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Five things you need to know about the EU’s new AI Act

The AI Act was conceived as a landmark bill that would mitigate harm in areas where using AI poses the biggest risk to fundamental rights, such as health care, education, border surveillance,... Read more »

Human brain cells hooked up to a chip can do speech recognition

With Brainoware, Guo aimed to use actual brain cells to send and receive information. When the researchers applied electrical stimulation to the hybrid system they’d built, Brainoware responded to those signals, and... Read more »

The best way to prevent this deadly cancer is to remove multiple organs. And I’m about to do it.

These ideas have recently started filtering through to the wider public. Earlier this year, the US-based Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance, one of the largest advocacy organizations for this cancer, had a major... Read more »

The Download: the EU AI Act is here, and preventing deadly cancer

On Saturday, European Union lawmakers announced they’d finally agreed the terms of the final version of the EU AI Act, a major package of laws regulating the industry. To get the full... Read more »

Why the EU AI Act was so hard to agree on

The latest round of EU negotiations has introduced a two-tier approach in which foundation models are, at least in part, sorted on the basis of the computational resources they require, Connor explains.... Read more »

The best way to prevent the deadliest gynecological cancer is to remove multiple organs

These ideas have recently started filtering through to the wider public. Earlier this year, the US-based Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance, one of the largest advocacy organizations for this cancer, had a major... Read more »

5 things we didn’t put on our 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies

We haven’t always been right (RIP, Baxter), but we’ve often been early to spot important areas of progress (we put natural-language processing on our very first list in 2001; today this technology... Read more »

The Download: inside the first CRISPR treatment, and smarter robots

The news: A new robot training model, dubbed “KnowNo,” aims to teach robots to ask for our help when orders are unclear. At the same time, it ensures they seek clarification only... Read more »

Here’s a sneak peek at what made our 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies

Our new 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies won’t come out until January. But I recently gave attendees at EmTech MIT a sneak peek at one item that made the list—weight-loss drugs. Caroline... Read more »

Medical microrobots that can travel inside your body are (still) on their way

Okay, I know what you’re probably thinking. We’ve been hearing about the use of tiny robots in medicine for years, maybe even decades. And they’re still not here. Where are my medical... Read more »