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Humans and bacteria are in a perpetual war.

For most of history, bacteria won. Before 1928, a simple scrape on the knee, a cut when cooking dinner, or giving birth could lead to death from infection.

The discovery of penicillin, a molecule secreted from mold, changed the balance. For the first time, humans had a way to fight back. Since then, generations of antibiotics have targeted different phases of bacterial growth and spread inside the body, efficiently eliminating them before they can infect other people.

But bacteria have an evolutionary upper hand. Their DNA readily adapts to evolutionary pressuresincluding from antibioticsso they can mutate over generations to escape the drugs. They also have a phone line of sorts that transmits adapted DNA to other nearby bacteria, giving them the power to resist an antibiotic too. Rinse and repeat: Soon an entire population of bacteria gains the ability to fight back.

We might be slowly losing the war. Antibiotic resistance is now a public health threat that caused roughly 1.27 million deaths around the globe in 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) and others say that without newer generations of antibiotics, surgery, cancer chemotherapy, and other life-saving treatments face increasing risk of death due to infection.

Traditionally, a new antibiotic takes roughly a decade to develop, test, and finally reach patients.

There is an urgent need for new methods for antibiotic discovery, Dr. Luis Pedro Coelho, a computational biologist and author of a new study on the topic, said in a press release.

Coelho and team tapped into AI to speed up the whole process. Analyzing huge databases of genetic material from the environment, they uncovered nearly one million potential antibiotics.

The team synthesized 100 of these AI-discovered antibiotics in the lab. When tested against bacteria known to resist current drugs, they found 63 readily fought off infections inside a test tube. One worked especially well in a mouse model of skin disease, destroying a bacterial infection and allowing the skin to heal.

AI in antibiotic discovery is now a reality and has significantly accelerated our ability to discover new candidate drugs. What once took years can now be achieved in hours using computers, said study co-senior author Dr. Csar de la Fuente at Penn Medicine in another press release.

Its easy to take antibiotics for granted. Say you have an ear infection from always wearing wireless earbuds. You get a prescription, dab it in, and all goes well.

Or does it? With time, the drops could potentially struggle to hold the infection back. This antibiotic resistance is key in the evolutionary battle between bacteria and humanity.

Antibiotics usually work to stop bacteria from replicating multiple ways. Like human cells, bacterial cells have a cell wall, a wrapper that keeps DNA and other biological components inside. One type of antibiotic destroys the wall, preventing the pathogen from spreading. Others target genetic material or inhibit metabolic pathways necessary for the bacteria to survive.

Every one of these strategies has taken decades of research to uncover and develop into medicine. But microbes rapidly mutate. Some bacteria, for example, develop pumps on their surfaces that literally throw out the drugs. Others evolve enzymes that shut down antibiotics by slightly changing their protein target sites through DNA mutation, neutering their effect.

Each strategy, by itself, is hard to evolve. But bacteria have another trick up their sleeveshorizontal transfer. Here, antibiotic-resistant genes are encoded into small circular pieces of DNA that can transfer to neighboring cells through a biological highwaya physical tubeendowing the recipients with a similar ability to fight off antibiotics.

Finding a way to kill off invading bacteria is tough. If bacteria evolve to evade that target, then the antibiotic and other chemically similar ones rapidly lose their effect. So, is there a way to find antibiotics that bacteriaor even nature itselfhave never seen before?

AI is beginning to revolutionize biology. From predicting protein structures to designing antibodies, these algorithms are tackling some of humanities most severe health disorders.

Traditionally, searching for antibiotics has mostly been trial-and-error, with scientists often scraping samples from exotic mosses or other sources that could potentially fight off infections.

In the new study, the team aimed to find new versions of a type of antibiotic based on antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). Similar to proteins, these are made of relatively short strings of molecules called amino acids. The peptides are found across the living world and can disrupt microbial growth by breaking down cell walls and causing bacteria to explode. Theyve already been used clinically as antimicrobial drugs and are currently being tested in clinical trials for yeast infections. However, like other antibacterials, they run the risk of resistance.

As the discovery of penicillin suggested nearly 100 years ago, the natural world is a bountiful source of potential antibiotics. In the study, the team used machine learning to look for antimicrobial peptides with possible antibiotic properties in over 63,000 publicly available metagenomesgenetic information isolated from multiple organisms in an environmentand nearly 88,000 high-quality microbial genomes. The sources came from across the globe, ocean and land, and also contained human and animal gut microbes. These data were merged into the AMPSphere database, which is open for anyone to explore.

