For patients with inflammatory bowel disease, antibiotics can be a double-edged sword. The broad-spectrum drugs often prescribed for gut flare-ups can kill helpful microbes alongside harmful ones, sometimes worsening symptoms over time. When fighting gut inflammation, you don't always want to bring a sledgehammer to a knife fight. Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and McMaster University have identified a new compound that takes a more targeted approach. The molecule, called enterololin, suppresses a group of bacteria linked to Crohn's disease flare-ups while leaving the rest of the microbiome largely intact.

Environment Animals Wildlife Birds First known wild'grue jay' hybrid spotted in Texas Green and blue jays are crossing paths as temperatures rise. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you happen to find yourself in south Texas and spot a strikingly colored bird, be sure to snap a photo. According to biologists at the University of Texas at Austin, it may be a mix between a green jay () and a blue jay (). Unofficially dubbed a "grue jay," the bird likely marks one of the first confirmed examples of a vertebrate animal that hybridized partially due to climate change .

This content is not available in your location. Watch live coverage from every court on BBC iPlayer. Could you return a professional tennis player's serve? Video, 00:03:11 Could you return a professional tennis player's serve? Watch: Humanoid robots stumble through football match in China.

This week, I'm wondering what my first jobs in journalism would have been like had generative AI been around. In other news: Elon Musk leaves a trail of chaos, and influencers are selling the text they fed to AI to make art. Generative artificial intelligence may eliminate the job you got with your diploma still in hand, say executives who offered grim assessments of the entry-level job market last week in multiple forums. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which makes the multifunctional AI model Claude, told Axios last week that he believes that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years. One explanation why an AI company CEO might make such a dire prediction is to hype the capabilities of his product.

The complex structure and extensive details of solar spectral data, combined with a recent surge in volume, present significant processing challenges. To address this, we propose a deep learning-based compression technique using deep autoencoder (DAE) and 1D-convolutional autoencoder (CAE) models developed with Hinode SOT/SP data. We focused on compressing Stokes I and V polarization spectra from the quiet Sun, as well as from active regions, providing a novel insight into comprehensive spectral analysis by incorporating spectra from extreme magnetic fields. The results indicate that the CAE model outperforms the DAE model in reconstructing Stokes profiles, demonstrating greater robustness and achieving reconstruction errors around the observational noise level. The proposed method has proven effective in compressing Stokes I and V spectra from both the quiet Sun and active regions, highlighting its potential for impactful applications in solar spectral analysis, such as detection of unusual spectral signals.

Textbooks are one of the main mediums for delivering high-quality education to students. In particular, explanatory and illustrative visuals play a key role in retention, comprehension and general transfer of knowledge. However, many textbooks lack these interesting visuals to support student learning. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of vision-language models to automatically enhance textbooks with images from the web. We collect a dataset of e-textbooks in the math, science, social science and business domains. We then set up a text-image matching task that involves retrieving and appropriately assigning web images to textbooks, which we frame as a matching optimization problem. Through a crowd-sourced evaluation, we verify that (1) while the original textbook images are rated higher, automatically assigned ones are not far behind, and (2) the precise formulation of the optimization problem matters. We release the dataset of textbooks with an associated image bank to inspire further research in this intersectional area of computer vision and NLP for education.

AI chatbots are coming to your Salesforce applications and it looks like it'll all of them. Company executives had a lot to show off during Tuesday's Dreamforce 2023 keynote address, including major updates to both its Einstein AI and Data Cloud services. Einstein AI has received a slew of updates and upgrades since we saw it integrated with Slack back in May. The new Copilot service will take the existing AI chatbot and tune it to a client company's specific datasets using their Salesforce Data Cloud data. This enables the Einstein AI to provide better, more relevant and more actionable answers to employees' natural language questions and requests.

It had a great new idea for a movie--Elemental, based on characters from The Good Dinosaur's director Peter Sohn--but actually animating the film's titular elements was proving to be a problem. After all, it's one thing to draw a crumbling mound of sentient dirt, but how do you capture the ethereal nature of fire onscreen, and how would a corporeal body made of water even work? Can you see through it? Do the eyes just float around? While some of those questions could be answered with good old-fashioned suspension of disbelief, Pixar's animators thought the fire issue was a real conundrum, especially considering that one of their movie's leads, Ember, was actually supposed to be made of the stuff. They had tools to make a flame effect from years of previous animations, but when you actually tried to shape it into a character, the results were pretty terrifying, a cross between Studio Ghibli's Calcifer and Nicolas Cage's Ghost Rider, but somehow harsher.

But there's one thing that, as he puts it, scared the shit out of him: needles. His aversion was severe enough to hold him back from getting routine tests. Stokes, now 40, recalls an instance in his 20s when he simply couldn't bring himself to get a blood test. He once even drove to the testing facility to get his blood drawn, but couldn't follow through with it. His partner (now wife) eventually convinced him to get the test, but he remembers it as one of "the most horrific" experiences he's had. "I kind of passed out a little bit along the way, and was sweaty and clammy and all that sort of stuff," he said.

For Dr. Erich Huang, Duke Health's chief data officer for quality, one issue often overlooked when discussing AI in healthcare is the importance of the user experience. "It's not just an abstract Westworld brain sitting out there," Huang says. "It has to be well integrated with clinical workflow, and nurses are essential to that." With the Sepsis Watch early warning program, Huang says, nurses were able to apply their professional experience to kick off the cascade of actions that would follow an AI-produced alert. "One of the big issues with electronic health records is fatigue from alerts," he says.