Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In Mary Shelley's, a mad scientist creates a monstrous creature with severed body parts. In certain film adaptations, a dismembered head is tacked onto the malformed body. Then, with the help of a lightning storm, a new life is born. From the first successful kidney transplant in 1954, modern organ transplantation has often been linked to the horrors of Frankenstein .

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For years, needing reading glasses to correct farsightedness seemed like an inevitable part of aging. This year, the visual accessories might officially be a thing of the past. The newly approved drops are powerful enough to improve vision by three or more lines on an eye chart within only 30 minutes. That wide-ranging impact is why chose the drops as the 2025 Health category winner.

In barter exchanges, participants swap goods with one another without exchanging money; these exchanges are often facilitated by a central clearinghouse, with the goal of maximizing the aggregate quality (or number) of swaps. Barter exchanges are subject to many forms of uncertainty--in participant preferences, the feasibility and quality of various swaps, and so on. Our work is motivated by kidney exchange, a real-world barter market in which patients in need of a kidney transplant swap their willing living donors, in order to find a better match. Modern exchanges include 2-and 3-way swaps, making the kidney exchange clearing problem NP-hard. Planned transplants often \emph{fail} for a variety of reasons--if the donor organ is rejected by the recipient's medical team, or if the donor and recipient are found to be medically incompatible.

Science Corporation, founded by former Neuralink president Max Hodak, has unveiled a prototype machine to extend the life of organs for longer periods. Science Corporation, the brain-computer interface startup founded in 2021 by former Neuralink president Max Hodak, is launching a new division of the company with the goal of extending the life of human organs. Alameda, California-based Science is aiming to improve on current perfusion systems that continuously circulate blood through vital organs when they can no longer function on their own. The technology is used to preserve organs for transplant and as a life-support measure for patients when the heart and lungs stop working, but it's clunky and costly. Science wants to make a smaller, more portable system that could provide long-term support.

Plus: Australia's social media ban for teens has just come into force. Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change--for a price. The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once they've reached the necessary altitude, those planes will disperse particles engineered to reflect away enough sunlight to cool down the planet, purportedly without causing environmental side effects. But numerous solar geoengineering researchers are skeptical that Stardust will line up the customers it needs to carry out a global deployment in the next decade. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Is this the electric grid of the future?

Alignment methods in moral domains seek to elicit moral preferences of human stakeholders and incorporate them into AI. This presupposes moral preferences as static targets, but such preferences often evolve over time. Proper alignment of AI to dynamic human preferences should ideally account for "legitimate" changes to moral reasoning, while ignoring changes related to attention deficits, cognitive biases, or other arbitrary factors. However, common AI alignment approaches largely neglect temporal changes in preferences, posing serious challenges to proper alignment, especially in high-stakes applications of AI, e.g., in healthcare domains, where misalignment can jeopardize the trustworthiness of the system and yield serious individual and societal harms. This work investigates the extent to which people's moral preferences change over time, and the impact of such changes on AI alignment. Our study is grounded in the kidney allocation domain, where we elicit responses to pairwise comparisons of hypothetical kidney transplant patients from over 400 participants across 3-5 sessions. We find that, on average, participants change their response to the same scenario presented at different times around 6-20% of the time (exhibiting "response instability"). Additionally, we observe significant shifts in several participants' retrofitted decision-making models over time (capturing "model instability"). The predictive performance of simple AI models decreases as a function of both response and model instability. Moreover, predictive performance diminishes over time, highlighting the importance of accounting for temporal changes in preferences during training. These findings raise fundamental normative and technical challenges relevant to AI alignment, highlighting the need to better understand the object of alignment (what to align to) when user preferences change significantly over time.

Thousands of patients worldwide are waiting for a potentially life-saving donor. Thousands of patients worldwide are waiting for a potentially life-saving donor. Doctors have developed an AI tool that could reduce wasted efforts to transplant organs by 60%. Thousands of patients worldwide are waiting for a potentially life-saving donor, and more candidates are stuck on waiting lists than there are available organs. Recently, in cases where people need a liver transplant, access has been expanded by using donors who die after cardiac arrest.

Modern exchanges include 2-and 3-way swaps, making the kidney exchange clearing problem NPhard.

With the demand for human donor organs desperately outstripping supply, scientists are working to see if genetically edited pig organs can bridge the gap. Leonardo Riella, medical director for kidney transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital, checks on Tim Andrews after his pig kidney transplant. Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital have removed a genetically engineered pig kidney from a 67-year-old New Hampshire man after a period of decreasing kidney function, the hospital confirmed to WIRED in a statement. The organ functioned for nearly nine months, longer than previous pig organ transplants, before it was removed on October 23. Tim Andrews received the pig kidney on January 25 after being on dialysis for more than two years due to end-stage kidney disease.