Protesters march on Meta after the company was caught using pirated books for AI training. Credit: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Plaintiffs in the landmark Kadrey v. Meta case have already submitted the U.S. Copyright Office's controversial AI report as evidence in their copyright infringement suit against the tech giant. Last Friday, the Copyright Office quietly released a "pre-publication version" of its views on the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models. The consequential report contained bad news for AI companies hoping to claim the fair use legal doctrine as a defense in court. Less than a day after the report was published, Shira Perlmutter, the head of the Copyright Office, was fired by President Donald Trump. It's still unclear exactly why Perlmutter was fired, but the move alarmed some copyright lawyers, as Mashable previously reported. You May Also Like And on May 12, the plaintiffs in Kadrey v Meta, which includes artists and authors such as Junot Diaz, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, submitted the report as an exhibit in their class action lawsuit. What's in the U.S. Copyright Office's AI report?The Office's report was the conclusion of a three-part investigation into copyright law and artificial intelligence, which it calls uncharted legal territory. The "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3: Generative AI Training" report examined exactly the type of legal issues at stake in Kadrey v Meta.While some copyright lawyers and Democratic politicians have speculated the report led to Perlmutter's firing, there are other possible explanations. In a blog post, copyright lawyer Aaron Moss said "it’s more likely that the Office raced to release the report before a wave of leadership changes could delay — or derail — its conclusions."The report addressed in detail the four factors of the fair use doctrine. Meta and other AI companies are being sued for using copyrighted works to train their AI models, and Meta in particular has claimed this activity should be protected under fair use. Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! The lengthy 113-page report spends around 50 pages delving into the nuances of fair use, citing historic legal cases that ruled for and against fair use. It doesn't goes as far as making any blanket conclusions, but its analysis generally favors copyright holders over AI companies and their unprecedented stockpiling of data for model training.The Copyright Office's stance on the white hot issue doesn't line up with the wishes of Big Tech titans, who have cozied up to the Trump Administration. In general, President Trump has taken a pro-tech approach to AI regulation. The plaintiffs in the Kadrey v. Meta case are clearly hoping the report could tip the scale in their favor. The lawyers who submitted the report as evidence on Monday didn't explain in detail why it was submitted as a "Statement of Supplemental Authority." The brief simply said, "the Report addresses several key issues discussed in the parties’ respective motions regarding the use of copyrighted works in the development of generative AI systems and application of the fair use doctrine." AI models can harm creative markets, Copyright Office finds The controversial AI copyright report could tip the scales for the case against Meta. Credit: wildpixel / iStock / Getty Images The part of the report that's potentially the most damning for Meta is the Copyright Office's assessment of the fourth factor of fair use, which considers the effects on current or future markets. Related Stories "The use of pirated collections of copyrighted works to build a training library, or the distribution of such a library to the public, would harm the market for access to those works," said the pre-publication version of the report. The analysis also considers possible market dilution for authors. "If thousands of AI-generated romance novels are put on the market, fewer of the human-authored romance novels that the AI was trained on are likely to be sold. Royalty pools can also be diluted," the report stated. In addition, the plaintiffs have argued that Meta's use of piracy to access the authors' books deprived them of licensing opportunities. For its part, Meta argues that its AI model Llama doesn't compete with the authors' market, and that the model's transformative output makes the fair use argument irrelevant.While the report favors the plaintiffs' argument, we don't know if the judge in the case will agree. And because this is a pre-publication version, it could be edited or even rescinded by a future leader at the Copyright Office.Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems. Cecily Mauran Tech Reporter Cecily is a tech reporter at Mashable who covers AI, Apple, and emerging tech trends. Before getting her master's degree at Columbia Journalism School, she spent several years working with startups and social impact businesses for Unreasonable Group and B Lab. Before that, she co-founded a startup consulting business for emerging entrepreneurial hubs in South America, Europe, and Asia. You can find her on X at @cecily_mauran. #artists #are #using #whitehot #report