The resource allowed scientists to mine the entirety of the microbial diversity that we have on Earthor a huge representation of thatand find almost one million new molecules encoded or hidden within all that microbial dark matter, de la Fuente told The Guardian.

To test their findings, the team pulled out 100 candidates and synthesized them in the lab. In test tubes, 79 disrupted cell membranes, and 63 completely killed off at least one of the dangerous bugs.

In some cases, these molecules were effective against bacteria at very low doses, said de la Fuente.

The team next developed an antibiotic peptide from the database to tackle a dangerous bug causing skin lesions in mice. With just one shot, the AI-discovered drug inhibited bacterial growth, and the mice didnt appear to suffer side effects based on body weight measurements.

We have been able to just accelerate the discovery of antibiotics, de la Fuente told The Guardian. So instead of having to wait five, six years to come up with one candidate, now, on the computer, we can, in just a few hours, come up with hundreds of thousands of candidates.

Image Credit: Antibiotic-resistant staph (yellow) and a dead white blood cell (red). National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)/NIH

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AI Unearths Nearly a Million Potential Antibiotics to Take Out Superbugs - Singularity Hub

Everything about Jay Stulls The Singularity Play, now in a world premiere at Jackalope Theatre (directed by Georgette Verdin) should feel timely and tense. Its about the effects of AI on art, relationships, and life, after allwhat could be more ripped-from-the-headlines than that?

But something about Stulls story left me cold, and I think it may be because the play itself, despite the skillful performances of Verdins ensemble, feels self-conscious and straining for profundity on the question of what makes us human. The real dramatic meat of the story lies in something far more commonplace than the sci-fi/satire underpinnings of the script acknowledge: the impossibility of recovering from the death of a child.

The Singularity Play Through 6/22: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 6/10 and 6/17 7:30 PM; audio description and live captions Sun 6/9; Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan, 773-340-2543, jackalopetheatre.org, $35 (Edgewater residents $25, students $15)

The first scene takes place in a conference room at Google, where a group of actors, led by director Lauren (Christina Gorman) try to rehearse a play written by an AI program, Denise (voiced by Anelga Hajjar). Greg (Patrick Newson Jr.)lets call him Denises minderattributes pretty much anything the cast hates to the algorithm. (And when Denise spits out some Gertrude Steinlike lines that the cast likes, Greg shuts them down for not being what the company is looking for in the experiment.)

When Jason (Kroydell Galima) suffers a tragedy offstage, Denise uses that event as an element in the script theyre building. Tensions around both the new technology and artistic choices grow and explode.

By the second scene, set sometime in the future, were deep into Inception territory, with a new group of actors interacting with the humanoid robot Dennis (Hajjar, feeling like a slightly more ominous version of Janet from The Good Place), and a director, Ocean (Collin Quinn Rice), showing us that AI hasnt killed off all artistic pretension. (The many sly in-jokes about the rehearsal process throughout the play ring truthful.)

Offstage, there are, were told, a handful of humans in Idaho who have rejected the wet suit of implanted technology thats required in order to have any kind of life. Lucy Carapetyans Royal has been spending more and more time in World, a sort of simulation that seems more real than real life to them.

But what should be terrifying feels more opaque (or ludicrous) here, because Stulls script seems more interested in checking off boxes on what the brave new world of AI-dominated life looks like than investing in the characters. AI as a requirement for employment? Check. AI as a substitute for flesh-and-blood IRL relationships? Check. AI negating the birth of actual children? Check.

The mechanism for how this last reality came to be remains frustratingly vague, undercutting the human drama of the final scene. I dont think thats the fault of the actors or of Verdins direction (shes shown in past plays, like Teatro Vistas Enough to Let the Light In, that she knows how to combine deeply felt tragedy with otherworldly elements.) I think its because in creating the atmosphere of the Uncanny Valley of the play, Stulls story loses its way. There are many witty lines and solid performances in The Singularity Play, but they dont add up to a satisfying and convincing whole.

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The Singularity Play tackles AI - Chicago Reader

Black holes are some of the most enigmatic objects in the universe, capable of deforming the fabric of space around them so violently that not even light can escape their gravitational grip. But it turns out, much of what scientists know about these mysterious objects could be wrong.

