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Powerful antibiotics discovered using AI

Escherichia coli bacteria, coloured green, in a scanning electron micrograph.

    A pioneering machine-learning approach has identified powerful new types of antibiotic from a pool of more than 100 million molecules — including one that works against a wide range of bacteria, including tuberculosis and strains considered untreatable. The researchers say the antibiotic, called halicin, is the first discovered with artificial intelligence (AI). Although AI has been used to aid parts of the antibiotic- -discovery process before, they say that this is the first time it has identified completely new kinds of antibiotic from scratch, without using any previous human assumptions. The work, led by synthetic biologist Jim Collins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is published in Cell.

    “The study is remarkable”, says Jacob Durrant, a computational biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “The team didn’t just identify candidates, but also validated promising molecules in animal tests”, he says. “What’s more, the approach could also be applied to other types of drugs, such as those used to treat cancer or neurodegenerative diseases”, says Durrant.

    Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is rising dramatically worldwide, and researchers predict that unless new drugs are developed urgently, resistant infections could kill ten million people per year by 2050. But over the past few decades, the discovery and regulatory approval of new antibiotics has slowed. “People keep finding the same molecules over and over,” says Collins. “We need novel chemistries with novel mechanisms of action.”

(Jo Marchant. www.nature.com, 20.02.2020. Adaptado.)

Read the text and answer the question.

The idea of evolution (which is gradual change) was not a new one. The Greeks had thought of it, so Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, and also the Frenchman, Lamarck. It is one thing to have an idea; we can all of us guess and sometimes make a lucky guess.

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Samsung developing technology to create fake videos from one single photo.

With new technology like this in development, seeing will no longer mean believing.

news.com.au MAY 28, 2019

Researchers at Samsung’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Centre in Moscow have created an algorithm that can generate videos using only one image.

The development has caused some worry among technology experts and commentators, ¹who see it as a worrying step towards making fake content creation easier.

In a paper published in the preprint journal ArXiv, and in an accompanying video demo, the algorithm creates a video using a single still image, such as the Mona Lisa painting or a photo of Salvador Dali.

The video can be created using one single image but the more images are used, the better the quality.

A sample of 32 images produces a video of near lifelike accuracy

Current AI systems usually require the algorithm to scan large sets of data of a body and face before it can produce a moving picture based on it.

With this new technology, however, creating fake videos will become a lot easier.

The Samsung algorithm was trained using the publicly available VoxCeleb database which has more than 7000 images of celebrities from YouTube videos.

Since the algorithm recognises common characteristics of a person’s face and body, as opposed to specific traits of a subject, it’s able to quickly extrapolate images with little input.

This method also means that the technology is applicable toward non-celebrities and can be used on anyone, even people ²who died a long time ago and were never captured on video.

The AI is currently only able to produce “talking head” style videos from the shoulders up.

Skeptics of deepfake technology, as it is referred to, worry it will be used to spread misinformation and fake news or to steal people’s identity.

TEXTO:

Bigger yet Better

On ‘magic island,’ a virtuous cycle began with a ban on heavy industry

    One of the sad truths of the developing
world is that an urban population boom has
so often been bad news. From Jakarta to Rio
de Janeiro, more people have typically meant
[5] more ghettoes, more crime, and less economic
life. That’s one reason urbanites in big cities are
moving to places like Florianópolis, an island city 700
kilometers south of São Paulo, where bigger doesn’t
always mean worse.
[10]    Between 1970 and 2004, Florianópolis’s
population tripled. So did the number of slums. But
the local economy grew fivefold, and incomes grew
in step. Opportunity seekers, urban and rural, white
collar and blue, arrived in large groups. With a hundred or so
[15] beaches lining the “magic island,” tourism is thriving.
And while many Brazilian cities are struggling to
graduate from smokestacks to services, Florianópolis
is succeeding. Thanks in part to a federal rule that for
decades barred heavy industry on the island, town
[20] officials promoted cleaner public works, and now it
has a network of public and private universities that
make this one of the most scholarly cities in Brazil.
     To tend to the demanding academic crowd, the city
invested heavily in everything from roads to schools,
[25] and now Florianópolis ranks high on every development
measure, from literacy (97%) to electrification (near
100%). By the late 1990s, private companies were
flocking to the island, or emerging from a technology
“incubator” at the federal university. (Among its
[30] innovations: the computerized voting machines that
have made Brazilian elections fraud-free and efficient.)
Local officials now say their goal is to be the Silicon
Valley of Brazil, with beaches. Don’t count them out.

MARGOLIS, Mac. Newsweek, New York, p. 56July 3/10 s.d Adaptado.