Take-Two Interactive reported its latest earnings Thursday, which included a writedown of more than billion. But despite that hit, the biggest news for the company still came out nearly two weeks ahead of the financial results: the publisher’s highly anticipated Rockstar Games-developed “Grand Theft Auto 6” would be shifting from a planned fall 2025 release to a May 26, 2026 launch. The choice, which was announced May 2, was made before Take-Two revealed these full fiscal 2025 resultsand projections for its Fiscal 2026, but the company has not disclosed exactly at what point Rockstar decided “GTA 6” would need to be moved. As of February, the company had still been publicly eyeing that fall window. Related Stories “So we don’t talk about when we make decisions around here,” Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick told Variety Thursday ahead of the company’s earnings call. “And obviously, the net bookings that are expected for Fiscal ’26 are lower without the release of ‘GTA 6,’ that goes without saying. But we haven’t actually parsed what the specific felt is, although analysts have speculated. I think the key point to bear in mind is, once again, we’re setting a record, which is what we said we would do. We certainly expect growth in Fiscal ’27. This company is in extraordinarily sound shape and well positioned both for the challenges and opportunities ahead.” Popular on Variety Wall Street forecast a loss of earnings per shareof 5 cents on billion in revenue for Take-Two’s January-March results, according to analyst consensus data provided by LSEG. On Thursday, Take-Two reported billion in net bookings. GAAP net loss was billion, or per share. That loss included a writedown of billion, though Take-Two did not disclose which division within the company accounted for that large hit and declined to comment when asked. For the year-long period between April 1, 2025-March 31, 2026, Take-Two is projecting net bookings between to billion. Regarding the potential pricing for “GTA 6,” as well as the rest of Take-Two’s games moving forward, Zelnick said he’s not letting recent moves made by competitors affect what Take-Two decides to do. “Well it’s true that some of our competitors have talked about higher prices and variable pricing. The rubric that informs our decision making is that we need and want to deliver way more value than whatever we charge consumers,” Zelnick said. “We think the consumer experiences the intersection of the thing itself. How great is the property with how much you pay for it? I think you know that anecdotally about yourself. We all feel that way. So we’re very mindful that it’s our job to deliver enormous value to consumers. We think we do just that.” More to come… #gta #delay #taketwo #chief #strauss

Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling. Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer.  “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the future of medicine,” says Kiran Musunuru, an expert in gene editing at the University of Pennsylvania whose team designed the drug. “My hope is that someday no rare disease patients will die prematurely from misspellings in their genes, because we’ll be able to correct them.” The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them.  In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells. “In reality, this drug will probably never be used again,” says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who treats metabolic diseases in children and who led the overall effort to treat the child. That effort involved more than 45 scientists and doctors as well as pro bono Eventually, he says, the cost of custom gene-editing treatments might be similar to that of liver transplants, which is around not including lifelong medical care and drugs. The researchers used a new version of CRISPR technology, called base editing, that can replace a single letter of DNA at a specific location.  Previous versions of CRISPR have generally been used to delete genes, not rewrite them to restore their function. The researchers say they were looking for a patient to treat when they learned about KJ. After he was born in August, a doctor noted that the infant was lethargic. Tests found he had a metabolic disorder that leads to the buildup of ammonia, a condition that’s frequently fatal without a liver transplant. In KJ’s case, gene sequencing showed that the cause was a misspelled letter in the gene CPS1 that stopped it from making a vital enzyme. The researchers approached KJ’s parents, Nicole and Kyle Muldoon, with the idea of using gene editing to try to correct their baby’s DNA. After they agreed, a race ensued to design the editing drug, test it in animals, and get permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to treat KJ in a one-off experiment. The team says the boy, who hasn’t turned one yet, received three doses of the gene-editing treatment, of gradually increasing strength. They can’t yet determine exactly how well the gene editor worked because they don’t want to take a liver biopsy, which would be needed to check if KJ’s genes have really been corrected. But Ahrens-Nicklas says that because the child is “growing and thriving,” she thinks the editing has been at least partly successful and that he may now have “a milder form of this horrific disease.” “He’s received three doses of the therapy without any complications, and is showing some early signs of benefit,” she says. “It’s really important to say that it’s still very early, so we will need to continue to watch KJ closely to fully understand the full effects of