According to new research, published in April in the journal Physical Review D, black holes could actually be entirely different celestial entities known as gravastars.

"Gravastars are hypothetical astronomical objects that were introduced [in 2001] as alternatives to black holes," study co-author Joo Lus Rosa, a professor of physics at the University of Gdask in Poland, told Live Science in an email. "They can be interpreted as stars made of vacuum energy or dark energy: the same type of energy that propels the accelerated expansion of the universe."

Karl Schwarzschild, a German physicist and astronomer, first predicted black holes in 1915, based on calculations using Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Over the years, astronomical observations have seemingly confirmed the existence of objects resembling black holes. However, Schwarzschild's description of these space bodies has some shortcomings.

In particular, the center of a black hole is predicted to be a point of infinitely high density, called a singularity, where all the mass of the black hole is concentrated, but fundamental physics teaches us that infinities do not exist, and their appearance in any theory signals its inaccuracy or incompleteness.

"These problems indicate that something is either wrong or incomplete in the black hole model, and that the development of alternative models is necessary," Rosa said. "The gravastar is one of many alternative models proposed. The main advantage of gravastars is that they do not have singularities."

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Like ordinary black holes, gravastars should arise at the final stage of the evolution of massive stars, when the energy released during thermonuclear combustion of the matter inside them is no longer enough to overcome the force of gravity, and the star collapses into a much denser object. But in contrast to black holes, gravastars are not expected to have any singularities and are thought to be thin spheres of matter whose stability is maintained by the dark energy contained within them.

To find out if gravastars are viable alternatives to singular black holes, Rosa and his colleagues examined the interaction of particles and radiation with these hypothetical objects.

Using Einstein's theory, the authors examined how the huge masses of hot matter that surround supermassive black holes would appear if these black holes were actually gravastars. They also scrutinized the properties of "hot spots" gigantic gas bubbles orbiting black holes at near-light speeds.

Their findings revealed striking similarities between the matter emissions of gravastars and black holes, suggesting that gravastars don't contradict scientists' experimental observations of the universe. Moreover, the team discovered that a gravastar itself should appear almost like a singular black hole, creating a visible shadow.

"This shadow is not caused by the trapping of light in the event horizon, but by a slightly different phenomenon called the 'gravitational redshift,' causing light to lose energy when it moves through a region with a strong gravitational field," Rosa said. "Indeed, when the light emitted from regions close to these alternative objects reach[es] our telescopes, most of its energy would have been lost to the gravitational field, causing the appearance of this shadow."

The striking resemblances between Schwarzschild's black hole model and gravastars highlight the latter's potential as a realistic alternative, free from the theoretical pitfalls of singularities.

However, this theory needs to be backed up with experiments and observations, which the study authors believe may soon be carried out. While gravastars and singular black holes might behave similarly in many respects, subtle differences in emitted light could potentially distinguish them.

"To test our results experimentally, we are counting on the next generation of observational experiments in gravitational physics," Rosa said, referring to the black hole-hunting Event Horizon Telescope and the GRAVITY+ instrument being added to the Very Large Telescope in Chile. "These two experiments aim to observe closely what happens near the center of galaxies, in particular, our own Milky Way."

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Black hole singularities defy physics. New research could finally do away with them. - Space.com

Pocket-Sized AI Models Could Unlock a New Era of Computing Will Knight | Wired When ChatGPT was released in November 2023, it could only be accessed through the cloud because the model behind it was downright enormous. Today I am running a similarly capable AI program on a Macbook Air, and it isnt even warm. The shrinkage shows how rapidly researchers are refining AI models to make them leaner and more efficient. It also shows how going to ever larger scales isnt the only way to make machines significantly smarter.

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Google Promised a Better Search ExperienceNow Its Telling Us to Put Glue on Our Pizza Kylie Robison | The Verge This is just one of many mistakes cropping up in the new feature that Google rolled out broadly this month. It also claims that former US President James Madison graduated from the University of Wisconsinnot once but 21 times,that a dog has played in the NBA, NFL, and NHL, and thatBatman is a cop. Look, Google didnt promise this would be perfect, and it even slaps a Generative AI is experimental label at the bottom of the AI answers. But its clear these tools arent ready to accurately provide information at scale.

