Spring FD installs new cancer prevention technology

Engine 71 is the first in the nation to pilot real-time air quality monitoring for firefighters inside the cab.

SPRING, Texas — When firefighters answer the call, fires are not the only danger they face. Inside the cab can be just as dangerous with every breath they take.

“If you don’t take care of your people, they can’t take care of the citizens,” said Matthew Corso, Senior Captain with Spring Fire Department.

He knows the risks. Corso has been a firefighter since 1999. In 2016 a life scan the Spring Fire Department offered caught cancer.

It was tough news to share with his wife and kids.

“They knew I was sick, my wife did everything she could to keep their life normal,” said Corso.

RELATED: Health Matters: New research shows stretching may be the best exercise to lower blood pressure

He made a full recovery, but it’s stories like

… Read more

A New Technology Could Help Solve a DNA Mystery

DNA Technology Concept

Scientists were able to examine tens of millions of three-dimensional locus groupings with the help of the new technology which they named Pore-C.

The human genome’s inner workings could be revealed through new Cornell-developed technology.

Researchers from Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Weill Cornell Medicine, and the New York Genome Center have created a new technique to evaluate the three-dimensional structure of the human[{” attribute=””DNA, or how the genome folds, on a massive scale. The genome is the entire set of genetic instructions, either DNA or RNA, that allow an organism to function.

Using this technique, the researchers showed that groups of simultaneously interacting regulatory elements in the genome, as opposed to pairs of these elements, may influence cell activity, including gene expression. Their research, which was recently published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, may help clarify the connection between cellular identity and genome structure.

“Knowing the three-dimensional genome

… Read more

BLOOM: Inside the radical new project to democratize AI

But Meta’s model is available only upon request, and it has a license that limits its use for research purposes. Hugging Face goes a step further. The meetings detailing its work over the past year are recorded and uploaded online, and anyone can download the model free of charge and use it for research or to build commercial applications.

A big focus for BigScience was to embed ethical considerations into the model from its inception, instead of treating them as an afterthought. LLMs are trained on tons of data collected by scraping the internet. This can be problematic, because these data sets include lots of personal information and often reflect dangerous biases. The group developed data governance structures specifically for LLMs that should make it clearer what data is being used and who it belongs to, and it sourced different data sets from around the world that weren’t readily available

… Read more

A new technology uses human teardrops to spot disease

Human tears could carry a flood of useful information.

With just a few drops, a new technique can spot eye disease and even glimpse signs of diabetesscientists report July 20 in ACS Nano.

“We wanted to demonstrate the potential of using tears to detect disease,” says Fei Liu, a biomedical engineer at Wenzhou Medical University in China. It’s possible the droplets could open a window for scientists to peer into the entire body, he says, and one day even let people quickly test their tears at home.

Like saliva and urine, tears contain tiny sacs stuffed with cellular messages (SN: 9/3/13). If scientists could intercept these microscopic mailbags, they could offer new intel

… Read more

First, they banned facial recognition. Now they’re not so sure

There are no federal laws governing the use of facial-recognition technology, which has led states, cities, and counties to regulate it on their own in various ways, particularly when it comes to how law enforcement agencies can use it.

Generally, there are two types of facial-recognition software: one compares a photo of a person to those in a database of faces looking for a likely match (the kind of software police might use when investigating a crime, such as that sold by Clearview AI), while the other compares a photo of a person to one other image (the kind that is used when you open your iPhone with your face).
The technology has been used across the United States in recent years, but it has also been blasted by privacy and digital rights groups over privacy issues and other real and potential dangers: The technology has been shown to be
… Read more