this therapy.” The case suggests a future in which parents will take sick children to a clinic where their DNA will be sequenced, and then they will rapidly receive individualized treatments. Currently, this would only work for liver diseases, for which it’s easier to deliver gene-editing instructions, but eventually it might also become a possible approach for treating brain diseases and conditions like muscular dystrophy. The experiment is drawing attention to a gap between what gene editing can do and what treatments are likely to become available to people who need them. So far, biotechnology companies testing gene editing are working only on fairly common gene conditions, like sickle cell disease, leaving hundreds of ultra-rare conditions aside. One-off treatments, like the one helping KJ, are too expensive to create and get approved without some way to recoup the costs. The apparent success in treating KJ, however, is making it even more urgent to figure out a way forward. Researchers acknowledge that they don’t yet know how to scale up personalized treatment, although Musunuru says initial steps to standardize the process are underway at his university and in Europe. #this #baby #boy #was #treated

The world is awash in data about, well, the world — thanks to satellites and environmental sensors. But there’s still a lot we can’t see, and Fieldstone Bio thinks microbes can change that. “They’ve evolved to sense and respond to information. It’s just trillions of calculations going on at all times all around us,” Brandon Fields, Fieldstone Bio’s co-founder and chief science officer, told TechCrunch. “How do we take that and actually manipulate that to gain benefits for us?” Fieldstone’s technology emerged from that question. The startup was founded in 2023 after spinning out of MIT, where professor Chris Voigt’s lab had developed a way to turn microbes into sensors. The scientists programmed the microbes to change color when they encountered something of interest, whether it be nutrients in soil or landmines hidden in the dirt, and then figured out how to detect them. “The key technology out of Chris’ lab is this idea of, ‘How do we actually visualize these cells from really far away?’” Fields said. Fieldstone Bio recently raised million in seed funding led by Ubiquity Ventures with participation from E14 and LDV Capital, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The startup has been testing its technology in the lab, and the funding will let it test those microbes in the real world. Each strain is tailored to sense a particular compound, such as nitrogen on a farm field or TNT residue from a landmine.  “We isolate microbes from the environments we want to sense,” Fields said. “We build our sensors the DNA pieces, and we just drop them into these different ones and see which ones behave the best, which ones can last the longest.” Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Once the microbes are ready, Fieldstone will broadcast them using drones. After the microbes have some time to sense their environment — several hours to days, depending on the target — the company will have another drone snap photos of the area. The images aren’t the usual aerial photography seen on Google Maps. Rather, they’re taken using what’s known as a hyperspectral camera, which divide visible and infrared light into as many as 600 different colors. Because Fieldstone’s microbes will reflect light at a very specific wavelength, it can train AI models to look for those signals amid a torrent of data. “That’s where the power of AI comes in, because we can start using that information to tease out these really faint signals to produce really cool heat maps of the microbe sensing the environment,” Fields said. In addition to agriculture and national security applications, Fieldstone is also programming microbes to detect environmental contaminants like arsenic, CEO Patrick Stone said. “Instead of going to do core soil samples over every 100 feet — and then you have 100 foot resolution — we could get a one-inch resolution and really map out exactly where they need to go clean up stuff,” he said. Gene edited microbial sensors broadcast over farm fields are sure to raise the eyebrows among people who oppose genetic modification. Fields said that the company has been in contact with the EPA to ensure that the company follows regulations. Fields said that, over time, he hopes the company’s database will become large enough that it can train models to associate other signals in the environment with whatever data is returned by the microbes. That would allow hyperspectral cameras to detect, say, arsenic contamination without needing to spread the engineered microbes. “Eventually, you don’t need to apply the microbe at all,” Fields said. “You have drones, planes, and satellites now collecting information about chemical information on a global scale.” #fieldstone #bio #building #microbes #that

Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling. Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer.  “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the future of medicine,” says Kiran Musunuru, an expert in gene editing at the University of Pennsylvania whose team designed the drug. “My hope is that someday no rare disease patients will die prematurely from misspellings in their genes, because we’ll be able to correct them.” The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them.  In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells. “In reality, this drug will probably never be used again,” says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who treats metabolic diseases in children and who led the overall effort to treat the child. That effort involved more than 45 scientists and doctors as well as pro bono Eventually, he says, the cost of custom gene-editing treatments might be similar to that of liver transplants, which is around not including lifelong medical care and drugs. The researchers used a new version of CRISPR technology, called base editing, that can replace a single letter of DNA at a specific location.  Previous versions of CRISPR have generally been used to delete genes, not rewrite them to restore their function. The researchers say they were looking for a patient to treat when they learned about KJ. After he was born in August, a doctor noted that the infant was lethargic. Tests found he had a metabolic disorder that leads to the buildup of ammonia, a condition that’s frequently fatal without a liver transplant. In KJ’s case, gene sequencing showed that the cause was a misspelled letter in the gene CPS1 that stopped it from making a vital enzyme. The researchers approached KJ’s parents, Nicole and Kyle Muldoon, with the idea of using gene editing to try to correct their baby’s DNA. After they agreed, a race ensued to design the editing drug, test it in animals, and get permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to treat KJ in a one-off experiment. The team says the boy, who hasn’t turned one yet, received three doses of the gene-editing treatment, of gradually increasing strength. They can’t yet determine exactly how well the gene editor worked because they don’t want to take a liver biopsy, which would be needed to check if KJ’s genes have really been corrected. But Ahrens-Nicklas says that because the child is “growing and thriving,” she thinks the editing has been at least partly successful and that he may now have “a milder form of this horrific disease.” “He’s received three doses of the therapy without any complications, and is showing some early signs of benefit,” she says. “It’s really important to say that it’s still very early, so we will need to continue to watch KJ closely to fully understand the full effects of this therapy.” The case suggests a future in which parents will take sick children to a clinic where their DNA will be sequenced, and then they will rapidly receive individualized treatments. Currently, this would only work for liver diseases, for which it’s easier to deliver gene-editing instructions, but eventually it might also become a possible approach for treating brain diseases and conditions like muscular dystrophy. The experiment is drawing attention to a gap between what gene editing can do and what treatments are likely to become available to people who need them. So far, biotechnology companies testing gene editing are working only on fairly common gene conditions, like sickle cell disease, leaving hundreds of ultra-rare conditions aside. One-off treatments, like the one helping KJ, are too expensive to create and get approved without some way to recoup the costs. The apparent success in treating KJ, however, is making it even more urgent to figure out a way forward. Researchers acknowledge that they don’t yet know how to scale up personalized treatment, although Musunuru says initial steps to standardize the process are underway at his university and in Europe. #this #baby #boy #was #treated

Rejected by Museums Around the World, This New Art Exhibition Explores the Historical Roots of the Term ‘Homosexual’ “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” is a sprawling collection of more than 300 works at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 gallery An 1890 photo by Alice Austen titled The Darned Club Collection of Historic Richmond Town / Wrightwood 659 In 1868, the Hungarian writer and activist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in a letter to his friend, the pioneering sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Kertbeny was arguing against a German anti-sodomy law that made sexual contact between members of the same gender punishable by up to four years in prison. He reasoned that humans had innate desires—some homosexual, some heterosexual—that could not be regulated by the state. Although Kertbeny had just used the terms for what scholars believe is the first time, the language was already charged with the same imprecision that exists today. An expansive label like “homosexual” could describe actions; desires; and, crucially, an entire identity. The artistic and social “sea change” that accompanied the birth of the term “homosexual” is the subject of “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” a sprawling, ambitious exhibition at the Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. It is on view until July 26.The scale and scope of the exhibition is staggering. It gathers more than 300 works by 125-plus artists from 40 countries, on loan from private collections and major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay. “It is the kind of exhibition that a massive institution like the Met regularly pulls off,” curator Jonathan D. Katz, an art historian at the University of Pennsylvania, tells the Chicago