Many will assume that OpenAI's Sora app represents a new era of social media. But that's wrong--all it does is reanimate our current one. As a purely creative instrument, Sora, the new AI video app from OpenAI, is a game changer. Dream up any scenario and it appears in an instant. Mr. Rogers teaching Tupac Shakur the lyrics to the legendary rap diss "Hit Em Up."

An AI has designed anti-microbial proteins that were then tested in real life and shown to work. The same approach could eventually be used to make new medicines. Proteins are made of chains of amino acids. The sequence of those acids determine the protein's shape and function. Ali Madani at Salesforce Research in California and his colleagues used an AI to design millions of new proteins, then created a small sample of those to test whether they worked.

A number of big themes emerged from the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort Davos. Here are five of most pressing questions that came to dominate this year's gathering of the global elite. Donald Trump's trade war with China – continued by his successor Joe Biden – has left relations between east and west at rock bottom. But with Covid and trade tensions halving Chinese growth last year to just 3% and western businesses such as Apple moving business out of the world's second-biggest economy, Beijing has hinted it may adopt a less-hostile approach. Vice-premier Liu He appeared on the main stage at Davos to assure foreign investors that after three years of Covid disruption, it was open for business.

One day soon, a menu may judge you. You'll walk up to a kiosk in a quick service restaurant and a tiny camera will scan your features, registering your height, age, gender, and mood. Instantly, it will adjust its display, selecting meal options picked just for you. Once you've ordered and moved on, the person behind you will step into the menu's gaze, and the process will start again. This is the idea behind new software from Raydiant, a San Francisco-based software company that plans to roll out its AI-driven kiosks by the end of this year.

Imagine that while you are enjoying your morning bowl of Cheerios, a spider drops from the ceiling and plops into the milk. Years later, you still can't get near a bowl of cereal without feeling overcome with disgust. Researchers have now directly observed what happens inside a brain learning that kind of emotionally charged response. In a new study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team at the University of Southern California was able to visualize memories forming in the brains of laboratory fish, imaging them under the microscope as they bloomed in beautiful fluorescent greens. From earlier work, they had expected the brain to encode the memory by slightly tweaking its neural architecture. Instead, the researchers were surprised to find a major overhaul in the connections.

The US health and medical insurance industry is a $1.1-trillion maze that is impossible to navigate. And in the bigger scenario of a massive $11-trillion-plus global healthcare industry, America is definitely not first. Americans are fed up, and a digital revolution that goes way beyond telemedicine is the only thing that will restore control. Fixing it is a highly disruptive, multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. Telemedicine, or'Telehealth', will soar from $42 billion in 2018 to $400 billion in 2026. Healthcare IT alone will be worth $390 billion by 2024.

