Brian Christian was part of a team behind a landmark study that found that spending just 10 minutes relying on an AI tool significantly impairs our ability to focus and persist with difficult tasks. A preliminary draft made waves earlier this year, and the team presented the updated, peer-reviewed paper this week at the Conference on Language Modeling. “It’s a striking finding, but in a way it supplies ammunition for a story that a lot of us kind of feel in our gut,” said Christian, a research fellow with the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI. “I experience it too.”

New research from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) uncovers an unknown role for immune cells in fueling triple-negative breast cancer; identifies a new strategy for fighting leptomeningeal metastases; finds trastuzumab deruxtecan shows enhanced benefit for patients with ERBB2 mutations in breast cancer; shows tumor DNA insights can help guide treatment for patients with hard-to-treat biliary tract cancers; and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to study early development.

Marine snow helps transport carbon into the deep ocean, but some particles are better at it than others. A new study found that the viscosity—or gooeyness—of marine snow can have a major impact on how quickly it’s broken down and how far it sinks, potentially affecting how much carbon is sequestered in the deep ocean

Researchers from Rutgers, IBM and collaborating institutions have shown that a quantum computer can check what is happening inside it and respond while it is running, repeatedly resetting parts of the system to bring chaotic behavior under control.

The advance is a critical step toward building larger, more reliable quantum computers. 

Today’s quantum computers operate according to the unusual rules governing atoms and other extremely small particles. They could one day solve problems beyond the reach of conventional computers — designing better batteries and cleaner industrial catalysts, simulating molecules and materials too complex for today’s computers, and running certain artificial intelligence programs.

In a study published in Nature Physics, researchers from Rutgers, International Business Machines Corp., and collaborating institutions showed that a quantum computer can repeatedly check and reset parts of itself while running. The experiment is among the largest demonstrations to date of real-time quantum feedback control, a capability considered essential for future quantum computers that will be fault tolerant. 

AI can predict the structures of many proteins, but it still struggles with a large class of proteins that do not hold one fixed shape and are heavily implicated in neurodegenerative disease.

A new $28.6 million ARPA-H-funded effort aims to close that gap. Randal Halfmann, Ph.D., and his lab at the Stowers Institute will generate more than 10 billion measurements of protein aggregation across 50,000 proteins using DAmFRET, creating one of the large experimental datasets needed to train AI models on when and how these proteins go wrong.

The work could help researchers move from observing harmful protein aggregation after it happens to predicting it earlier, with implications for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, Huntington’s and related diseases.