Sun-Times’ Courtney Kueppers. “But for a small, fairly new institution like Wrightwood 659 to pull off,is kind of extraordinary.” “Before the Binary,” the first of eight sections in the exhibition, begins decades before Kertbeny’s letter. Its focus is on longstanding cultural, sexual and romantic practices that modern language occludes. Dance to the Berdash is an 1835-1837 oil painting by George Catlin, a 19th-century artist known for his paintings of Indigenous life and the American frontier. It depicts a real feast Catlin witnessed in which members of the Sac and Fox tribe paid tribute to a Two-Spirit leader, a person who was born male but who dressed, performed and lived as a woman. Non-Indigenous observers applied the term “berdache,” now considered derogatory, to identities and practices they considered foreign. Catlin’s painting depicts what language could not capture. Dance to the Berdash, George Catlin, 1835-1837 Smithsonian American Art Museum “Art can tell this story uniquely well,” Katz says in a statement. “While written narratives must necessarily use specialized words to describe ideas, visual imagery is more elastic, allowing for coincident layers of meaning.” More modern works by well-known artists like Jean Cocteau, the Lumière Brothers, Gustave Moreau, John Singer Sargent, Egon Schiele and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec also convey those nuances with tact across the seven other sections of the exhibition. In “Portraits,” Katz and associate curator Johnny Willis assemble a 1907 portrait of Gertrude Stein, the only full-size portrait of Oscar Wilde painted in his lifetime and Thomas Eakins’ celebrated oil portrait of Walt Whitman. Some portraits explore sexuality more overtly than others, but all can be read in the spirit of the exhibition. Where do actions become identity? Do modern audiences have the right to retroactively apply labels to celebrated past figures who may have never embraced them? Another section of the show explores relationships through the photography of Alice Austen, a Victorian-era photographer in New York City who trained her lens on women’s lives. Still others examine how nude portraits have shifted with changing understandings of sexuality and how same-sex desire converged with colonialism and resistance. Gertrude Stein, Félix Vallotton, 1907 The Baltimore Museum of Art / Mitro Hood / Wrightwood 569 Wrightwood 659’s ability to land an exhibition like “The First Homosexuals” is in part due to its controversial subject matter. “Queer art is the third rail of the art realm,” Katz tells Block Club Chicago’s Web Behrens. “One very highly placed museum director told me, ‘This is exactly the exhibition I want to show, and therefore exactly the exhibition I can’t.’” Katz estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of the museums and art collectors he asked to contribute art to the exhibition rejected his requests, per Fast Company’s Grace Snelling. Later, nearly all of the museums Katz approached to host the multimillion dollar exhibition declined, even when he offered it to them for free, the Sun-Times reports. Besides Wrightwood 659, the only museum to express interest was the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, which is in talks to bring part of the show to Art Basel 2026. Despite enduring prejudice toward queer art, the exhibition at Wrightwood 659 has been a roaring success, with the gallery selling more advance tickets to it than any other show in its seven-year history. The final piece in the exhibition is an archway full of photographs of the Nazis burning thousands of books at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, the first sexology research center in the world, in 1933. “The idea that everything that flowers over the course of the exhibition can so quickly be destroyed, is, of course, a metaphor for where we are now,” Katz tells Fast Company. While Kertbeny’s terms became twisted into means of isolating “homosexuals” from the rest of the population, as the persecution and mass murder of queer people during World War II exemplifies on a horrific scale, the exhibition strikes a unified note about belonging, even in the midst of confusion and fear. “We wanted to show how art offered numerous positions along that spectrum, positions that literally had no words to describe them,” Katz tells Block Club. “Art could figure what language could not.” “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” is on view at the Wrightwood 659 in Chicago through July 26. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. #rejected #museums #around #world #this

Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition caused by a particularly unusual gene misspelling. Researchers say their attempt to correct the error demonstrates the high level of precision new types of gene editors offer.  “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the future of medicine,” says Kiran Musunuru, an expert in gene editing at the University of Pennsylvania whose team designed the drug. “My hope is that someday no rare disease patients will die prematurely from misspellings in their genes, because we’ll be able to correct them.” The project also highlights what some experts are calling a growing crisis in gene-editing technology. That’s because even though the technology could cure thousands of genetic conditions, most are so rare that companies could never recoup the costs of developing a treatment for them.  In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells. “In reality, this drug will probably never be used again,” says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who treats metabolic diseases in children and who led the overall effort to treat the child. That effort involved more than 45 scientists and doctors as well as pro bono assistance from several biotechnology companies. Musunuru says he cannot estimate how much it had cost in time and effort. Eventually, he says, the cost of custom gene-editing treatments might be similar to that of liver transplants, which is around not including lifelong medical care and drugs. The researchers used a new version of CRISPR technology, called base editing, that can replace a single letter of DNA at a specific location.  Previous versions of CRISPR have generally been used to delete genes, not rewrite them to restore their function. The researchers say they were looking for a patient to treat when they learned about KJ. After he was born in August, a doctor noted that the infant was lethargic. Tests found he had a metabolic disorder that leads to the buildup of ammonia, a condition that’s frequently fatal without a liver transplant. In KJ’s case, gene sequencing showed that the cause was a misspelled letter in the gene CPS1 that stopped it from making a vital enzyme. The researchers approached KJ’s parents, Nicole and Kyle Muldoon, with the idea of using gene editing to try to correct their baby’s DNA. After they agreed, a race ensued to design the editing drug, test it in animals, and get permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to treat KJ in a one-off experiment. The team says the boy, who hasn’t turned one yet, received three doses of the gene-editing treatment, of gradually increasing strength. They can’t yet determine exactly how well the gene editor worked because they don’t want to take a liver biopsy, which would be needed to check if KJ’s genes have really been corrected. But Ahrens-Nicklas says that because the child is “growing and thriving,” she thinks the editing has been at least partly successful and that he may now have “a milder form of this horrific disease.” “He’s received three doses of the therapy without any complications, and is showing some early signs of benefit,” she says. “It’s really important to say that it’s still very early, so we will need to continue to watch KJ closely to fully understand the full effects of this therapy.” The case suggests a future in which parents will take sick children to a clinic where their DNA will be sequenced, and then they will rapidly receive individualized treatments. Currently, this would only work for liver diseases, for which it’s easier to deliver gene-editing instructions, but eventually it might also become a possible approach for treating brain diseases and conditions like muscular dystrophy. The experiment is drawing attention to a gap between what gene editing can do and what treatments are likely to become available to people who need them. So far, biotechnology companies testing gene editing are working only on fairly common gene conditions, like sickle cell disease, leaving hundreds of ultra-rare conditions aside. One-off treatments, like the one helping KJ, are too expensive to create and get approved without some way to recoup the costs. The apparent success in treating KJ, however, is making it even more urgent to figure out a way forward. Researchers acknowledge that they don’t yet know how to scale up personalized treatment, although Musunuru says initial steps to standardize the process are underway at his university and in Europe. #this #baby #boy #was #treated

An AI tool aims to wade through mountains of government feedback and understand what the public is trying to say.UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said: “No one should be wasting time on something AI can do quicker and better, let alone wasting millions of taxpayer pounds on outsourcing such work to contractors.This digital assistant, aptly named ‘Consult’, just aced its first big test with the Scottish Government.The Scottish Gov threw Consult in at the deep end, asking it to make sense of public opinion on regulating non-surgical cosmetic procedures such as lip fillers and laser hair removal. Consult came back with findings almost identical to what human officials had pieced together.Now, the plan is to roll this tech out across various government departments. The current way of doing things is expensive and slow. Millions of pounds often go to outside contractors just to analyse what the public thinks.Consult is part of a bigger push to build a leaner, more responsive UK government—one that can deliver on its ‘Plan for Change’ without breaking the bank or taking an age to do it.So, how did it fare in Scotland? Consult chewed through responses from over 2,000 people. Using generative AI, it picked out the main themes and concerns bubbling up from the feedback across six key questions.Of course, Consult wasn’t left completely to its own devices. Experts in the Scottish Government double-checked and fine-tuned these initial themes. Then, the AI got back to work to sort individual responses into these categories. Officials ended up with more precious time to consider what people were saying and what it meant for policy.Because this was