Gene Therapy Repairs Spinal Discs to Relieve Back Pain Michael Irving | New Atlas Assessed over 12 weeks, injured mice that received the gene therapy were found to have a host of improvements compared to injured mice given plain saline injections. The tissue in the discs was found to produce more proteins that strengthen the tissue, and help it hold water. That helped them plump back up and act more like cushions again, improving the spines range of motion, load bearing and flexibility. While you cant exactly ask mice how much pain theyre feeling, behavioral tests suggested symptoms were reduced.

On Self-Driving, Waymo Is Playing Chess While Tesla Plays Checkers Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica Many Tesla fans see [limitations like remote operators and avoiding freeways] as signs that Waymo is headed for a technological dead end. But I predict that when Tesla begins its driverless transition, it will realize that safety requires a Waymo-style incremental rollout. So Tesla hasnt found a different, better way to bring driverless technology to market. Waymo is just so far ahead that its dealing with challenges Tesla hasnt even started thinking about. Waymo is playing chess while Tesla is still playing checkers.

A Warp Drive Breakthrough Inches a Tiny Bit Closer toStar Trek Paul Sutter | Wired A team of physicists has discovered that its possible to build a real, actual,physical warp driveand not break any known rules ofphysics. One caveat: The vessel doing the warping cant exceed the speed of light, so youre not going to get anywhere interesting anytime soon. But this research still represents an important advance in our understanding ofgravity.

Media Companies Are Making a Huge Mistake With AI Jessica Lessin | The Atlantic For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta, and more. Chasing techs distribution and cash, news firms strike deals to try to ride out the next digital wave. They make concessions to platforms that attempt to take all of the audience (and trust) that great journalism attracts, without ever having to do the complicated and expensive work of the journalism itself. And it never, ever works as planned.

ChatGPT, Explained Sheena Vasani | The Verge Some writers have declared thatthe debutof ChatGPT on November 30th, 2022, marked the beginning of a new chapter in history akin to theEnlightenmentand theIndustrial Revolution.Others have been more skeptical, wondering if this is just another overhyped tech, likeblockchainor themetaverse. What history will call ChatGPT remains to be seen, but heres one thing I do know for sure: nobody has shut up about it since. Thats why we decided to throw together this explainer so we can cut through all the BS together. You ready?Lets begin.

OpenAI Should Have Gone Way Beyond Scarlett Johansson Ross Andersen | The Atlantic Now that we can actually talk with a computer, we should be dreaming up wholly new ways to do it. Lets hope that someoneinside or outside of OpenAIstarts giving us a sense of what those ways might be. The weirder, the better. They may not even be modeled after existing human relationships. They may take on entirely different forms.

Nvidias Business Is Booming. Heres What Could Slow It Down. Asa Fitch | The Wall Street Journal Nvidiais riding high after anotherquarter of blockbuster sales and earnings, even as threats are emerging that could weaken the companys position at the center of the artificial-intelligence boom. Rivals and key customers are looking to produce chips that can close the gap with Nvidias products. Meanwhile, the AI market, which has proven tricky for some startups, is shifting in ways that could diminish the popularity of Nvidias chips.

Image Credit:Jason Leung / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 25) - Singularity Hub

Melanie Reid was 52 years old when she hopped onto her horse, fell, and broke her neck. The resulting injury paralyzed her body below the chest area. Fourteen years later and after extensive physical therapy, she has gradually regained some function in her right handa lifeline, she said in a press conference. But her left hand remained useless.

As a journalist, the injury was devasting as she couldnt type. Even seemingly simple everyday routinestying her hair up into a ponytail, using an ATM card, or even unwrapping candywere a struggle.

With the help of a new device, shes able to do all that after just two months of use. Called ARC-EX therapy, the device zaps residual neural connections around the site of spinal cord injuries. Combined with physical rehabilitation, the treatment restored some functionality in her left handeven when the stimulation was turned off.

Reid was part of a 60-participant clinical trial that looked to use spinal cord stimulation to regain control of both hands. Similar treatments have shown promise in paraplegic patients, restoring the ability to walk in just a day. But those required surgery to place electrodes on the spinal cord.

ARC-EX therapy, by contrast, delivers two different types of electrical pulses through the skinno surgery required. Developed by Grgoire Courtine and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the device improved hand strength, pinch, and other movements in 72 percent of participants.

Because the device is non-invasive, its a simple addition to physical rehabilitation programsa sort of pilates for the fingers, explained the team. The trial only included two months of stimulation, and extending the timeline could potentially further improve results.

