As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly integrates into clinical settings—from predicting patient outcomes to deploying humanoid "robotic nurses"—an article published in the Hastings Center Report warns that the core of nursing, its moral agency, must remain a human-driven responsibility.

A team from University of Toronto Engineering is the first to synthesize long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) outside the cell — a new approach to drug discovery that has already yielded some promising anti-inflammatory molecules. The team was inspired by advances in the field of messenger RNA (mRNA) and protein replacement therapies. They realized that a similar approach could be used to deliver lncRNA to the body, unlocking a potential new source of drugs.

What started out as a response to labor shortages in poultry processing plants during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a robotics system that can learn by imitating human movements to handle chickens. Using an advanced imitation learning algorithm and camera perceptions, researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have developed ChicGrasp, a dual-jaw robotic gripper with pinchers that can grasp a chicken carcass by the legs, lift and hang it on a shackle conveyor to be moved on for further processing. Results of the study behind the development of ChicGrasp were published in Advanced Robotics Research. All computer-aided design files, code and datasets from the project were released as open source, providing what the team describes as a reproducible benchmark for agricultural robotics and robot learning.