Consult’s first live outing, the Scottish Government went through every single response by hand too—just to be sure. Figuring out exactly what someone means in a written comment and then deciding which ‘theme’ it fits under can be a bit subjective. Even humans don’t always agree.When the government compared Consult’s handiwork to human analysis, the AI was right most of the time. Where there were differences, they were so minor they didn’t change the overall picture of what mattered most to people.Consult is part of a bigger AI toolkit called ‘Humphrey’—a suite of digital helpers designed to free up civil servants from admin and cut down on those contractor bills. It’s all part of a grander vision to use technology to sharpen up public services, aiming to find £45 billion in productivity savings. The goal is a more nimble government that is better at delivering that ‘Plan for Change’ we keep hearing about.“After demonstrating such promising results, Humphrey will help us cut the costs of governing and make it easier to collect and comprehensively review what experts and the public are telling us on a range of crucial issues,” added Kyle.“The Scottish Government has taken a bold first step. Very soon, I’ll be using Consult, within Humphrey, in my own department and others in Whitehall will be using it too – speeding up our work to deliver the Plan for Change.”Over in Scotland, Public Health Minister Jenni Minto said: “Using the tool was very beneficial in helping the Scottish Government understand more quickly what people wanted us to hear and our respondents’ range of views.“Using this tool has allowed the Scottish Government to move more quickly to a focus on the policy questions and dive into the detail of the evidence we’ve been presented with, while remaining confident that we have heard the strong views expressed by respondents.”Of course, like many AI deployments in government, it’s still early days, and Consult is officially still in the trial phase. More number-crunching and testing are on the cards to make sure it’s working just as it should before any big decisions about a full rollout are made.But the potential here is huge. The government runs about 500 consultations every year. If Consult lives up to its promise, it could save officials a staggering 75,000 days of analysis annually.And what did the civil servants who first worked with Consult think? They were reportedly “pleasantly surprised,” finding the AI’s initial analysis a “useful starting point.” Others raved that it “saveda heck of a lot of time” and let them “get to the analysis and draw out what’s needed next” much faster.Interestingly, they also felt Consult brought a new level of fairness to the table. As one official put it, its use “takes away the bias and makes it more consistent,” preventing individual analysts from, perhaps unconsciously, letting their “own preconceived ideas” colour the findings.Some consultations receive tens, even hundreds of thousands of responses. Given how well Consult has performed in these early tests, it won’t be long before it’s used on these massive consultations.It’s worth noting that humans aren’t being kicked out of the loop. Consult has been built to keep the experts involved every step of the way. Officials will always review the themes the AI suggests and how it sorts the responses. They’ll have an interactive dashboard to play with, letting them filter and search for specific insights. It’s about AI doing the heavy lifting, so the humans can do the smart thinking.This move towards AI in government isn’t happening in a vacuum, and experts are watching closely.Stuart Harvey, CEO of Datactics, commented: “Using AI to speed up public consultations is a great example of how technology can improve efficiency and save money. But AI is only as good as the data behind it. For tools like this to work well and fairly, government departments need to make sure their data is accurate, up-to-date, and properly managed.“People need to trust the decisions made with AI. That means making sure the process is clear, well-governed, and ethical. If the data is messy or poorly handled, it can lead to biased or unreliable outcomes.“As the government expands its use of AI in public services, it’s vital to invest in strong data practices. That includes building clear and consistent data systems, making data accessible for review, and keeping humans involved in key decisions—especially when it comes to hearing from the public.”This sentiment is echoed by academics. Professor Michael Rovatsos from the University of Edinburgh, for instance, acknowledges the benefits but also wisely cautions about the risks of AI biases and even the potential for these tools to be manipulated. He’s calling for tough safeguards and ongoing investment to make sure any AI tool used by the government remains reliable and fair.Stuart Munton, Chief for Group Operations at AND Digital, added: “The government’s use of AI to speed up public consultations is a welcome step toward smarter, more efficient public services. However, as AI adoption grows, we must ensure that people – not just technology – are at the heart of this transformation.”“Tools like this will only reach their full potential if we invest in equipping public sector teams with the right skills and training. Empowering diverse talent to work with AI will not only improve how these tools perform but also ensure that innovation is inclusive to real-world needs.”If done right, with these expert caveats in mind, AI tools like Consult have the potential to improve how governments listen, learn, and make policy based on public opinion. The UK government isn’t hanging about; the plan is to get Consult working across various departments by the end of 2025.Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here. #tool #speeds #government #feedback #experts