When members of the scientific community gathered at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February, they did so in front of laptops and tablets from their home offices and dining tables. They presented over Zoom, submitted questions via chat, and caught up with colleagues over social media. The 2021 AAAS Annual Meeting was unlike any other in the meeting's 187-year history, but the fully virtual setting did not dampen enthusiasm for sharing science in keeping with the “Understanding Diverse Ecosystems” meeting theme. Dozens of scientific sessions shared new research in areas ranging from microbiomes to space travel. More than 40 workshops offered attendees the opportunity to discuss strategies for working in the ecosystems of academia and science policy. Plenary and topical lecturers covered timely topics, including Ruha Benjamin on how technology can deepen inequities, Anthony Fauci on the next steps for COVID-19 response, Mary Gray on research ethics, and Yalidy Matos on immigration policies. “The quality of the speakers was absolutely undeniable, and the diversity of the speakers—across gender, race, region—was just extraordinary,” said Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of AAAS and executive publisher of the Science family of journals. “That is what our vision of the world looks like in a place where science is done with creativity and innovation and excellence.” Selecting a diverse meeting program is grounded in AAAS's values, but it is not without concerted effort, according to Claire Fraser. Fraser, who served as AAAS president through February and now serves as chair of the AAAS Board of Directors, selected the meeting theme and led the AAAS Meeting Scientific Program Committee, which oversees selection of the meeting's speakers. “The diversity doesn't happen by accident. I think it reflects the very strong commitment on the part of the Scientific Program Committee to make sure that not only is the science presented timely and excellent, but the diversity of speakers and participants is as broad as it possibly can be,” said Fraser, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Diversity isn't an afterthought—it's a deliberate part of the very first review of potential scientific sessions, according to Andrew Black, chief of staff and chief public affairs officer. When hundreds of volunteer reviewers evaluate the quality of the submissions before sending the best for consideration by the Scientific Program Committee, they are also looking for diversity across many dimensions, Black said. Among those dimensions are diversity of scientific discipline—befitting AAAS's multidisciplinary membership—but also gender, race and ethnicity, geographic diversity, career stage, and type of institution, including all types and sizes of universities, industry, and government. “Who do you see, who do you hear, and what kind of voices are in dialogue with each other? That's part of our assessment process,” said Agustín Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University and a member of the Scientific Program Committee. The review process offers opportunities for applicants to diversify their sessions. Applicants are often encouraged to look beyond their own networks to add a range of voices to their presentation to best communicate their ideas to the broader scientific community, Fuentes said. “We need to think very carefully in this moment in time about how do we not only redress past biases and discriminatory practices but how do we create a space, a voice, and a suite of presenters that is very inviting to a diverse audience,” Fuentes said. Added Fraser, “What you end up with is even better because you have such broad perspectives represented.” The committee also emphasized the importance of ensuring that a diverse group of decision-makers have a seat at the table. Members of the Scientific Program Committee, who are nominated from across AAAS and its 26 disciplinary sections and approved by the AAAS Board, represent a broad range of groups and perspectives, Fraser said. “What I firmly believe is that you can't come up with a diverse program like we had this year and like we've had in previous years without that diversity in the program committee,” Fraser said. Commitment to diversity across many axes is part of AAAS Annual Meeting history. In the 1950s, AAAS refused to hold meetings in the segregated South. In 1976, under one of AAAS's first female presidents, Margaret Mead, the Annual Meeting was fully accessible to people with disabilities for the first time. According to the AAAS Project on Science, Technology, and Disability, wheelchair ramps were added to the conference hall, programs were made accessible for hearing-impaired and visually impaired attendees, and Mead's presidential address was simultaneously interpreted in sign language. In 1978, AAAS's Board of Directors voted to move the following year's Annual Meeting out of Chicago because Illinois had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1993, AAAS moved its 1999 meeting from Denver after Colorado voters adopted a constitutional amendment to deny residents protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Leaders at AAAS note that there is always more work to be done in the present and future—both at the Annual Meeting and year-round. AAAS continues to focus on its own systemic transformation in areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion and on the breadth of initiatives in its new Inclusive STEM Ecosystems for Equity & Diversity program, all to ensure that the scientific enterprise reflects the full range of talent. That goal resonated with many 2021 AAAS Annual Meeting speakers, too. A more diverse group of scientists creating artificial intelligence systems can improve those systems, said Ayanna Howard, a roboticist who leads The Ohio State University's College of Engineering, during her topical lecture, “Demystifying AI Through the Lens of Fairness and Bias.” Said Howard, “We as people are diverse and we're different and it makes us unique and beautiful, and our AI systems should be designed in such a way.” Nalini Nadkarni, a University of Utah biologist who delivered a topical lecture on “Forests, the Earth, and Ourselves: Understanding Dynamic Systems Through an Interdisciplinary Lens,” shared how she reaches young girls to let them know that science—and her own scientific specialty—is a space where they can thrive. She and her students created and distributed “Treetop Barbie,” dressing a doll in fieldwork clothes and creating a doll-sized booklet about canopy plants. The Annual Meeting offers a chance to show that science is best when it is for everyone, regardless of background or perspective, whether they're a kid or just a kid at heart. Said Parikh, “The AAAS Annual Meeting is where the pages of Science literally come alive. It's a place where scientists, no matter what discipline or industry they decided to pursue, can pull back and just fall in love with the idea of science again—like we did when we were kids.”

Security cameras have become valuable tools to identify threats of violence. There's a new development Wednesday that adds artificial intelligence that can detect guns in security video.The new dimension of artificial intelligence, or AI, has the potential to prevent a mass casualty event.RELATED: CA gun sales up amid COVID-19 pandemic fears, study finds"We needed to move away from the thinking that emergency mass notification systems were all about notification, " said David Fraser, CEO of Omnilert.Fraser demonstrated its new Gun Detect technology it claims to be an industry first using AI. Utilizing existing camera networks in a large-scale setting, such as a school or airport or large business campus, algorithms can identify a gun or shotgun. The system first flags the gun in orange as suspicious, then goes to red alert in seconds."They

Do you ever feel as if your voice assistants – whether Siri, Alexa, or Google – don't understand you? You might repeat your question a little slower, a little louder, but eventually you'll get the information you were asking for read back to you in the pleasing but lifeless tones of your voice-activated assistant. That's the question facing many of the 3 million people in the United States who stutter, plus the thousands of others who have impaired speech not limited to stuttering, and many are feeling left out. "When this stuff first started coming out, I was all over it," said Jacquelyn Joyce Revere, a screenwriter from Los Angeles who stutters. "In LA, I need GPS all the time, so this seemed like a more convenient way to live the life I want to live."

Hamish Fraser first encountered Babylon Health in 2017 when he and a colleague helped test the accuracy of several artificial intelligence-powered symptom checkers, meant to offer medical advice for anyone with a smartphone, for Wired U.K. Among the competitors, Babylon's symptom checker performed worst in identifying common illnesses, including asthma and shingles. Fraser, then a health informatics expert at the University of Leeds in England, figured that the company would need to vastly improve to stick around. "At that point I had no prejudice or knowledge of any of them, so I had no axe to grind, and I thought'Oh that's not really good,'" says Fraser, now at Brown University. "I thought they would disappear, right? Much has changed since the Wired U.K. article came out. Since early 2018, the London-based Babylon Health has grown from just 300 employees to approximately 1,500. The company has a valuation of more than $2 billion and says it wants to "put an affordable and accessible health service in the hands of every person on earth." In England, Babylon operates the fifth-largest practice under the country's mostly government-funded National Health Service, allowing patients near London and Birmingham to video chat with doctors or be seen in a clinic if necessary. The company claims to have processed 700,000 digital consultations between patients and physicians, with plans to offer services in other U.K. cities in the future. "I thought they would disappear, right?