Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Dr. Robert Waldinger didn't believe it at first. The idea that loneliness could break down the body--that the quality of your relationships might help decide whether you get coronary artery disease, arthritis, or Type 2 diabetes--struck the psychiatrist as far-fetched.

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte Believes Aging May Come Down to a Cell's Identity Crisis Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. For decades, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte focused on unlocking the secrets of human life at its earliest stages. A pioneer in developmental biology and a long-time professor at the Salk Institute, he used Shinya Yamanaka's game-changing discovery of four genes that can essentially rewind the clock--turning adult cells to a younger state--to better understand how a fertilized egg turns into a human. Izpisua Belmonte's groundbreaking studies include creating the first embryo containing both human and monkey cells in 2021 to better study the steps that occur well before birth.

Disabled and terminally ill campaigners have written to Prime Minister Andy Burnham urging him to reform social and palliative care before assisted dying legislation is introduced in England and Wales. The Assist Us To Live group says people are currently being failed by society and introducing assisted dying in these circumstances will put sick and disabled people's lives at risk. Burnham believes the funding of palliative and social care should be fixed before assisted dying is considered. The government is likely to remain officially neutral, but the PM's remarks suggest he personally will not back the bill proposed by Labour MP Lauren Edwards. Bill supporters argue improving care services and giving terminally ill people autonomy over their final weeks must go hand in hand.

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Won't somebody think of the middle-aged men? In truth, the friendships and inner lives of men young, old, and in between are chronically ignored by Hollywood, which would rather see even the elderly among them blow up bad guys than admit to having feelings.

Sarah O'Connor's We Are Not Machines explores how we are contorting ourselves to fit AI into our working lives - and what to do about it, finds Tom Knowles Employers wanting staff to be more like machines isn't new, says O'Connor If you are a fan of translated films, you may have noticed the subtitles on streaming platforms have changed in recent years. They aren't wrong exactly, but they can come across as a bit, well, flat. "You get the meaning, but the language? It's not as rich," Petr Čermoch, a translator in the Czech Republic, tells Sarah O'Connor in We Are Not Machines, which explores how artificial intelligence is changing the way we work. That lack of richness is usually because the streaming platform has used AI to translate a script, then had a professional translator like Čermoch finesse it.

This week I've been at SXSW London . There's been music, film, and a lot--and I mean --of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies. Early in her career, the biggest concerns were the potential impacts of internet and email use on our brains. We may laugh those concerns off today, but it's true that as the technologies became more ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans began to shrink.

There is plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it's solar-powered cities from Adrian Tchaikovsky or a strange future from M. John Harrison A father mysteriously slips through time in Joseph Eckert's Writing this as the UK swelters under an unprecedented May heatwave, perhaps it's small wonder that so many science-fiction authors are currently imagining miserable versions of an overheated future in which their characters are struggling to survive. I'm intrigued by the sound of sci-fi legend M. John Harrison's upcoming take on a dystopian future, but if post-apocalyptic hellscapes aren't your thing, I'm also happy to report that there are other options for sci-fi fans this month. Next, I'm going to explore Isabel J. Kim's sci-fi spin on immigration,, as soon as I can get my hands on it. I am excited about this book: M. John Harrison is a really classy writer, winner of all sorts of awards, and his latest novel sounds right up my street. It's set in a future years after an obscure "crisis" changed everything, in a world where the seas are full of new creatures.

Apple's iPhone is unveiled at a press conference in central London in September 2007. When iPhone arrived in 2007, it didn't just change technology. It changed how we live. That same year, TIME named it the Invention of the Year and called it "the phone that forever changed phones." But what mattered most wasn't just what iPhone was, but what it made possible.

In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to assume different personas before solving vision and language tasks. We do this by prefixing the prompt with a persona that is associated either with a social identity or domain expertise. In a multi-armed bandit task, we find that LLMs pretending to be children of different ages recover human-like developmental stages of exploration. In a language-based reasoning task, we find that LLMs impersonating domain experts perform better than LLMs impersonating non-domain experts.

When Pam Cronrath's husband Bill died last year, after nearly 60 years of marriage, she knew what she wanted to do, but not exactly how. I promised him a super wake, she told the BBC. What she didn't expect was that keeping the promise would lead her into the world of holograms, technology more commonly associated with celebrities than memorial services in rural America. A self-confessed tech enthusiast, she says her outlook was shaped by a career that stretched back to the early days of the internet. Several years ago, while speaking at a medical conference, she watched a doctor appear as a full-body hologram broadcast live across the United States.