Answer ALS is proud to announce the launch of a groundbreaking collaborative initiative aimed at accelerating AI-powered drug discovery for ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases. This effort, known as the Louisiana AI Drug Development Infrastructure for ALS (LADDIA), brings together leading institutions and innovators, including Tulane University, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and GATC Health - a tech-bio innovator using validated AI models to accelerate drug discovery from large-scale multiomics data-, to harness the power of artificial intelligence and one of the largest ALS datasets in the world.

For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has observed several tidal disruption events — when a black hole draws in a nearby star and tears it to shreds. Surprisingly, these are not active black holes, but rather dormant ones that briefly “wake up” to feast on a passing star.

Researchers from Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) have discovered a deep-sea limpet species 6 km beneath the northwestern Pacific Ocean, the deepest known habitat for any true limpet, naming it after the character “Large Monk” Wadatsumi, from the manga series ONE PIECE.

This study assessed the diagnostic accuracy and fairness of multimodal large language models (ChatGPT-4 and LLaVA) in identifying skin diseases across various demographic groups. Analysis of approximately 10,000 medical images showed that while these AI models generally outperform traditional approaches, biases in performance related to sex and age were evident, particularly with LLaVA showing clear sex-related disparities.

Researchers advocate for attention to demographic fairness in AI-driven healthcare solutions. Further studies are planned to include additional demographic factors such as skin tone, aiming to enhance AI usability and reliability across diverse patient populations.