The stimulation only helps with finger and hand dexterity, not walking. But to Reid, thats what matters. Everyone thinks that [with] spinal injury all you want to do is to be able to walk again, she said. But what matters most is working hands[and] the gains can be life-changing.

All participants in the trial had a fracture in their spinal cord, roughly at the level of the neck.

With torn nerves, the brain can no longer command the body. Like a broken phone line, when you think move your hand, the signal gets lost at the break. Scientists have long tried to bridge this communication gap with electrodes to control muscle movement, essentially replacing broken biological wires with artificial ones.

Spinal cord stimulation is one solution. In 2018, a man walked across an entire football field years after he was paralyzed thanks to zaps to his spinal cord. With just a days stimulation, people with complete paralysis have been able to stroll around a busy downtown and go kayaking.

The key to recovery, explained the team, is to target living nerves. In a majority of cases, even patients deemed to have a complete spinal cord injury still have nerves left, and stimulating them can trigger regrowth and connections.

Picture the spinal cord as a tree, with branches reaching towards the skin. Now, imagine if the trunk was partially severed. By zapping the skin around the injury site, its possible to transmit electrical signals to the injured spinal cord trunk and allow living neurons near the injury site to rebuild neural connections.

In preclinical models, when applying stimulation, we immediately facilitated movement, said Courtine. But even more importantly, we saw new neuron growth, as if the body was repairing the broken neural system, he added. With sufficient healing, patients could potentially be able to use their hands even without stimulation.

Based on these ideas, the team built the ARC-EX device.

The clinical trial included 60 people with neck-level spinal cord injury. All participants underwent two months of physical therapy, followed by another two months of physical therapy combined with ARC-EX stimulation. The group was roughly 46 years old on average.

For physical rehab, each person practiced movements such as pinching, grasping, or moving the whole arm for an hour each day, up to five times a week. Although the therapy improved arm and hand function, progress plateaued for most patients.

The team then added ARC-EX stimulation, with the electrodes placed above and below the site of injury. During therapy, the team controlled the frequency and strength of the zaps, so it facilitated arm and hand movements without causing any unwanted muscle jerking.

The trial was open label, meaning both participants and researchers know theyre receiving stimulation. This can be risky business because of the placebo effectwhen participants recover because they think theyre getting the actual treatment, rather than, say, sham stimulation. However, with ARC-EX its impossible to blind the stimulation. Turning the device on immediately causes strange sensations in the participants, with the electrical pulses feeling like a sort of a buzz, said Reid. Turning the device off also immediately alerted participants. In one example, Reid said she was holding a jar with weights with the stimulation on, but with the stimulation offunbeknownst to hershe immediately dropped the jar.

In just eight weeks, 72 percent of participants met or exceeded goals for hand strength and dexteritythe ability to grab a mug or pinch a tweezeras assessed with a battery of tests. Only one person experienced unintended effectsuncontrollable muscle spasms. However, because stimulation was off when they occurred, the team says its likely not related to ARC-EX.

The therapy didnt just improve hand function. The paralyzed participants also felt less pain, had fewer struggles with breathing, and slept better.

The stimulation wont work for the roughly 10 percent of people with spinal cord injuries that completely severed all neural connections. But for those who still have residual nerve endings, it makes restoring finger movements easier.

Sherown Campbell, another participant in the trial, said ARC-EX is a life-changer. A self-proclaimed tech geek, he constantly works on his computer. Focusing on hand function was the biggest thing I was hoping to improve, he said.

With ARC-EX therapy, his typing speed increased from 25 words per minute to 33 words per minute, about a 30 percent increase, which is really significant for me, he said. But more importantly, his quality of life improved. He can cook and write againtwo seemingly simple everyday activities that give him joy but were robbed by his accident.

With the success of this trial, the device may hit the market soon. Because its non-invasive, it can easily be integrated into existing physical therapy sessions. The team is already looking for approval in the United States, with discussions with the European Union soon to follow. For now, the price is unknown, although Courtine said the aim is to make it widely accessible.

To Reid, being able to use her left hand is an enormous change to her life. Its extraordinary, she said. It makes you hold your head up and look at the world differently.

Image Credit: ONWARD Medical N.V.

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This Device Zaps the Spinal Cord to Give Paralyzed People Use of Their Hands Again - Singularity Hub