In recent decades, researchers have consistently explored new ways to tackle the global obesity epidemic. While existing methods show significant results, such as the dramatic, long-term weight loss from bariatric surgery or the flexible, non-invasive use of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, each approach has its drawbacks. Surgery can be risky and irreversible, while medications often bring unpleasant side effects and a risk of regaining weight once treatment stops.But what if we could combine the best of both? Imagine achieving the benefits of gastric bypass surgery without going under the knife — simply by taking a pill.A Boston-based biopharmaceutical companyis working on exactly that. The first-in-human study of their new treatment, known as SYNT-101, was presented at the European Congress on Obesityin Malaga, Spain. It demonstrated not only safety and good tolerance but also promising signs of appetite regulation and weight loss, without the side effects commonly seen with GLP-1 drugs.Bariatric Surgery vs. GLP-1 DrugsBariatric surgery remains the gold standard for significant weight loss. These procedures reduce stomach size or bypass parts of the small intestine, physically limiting nutrient absorption. But it’s a serious commitment, typically reserved for people with a BMI over 40 and requires lifelong lifestyle changes, medical supervision, and carries the inherent risks of major surgery.On the flip side, GLP-1 drugs offer a less invasive option for people with moderate weight gain. Available in pill or injection form, they’re easier to use but often cause side effects like nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. There’s also concern about losing lean muscle mass and regaining weight once the treatment stops.Faced with these extremes, many patients are left feeling stuck. That’s where SYNT-101 steps in, a new oral treatment that mimics gastric bypass without cutting or injections.Pill Mimics Gastric BypassSYNT-101 works by forming a temporary coating in the first part of the small intestine, rerouting how nutrients are absorbed. This “nutrient exclusion” triggers earlier satiety and helps regulate metabolic hormones.In animal studies, SYNT-101 led to an average weekly weight loss of 1 percent for six weeks and preserved 100 percent of lean muscle mass — better than GLP-1 drugs. In the human pilot study, nine healthy adultsreceived a single dose in liquid form at three increasing dosage levels.According to the press release, endoscopic imaging confirmed that the coating formed as expected. Blood tests showed increased leptinand reduced ghrelin, consistent with preclinical results. Glucose tolerance tests showed delayed glucose absorption, indicating that uptake was occurring later in the digestive tract.Importantly, there were no adverse events or gastrointestinal symptoms, and participants reported zero pain. Rahul Dhanda, CEO of Syntis Bio, summarized in the news release: “These data validate the potential of SYNT-101 to induce metabolic changes that support glycemic control, weight loss and energy balance.”Need Of Novel Treatment OptionsThe temporary lining lasts up to 24 hours. While the initial study used a liquid dose, the treatment is being developed as a once-daily pill for convenience.“We believe that SYNT-101 will provide a convenient, more sustainable oral alternative and/or complement to systemic therapies such as GLP-1 drugs,” said Dhanda in the statement. “The millions of people living with obesity need novel treatment options that are safe, effective and avoid the high costs and severe side effects that often accompany available treatment options.”Larger clinical trials are planned, and Syntis Bio aims to submit an Investigational New Drugapplication to the FDA in late 2025. As Dhanda added: “We are eager to replicate these data in our upcoming Phase 1 clinical trial and further explore the ability of SYNT-101 to produce sustainable, safe, effective weight loss by reducing fat, preserving lean muscle and stimulating natural production of satiety hormones to prevent weight regain.”Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery: Bariatric Surgery More Effective and Durable Than New Obesity Drugs and Lifestyle InterventionF1000 Reports Medicine: Quick fix or long-term cure? Pros and cons of bariatric surgeryHarvard Health Publishing: GLP-1 diabetes and weight-loss drug side effects: "Ozempic face" and moreHaving worked as a biomedical research assistant in labs across three countries, Jenny excels at translating complex scientific concepts – ranging from medical breakthroughs and pharmacological discoveries to the latest in nutrition – into engaging, accessible content. Her interests extend to topics such as human evolution, psychology, and quirky animal stories. When she’s not immersed in a popular science book, you’ll find her catching waves or cruising around Vancouver Island on her longboard. #gastric #bypass #pill #could #help