Could Contact-Tracing Apps Help With the Hantavirus? Contact-tracing apps were widely deployed during the Covid pandemic. After three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They're trying to trace the spread of the virus. It's a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection.

It is an online romance that has overcome a 3,500-mile distance, and also the Covid pandemic - which meant they had to get married virtually. Welsh cheesemaker Lewis Relfe struck up a relationship with Ameila Henderson, from Virginia, USA, while playing the Friday the 13th horror video game in 2017. She made a number of visits across the Atlantic, including one for six months, and he proposed on Aberystwyth Pier, dressed as the game's main character, Jason Voorhees. While they admit to seeing the humour in being the couple that met and married virtually, they now live together in Ceredigion, with daughter Evelyn. But because of parental responsibilities, they no longer get to enjoy the thing that brought them together.

Recent large language models (LLMs) can generate and revise text with human-level performance, and have been widely commercialized in systems like ChatGPT. These models come with clear limitations: they can produce inaccurate information, reinforce existing biases, and be easily misused. Yet, many scientists have been using them to assist their scholarly writing. How wide-spread is LLM usage in the academic literature currently? To answer this question, we use an unbiased, large-scale approach, free from any assumptions on academic LLM usage. We study vocabulary changes in 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010-2024, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. Our analysis based on excess words usage suggests that at least 10% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, and was as high as 30% for some PubMed sub-corpora. We show that the appearance of LLM-based writing assistants has had an unprecedented impact in the scientific literature, surpassing the effect of major world events such as the Covid pandemic.

Online social media have become an important forum for exchanging political opinions. In response to COVID measures citizens expressed their policy preferences directly on these platforms. Quantifying political preferences in online social media remains challenging: The vast amount of content requires scalable automated extraction of political preferences -- however fine grained political preference extraction is difficult with current machine learning (ML) technology, due to the lack of data sets. Here we present a novel data set of tweets with fine grained political preference annotations. A text classification model trained on this data is used to extract policy preferences in a German Twitter corpus ranging from 2019 to 2022. Our results indicate that in response to the COVID pandemic, expression of political opinions increased. Using a well established taxonomy of policy preferences we analyse fine grained political views and highlight changes in distinct political categories. These analyses suggest that the increase in policy preference expression is dominated by the categories pro-welfare, pro-education and pro-governmental administration efficiency. All training data and code used in this study are made publicly available to encourage other researchers to further improve automated policy preference extraction methods. We hope that our findings contribute to a better understanding of political statements in online social media and to a better assessment of how COVID measures impact political preferences.

AstraZeneca's Dave Fredrickson discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic helped to bolster early cancer diagnosis from lung scans. AstraZeneca is pushing forward with implementing artificial intelligence (AI) in early cancer diagnosis and drug treatment plans with the hope of significantly reducing mortality rates over the next two decades. David Fredrickson, the Executive Vice-President of the company's Oncology Business Unit, recently expressed his hope for the future of oncological work at the Milken Institute Global Conference, detailing what he expects cancer outlooks might look like in the year 2040. Speaking with Fox News Digital, Fredrickson said he expects blood-based screening to allow healthcare providers to identify cancer as early as possible and with the greatest potential for finding a cure. The rapid acceleration of AI technology could also help to pair a medicine or a combination of medicines with a specific signature that a patient has for why their cancer is growing inside them.

The moment that tech fans around the world have been waiting for is finally almost here, with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) set to return on January 5. The event will be the first in-person, full capacity CES since 2020, due to the Covid pandemic. It takes place between January 5 and January 8, although most major announcements will take place during the two days before. 'CES 2023 will harness the power of human-to-human interaction to keep the innovation engine moving forward,' says Consumer Technology Association (CTA), organiser of the annual event. 'CES is the most influential tech event in the world – the proving ground for breakthrough technologies and global innovators.

A year of incredible science news was complemented with wide-ranging commentary at Scientific American. Our opinion section featured some of the best and brightest minds, taking us to the front lines of COVID, teaching us about the many fraught Supreme Court decisions involving science and evidence, and more. We learned, for example, about the pitfalls of artificial intelligence, how racists misuse evolutionary biology, and how our children's troubled mental health is another ongoing epidemic. Whether they were thought-provoking, deeply moving or challenged long-held beliefs, here are some of our editors' favorite opinion articles of 2022. This year, language models proved they can write humanlike text, with one AI chatbot generating such impressive responses that it convinced an engineer it was sentient.

A fascinating session at the EASD 2022 conference on emerging technologies shed light on where we are with AID and telemedicine, and what leading researchers in diabetes believe is coming next in diabetes management. Healthcare is rapidly evolving, and now more than ever, robots and artificial intelligence have gone from science fiction to critical components of diabetes management. At the EASD 2022 conference in Stockholm, Sweden, researchers further explored this concept in a session titled, "A New Hope or Strange New Worlds: Submerging diabetes into emerging technologies." Dr. Moshe Phillip, head of the Institute of Endocrinology and Diabetes at Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel, began by demonstrating how continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) represent a paradigm shift in diabetes technology. "CGM is the most important tool in the last 20 years," he said.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled apps helped protect small and medium-sized businesses against many of the risks that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a study, which noted that only a quarter of small firms currently use them. The research, by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and published in the journal Information Systems Frontiers, surveyed 317 small and medium sized firms based in London. The study found the use of AI-powered apps was associated with a 3.1 per cent reduced risk to business during the pandemic. "We found that SMEs' business risks caused by the Covid-19 pandemic declined with the use of AI applications across a ten-item scale including marketing, sales, communication, predictions, pricing and cash flow, fake reviews, cybersecurity, recruitment, and legal services," said lead author Professor Nick Drydakis, Director of the Centre for Pluralist Economics at the University. "The outcomes proved true regardless of enterprise size, turnover, and years of operation, indicating that AI applications have helped SMEs to adapt to unprecedented conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic," he added.

A Chinese restaurant chain in the north west of England has been forced to make use of robotic waiters, after struggling for staff during the Covid pandemic. Directors at The Chinese Buffet unleashed one BellaBot in each of four restaurants in Liverpool, St Helens, Bolton and Wigan, to serve food to diners. When the buffet re-opened after the last lockdown, its owners decided to serve food to people at the table, ordered via an app, rather than allow them to serve themselves. This added an extra strain on the already short waiting staff, according to owners Paolo Hu and Peter Wu, who said the BellaBots had already proved popular with diners. The guide price for the friendly-faced robots is $20,000 (£14,500), which is less than the cost of employing a waiter at minimum wage for 40 hours per week. Quirky footage shows Bella, who features a wide-eyed feline face, sweeping across the restaurant floor dishing out delicacies to delighted customers.