Drinks manufacturers and consumers may soon have a small, portable kit, not much bigger than a covid test, to check the quality and safety of alcoholic beverages. The device is being described as an "artificial tongue" because it can detect additives, toxins and the sweetness of the drink with just a few drops. Shuo Huang at Nanjing University in China says that while this first generation of the new technology can't yet test for date rape drugs in spiked drinks or detect methanol contamination, which recently resulted in the deaths of six backpackers in Laos, future versions may. Current methods for analysing alcoholic drinks, such as liquid chromatography, involve expensive and cumbersome laboratory equipment, requiring expert technicians to operate and analyse samples. The artificial tongue relies on biological nanopore technology.

When the pandemic hit, shutting down or restricting many HIV testing clinics, that work became urgent. O'Byrne and his team used artificial intelligence developed for the program to identify those who would benefit most. GetaKit.ca has since been expanded across Ontario. The program was so successful that Health Canada contacted O'Byrne earlier this year to ask whether the artificial intelligence and the program could be adapted to COVID-19 testing as part of a pilot program. It could and it has.

The'Outnumbered' panel reacts to Sunny Hostin and Ana Navarro being pulled from the set moments before the vice president was set to arrive Ana Navarro, one of two co-hosts who were pulled from ABC's "The View" live on air Friday due to positive COVID-19 tests, has since revealed the results that caused the chaos were false positives. Producers informed Navarro and Sunny Hostin in their earpieces halfway through Friday's broadcast that they would have to leave the Hot Topics table, leaving Joy Behar and Sara Haines to conduct the rest of the show on their own. The remaining hosts often struggled to kill time, at one point taking questions from the audience, but often not being able to hear the questions that were muffled by their masks. Friday's drama was even more pronounced considering Navarro and Hostin were pulled just as Vice President Kamala Harris was on her way to the studio for an in-person interview. Even though Harris made it to the building, producers explained her appearance would end up taking place remotely from a separate room out of precaution.

Coronavirus Diaries is a series of dispatches exploring how the coronavirus is affecting people's lives. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with An Luu, a 21-year-old senior at Rice University in Houston, who got a false positive due to a COVID-19 test glitch earlier this month. Luu was one of many Rice students whose positive (later discovered to be false positive) test results caused the university to move classes online. Ninety-five percent of the student population of Rice is vaccinated, including Luu. Slate reached out to Rice University's Crisis Management Team for comment on Luu's experience.

Of late we have been focusing our attention on the evaluation of under followed smaller capitalization stocks set to benefit from certain structural changes in their respective industries, notes Matthew Castel, a Montreal-based money manager at Logos LP. We believe Biodesix (BDSX) offers an interesting risk/reward. This is a data-driven diagnostics company that has developed a proprietary AI platform called the Diagnostic Cortex to discover innovative diagnostic tests for clinical use, with particular focus on the lung. The particular problem that their platform solves is what researchers call'overfitting': this is when machine learning-based biological discoveries cannot be repeated or assessed in additional specimen cohorts (ie. the machine can identify something in a genomic dataset but not in a proteomics dataset). Travel restrictions and delayed ramp up were all headwinds in the beginning of the year but that should subside in the back half.