily read too much into human-like or reason, what Covariant has going on here is pretty cool. Our existing system is already good enough to do very fast, very variable pick and place, says Covariant co-founder Pieter Abbeel. But were now taking it quite a bit further. Any task, any embodimentthats the long-term vision. Robotics foundation models powering billions of robots across the world.'

Cerebras Unveils Its Next Waferscale AI Chip Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum Cerebras says its next generation of waferscale AI chips can do double the performance of the previous generation while consuming the same amount of power. The Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) contains 4 trillion transistors, a more than 50 percent increase over the previous generation thanks to the use of newer chipmaking technology. The company says it will use the WSE-3 in a new generation of AI computers, which are now being installed in a datacenter in Dallas to form a supercomputer capable of 8 exaflops (8 billion billion floating point operations per second).

SpaceX Celebrates Major Progress on the Third Flight of Starship Stephen Clarke | Ars Technica SpaceXs new-generation Starship rocket, the most powerful and largest launcher ever built, flew halfway around the world following liftoff from South Texas on Thursday, accomplishing a key demonstration of its ability to carry heavyweight payloads into low-Earth orbit. The successful launch builds on two Starship test flights last year that achieved some, but not all, of their objectives and appears to put the privately funded rocket program on course to begin launching satellites, allowing SpaceX to ramp up the already-blistering pace of Starlink deployments.

This Self-Driving Startup Is Using Generative AI to Predict Traffic James ODonnell | MIT Technology Review The new system, called Copilot4D, was trained on troves of data from lidar sensors, which use light to sense how far away objects are. If you prompt the model with a situation, like a driver recklessly merging onto a highway at high speed, it predicts how the surrounding vehicles will move, then generates a lidar representation of 5 to 10 seconds into the future (showing a pileup, perhaps).

Electric Cars Are Still Not Good Enough Andrew Moseman | The Atlantic The next phase, when electric cars leap from early adoption to mass adoption, depends on the people [David] Rapson calls the pragmatists: Americans who will buy whichever car they deem best and who are waiting for their worries about price, range, and charging to be allayed before they go electric. The current slate of EVs isnt winning them over.

Mining Helium-3 on the Moon Has Been Talked About ForeverNow a Company Will Try Eric Berger | Ars Technica Two of Blue Origins earliest employees, former President Rob Meyerson and Chief Architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here. The present lunar rush is rather like a California gold rush without the gold. By harvesting helium-3, which is rare and limited in supply on Earth, Interlune could help change that calculus by deriving value from resources on the moon. But many questions about the approach remain.

What Happens When ChatGPT Tries to Solve 50,000 Trolley Problems? Fintan Burke | Ars Technica Autonomous driving startups are now experimenting with AI chatbot assistants, including one self-driving system that will use one toexplain its driving decisions. Beyond announcing red lights and turn signals, the large language models (LLMs) powering these chatbots may ultimately need to make moral decisions, like prioritizing passengers or pedestrians safety. But is the tech ready? Kazuhiro Takemoto, a researcher at the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan, wanted to check if chatbots could make the same moral decisions when driving as humans.

States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat Matt Reynolds | Wired As well as the Florida bill, there is also proposed legislation to ban cultivated meat in Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, and Tennessee. If all of those bills passan admittedly unlikely prospectthen some 46 million Americans will be cut off from accessing a form of meat that many hope will be significantly kinder to the planet and animals.

Physicists Finally Find a Problem Only Quantum Computers Can Do Lakshmi Chandrasekaran | Quanta Quantum computers are poised to become computational superpowers, but researchers have long sought a viable problem that confers a quantum advantagesomething only a quantum computer can solve. Only then, they argue, will the technology finally be seen as essential. Theyve been looking for decades. Now, a team of physicists including [John] Preskill may have found the best candidate yet for quantum advantage.

Image Credit: SpaceX

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 16) - Singularity Hub

In sci-fi and horror movies, the "mad scientist" rarely begins as a villain. From Dr. Frankenstein to Spider-Man's Doc Ock, they are often the victims of a combination of good intentions, unstoppable curiosity and more than a little hubris. Their plight is as familiar in real life as on screen, most recently with artificial intelligence.

According to the authors of "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," who heavily borrowed from fantasy-genre language to predict a high-tech future, "We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone we are literally making sand think. ... We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder."

Ray Kurzweil is a scientist and futurist who for years now has predicted potential advancements in higher tech, as not just a helpful set of tools for humans to use but also as essential to post-human evolution. By hitching our humanity to artificial intelligence, what he calls "the Singularity," Kurzweil prophesies a new age:

"And this Singularity isn't far off," he says. "I set the date for the Singularity representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today."

Kurzweil sees the Singularity as more than a possibility. He thinks it is a near-absolute inevitability that human intelligence will be equaled, surpassed and eventually merged with our computerized tools.

Though many predictions about AI are still more science fiction than fact, it is advancing faster than many expected. Even Kurzweil, when he was writing in the early 2000s, failed to see the omnipresence of smartphones and social media. Today, it is nearly impossible to identify things produced by programs such as ChatGPT.

For years, Oxford mathematician and devout Christian John Lennox has warned of some of AI's more negative implications. In his book "2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity," Lennox challenged more utopian predictions about AI and highlighted its limits. "A neural network," wrote Lennox, "can pick out a cat on a YouTube video, but it has no concept of what a cat is." Here, Lennox is pointing to a profound limitation of materialism. In fact, only those wedded to the idea that the human mind is merely an organic machine can think that a smart computer is, in any real sense, "alive."

Though AI may never be the golden ticket it's hyped to be, suggested Lennox, its threats to humanity remain. The title intentionally points to George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984." The current situation in China should be enough to reveal that it will not take a fully realized Singularity to enslave millions. It will only take fallen humans with bad ideas and enough power to control some very powerful technologies.

And yet, the promises of AI are amazing. An algorithm can pick out our music, movies and groceries with incredible accuracy, even if it is a bit creepy. The labor- and time-saving potential of AI will save humanity hours of mindless tasks. And we've not even begun to imagine the potential for technical and medical advances.

However, potentials are not actuals, and history is full of the unintended applications and consequences of human technologies. The only way forward in these possible futures is with a clear-eyed perspective on human exceptionalism and human fallenness. We must know the implications of both being created in the image of God and being an heir of Adam's sin.

Adapted from Breakpoint, Feb. 23, 2024; reprinted by permission of the Colson Center, breakpoint.org.

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Breakpoint: The promises and perils of artificial intelligence - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Singularity 6's cosy MMO Palia has reached over 3 million players in six months ahead of its launch on Steam on March 25.

The studio's debut title a fantasy mix of life simulation and MMORPG launched last August with a PC open beta via its own website and launcher, followed by a release on the Epic Games Store in October. The game then launched on Nintendo Switch in December.

As for how Palia achieved this feat, Singularity 6 director of business strategy Yu Sian Tan tells GamesIndustry.biz it was a combination of captivating players and the game's release on Nintendo Switch.

"We believe that we struck a chord with players when we wanted to expand the community sim experience by making it more social, creating an environment that encourages players to be kind to one another and having an overarching narrative that players can dive into," she says, adding that Nintendo's involvement and supporting in development and marketing aided an increase in player numbers.

"[Their support] is invaluable to us as a new game studio," Tan adds. "After our launch on the Nintendo Switch, our partnership with Nintendo has only grown stronger."

Tan says Palia's launch on Nintendo provided a "big boost" to the title compared to the PC open beta due to the "flexibility" of the portable console.

"It also meant we were launching on a new platform and now supported cross-platform play so things definitely got a lot more interesting for the team," she says.

Despite this boost in player numbers, Tan notes that maintaining player engagement is one of the biggest challenges of overseeing the success of a free-to-play MMO.

"The free-to-play approach can be challenging because it involves a bit of a balancing act between offering engaging gameplay for free, but also introducing effective monetisation strategies that do not alienate players or cause unnecessary pressure that would run antithetical to the cosy community sim gameplay we are trying to encourage in Palia," she explains.

Tan highlights that the main obstacle with free-to-play is the ability to engage players over a long period of time when they haven't paid an upfront cost for the game, as well as keeping the game fresh as a live service product.

"I'd love to be able to say it's easy to predict what our players love to play and how they would engage with our content, but every time we release something new to our players, we constantly learn and evolve our understanding of our playerbase," she says.

"Every time we release something new to our players, we constantly learn and evolve our understanding of our playerbase"

"It's a mix of offering up content with our own unique spin on it that appeals to the player archetypes we expect to be attracted to Palia, but also throwing in new experiences to help players discover something that they might not have expected to like."

In terms of the live service aspect of the game, Tan describes adapting the title to this model as a "learning curve" for the studio, and that its live operations team has been instrumental in understanding concerns raised by its development team and ensuring their needs are met.

"We have definitely been working on improving our platform testing over time to understand what we need to test and where to test it to ensure we minimise our risk and maximise confidence," she notes.

"We have also been working on unifying the gameplay experience between platforms where it makes sense, without sacrificing the player experience. This has been a conscious effort for us as there are trade-offs we have to make, but this is key to ensure we can sustainably release content on multiple platforms in the future."

Among the lessons learned during development, Tan highlights that the game starting as an open beta on PC enabled the studio to comfortably launch the game on Switch, and helped lay the groundwork to bring the game to a bigger audience.

"There have been so many lessons we have learned along the way from building our own launcher/patcher on PC from scratch [to creating] robust monitoring systems and a scalable infrastructure that could handle the ebbs and flows in our playerbase," she says.

As for advice she has for developers working on similar free-to-play and live service products, Tan says it all comes down to the strength of the development team itself.

"The most important factor is to have a strong development team who trusts each other to band together and support each other throughout the ups and downs," she highlights. "Accept that you cannot plan for everything, so it's important to have established processes for how you deal with issues when they come up and how you take the lessons and apply them going forward."

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Palia reaches over 3m players in six months thanks to "invaluable" Switch partnership - GamesIndustry.biz

I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away Will Knight | Wired When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly integrated intolegacy assistant bots [like Siri and Alexa], they will surely get much more interesting. A year from now, I would expect the experience of using a computer to look very different, says Shah, who says he built vimGPT in only a few days. Most apps will require less clicking and more chatting, with agents becoming an integral part of browsing the web.'

CRISPR Gene Therapy Seems to Cure Dangerous Inflammatory Condition Clare Wilson | New Scientist Ten people who had the one-off gene treatment that is given directly into the body saw their number of swelling attacks fall by 95 percent in the first six months as the therapy took effect. Since then, all but one have had no further episodes for at least a further year, while one person who had the lowest dose of the treatment had one mild attack. This is potentially a cure, says Padmalal Gurugama at Cambridge University Hospitals in the UK, who worked on the new approach.

Apple Vision Pro Review: Magic, Until Its Not Nilay Patel | The Verge The Vision Pro is an astounding product. Its the sort of first-generation device only Apple can really make, from the incredible display and passthrough engineering, to the use of the whole ecosystem to make it so seamlessly useful, to even getting everyone to pretty much ignore the whole external battery situation. But the shocking thing is that Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead endsthat they cant ever be executed well enough to become mainstream.

Allen Institute for AI Releases Truly Open Source LLM to Drive Critical Shift in AI Development Sharon Goldman | VentureBeat While other models have included the model code and model weights, OLMo also provides the training code, training data and associated toolkits, as well as evaluation toolkits. In addition, OLMo was released under an open source initiative (OSI) approved license, with AI2 saying that all code, weights, and intermediate checkpoints are released under the Apache 2.0 License. The news comes at a moment when open source/open science AI, which has been playing catch-up to closed, proprietary LLMs like OpenAIs GPT-4 and Anthropics Claude, is making significant headway.

This Robot Can Tidy a Room Without Any Help Rhiannon Williams | MIT Technology Review While robots may easily complete tasks like [picking up and moving things] in a laboratory, getting them to work in an unfamiliar environment where theres little data available is a real challenge. Now, a new system called OK-Robot could train robots to pick up and move objects in settings they havent encountered before. Its an approach that might be able to plug the gap between rapidly improving AI models and actual robot capabilities, as it doesnt require any additional costly, complex training.

People Are Worried That AI Will Take Everyones Jobs. Weve Been Here Before. David Rotman | MIT Technology Review [Karl T. Comptons 1938] essay concisely framed the debate over jobs and technical progress in a way that remains relevant, especially given todays fears over the impact of artificial intelligence. While todays technologies certainly look very different from those of the 1930s, Comptons article is a worthwhile reminder that worries over the future of jobs are not new and are best addressed by applying an understanding of economics, rather than conjuring up genies and monsters.

Experimental Drug Cuts Off Pain at the Source, Company Says Gina Kolata | The New York Times Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston announced [this week] that it had developed an experimental drug that relieves moderate to severe pain, blocking pain signals before they can get to the brain. It works only on peripheral nervesthose outside the brain and the spinal cordmaking it unlike opioids. Vertex says its new drug is expected to avoid opioids potential to lead to addiction.

StarlabWith Half the Volume of the ISSWill Fit Inside Starships Payload Bay Eric Berger | Ars Technica We looked at multiple launches to get Starlab into orbit, and eventually gravitated toward single launch options, [Voyager Space CTO Marshall Smith] said. It saves a lot of the cost of development. It saves a lot of the cost of integration. We can get it all built and checked out on the ground, and tested and launch it with payloads and other systems. One of the many lessons we learned from the International Space Station is that building and integrating in space is very expensive. With a single launch on a Starship, the Starlab module should be ready for human habitation almost immediately, Smith said.

9 Retrofuturistic Predictions That Came True Maxwell Zeff | Gizmodo Commentators and reporters annually try to predict where technology will go, but many fail to get it right year after year. Who gets it right? More often than not, the world resembles the pop culture of the pasts vision for the future. Looking to retrofuturism, an old version of the future, can often predict where our advanced society will go.

Can This AI-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me. Kevin Roose | The New York Times Intrigued by the hype, I recently spent several weeks using Perplexity as my default search engine on both desktop and mobile. Hundreds of searches later, I can report that even though Perplexity isnt perfect, its very good. And while Im not ready to break up with Google entirely, Im now more convinced that AI-powered search engines like Perplexity could loosen Googles grip on the search market, or at least force it to play catch-up.

Image Credit:Dulcey Lima / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 3) - Singularity Hub