Background: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into medical education, with transformative potential for learning and assessment. However, their performance across diverse medical exams globally has remained underexplored.
You shouldn’t have to choose between losing weight and losing hair but if you’ve embraced intermittent fasting, that might be precisely the situation you’re in. That, at least, is the conclusion of a paper published this week in the journal Cell. And while the scientists researching this did plenty of work with mice to explore this phenomenon
Join us for a conversation with Fazlur Rahman, a hematology-oncology physician and author of Our Connected Lives. In this episode, we explore how Fazlur's journey from physician to patient transformed his understanding of empathy.
He reflects on the importance of personal connection in medicine, the impact of a lack of empathy on both doctors and patients, and the need for medical education to include the humanities to foster compassionate care. This episode dives deep into the role empathy plays in improving patient outcomes and doctor-patient relationships.
"Students were also more likely to feel negative emotions than positive ones while studying and completing their assignments, according to data collected by Kahoot!..."
Many are bizarre and live in salt lakes, hydrothermal vents and other extreme environments.
Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover 70,500 viruses previously unknown to science, many of them weird and nothing like known species. The RNA viruses were identified using metagenomics, in which scientists sample all the genomes present in the environment without having to culture individual viruses. The method shows the potential of AI to explore the ‘dark matter’ of the RNA virus universe. Viruses are ubiquitous microorganisms that infect animals, plants and even bacteria, yet only a small fraction have been identified and described. There is “essentially a bottomless pit” of viruses to discover, says Artem Babaian, a computational virologist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Some of these viruses could cause diseases in people, which means that characterizing them could help to explain mystery illnesses, he says. Previous studies have used machine learning to find new viruses in sequencing data. The latest study, published in Cell this week, takes that work a step further and uses it to look at predicted protein structures. The AI model incorporates a protein-prediction tool, called ESMFold, that was developed by researchers at Meta (formerly Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California). A similar AI system, AlphaFold, was developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this week.
Missed viruses
In 2022, Babaian and his colleagues searched 5.7 million genomic samples archived in publicly available databases and identified almost 132,000 new RNA viruses. Other groups have led similar efforts. But RNA viruses evolve quickly, so existing methods for identifying RNA viruses in genomic sequence data probably miss many. A common method is to look for a section of the genome that encodes a key protein used in RNA replication, called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp). But if the sequence that encodes this protein in a virus is vastly different from any known sequence, researchers won’t recognize it. Shi Mang, an evolutionary biologist at Sun Yat-sen University in Shenzhen, China, and a co-author of the Cell study, and his colleagues went looking for previously unrecognized viruses in publicly available genomic samples. They developed a model, called LucaProt, using the ‘transformer’ architecture that underpins ChatGPT, and fed it sequencing and ESMFold protein-prediction data. They then trained their model to recognize viral RdRps and used it to find sequences that encoded these enzymes — evidence that those sequences belonged to a virus — in the large tranche of genomic data. Using this method, they identified some 160,000 RNA viruses, including some that were exceptionally long and found in extreme environments such as hot springs, salt lakes and air. Just under half of them had not been described before. They found “little pockets of RNA virus biodiversity that are really far off in the boonies of evolutionary space”, says Babaian.
“It’s a really promising approach for expanding the virosphere,” says Jackie Mahar, an evolutionary virologist at the CSIRO Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Geelong. Characterizing viruses will help researchers to understand the microbes’ origins and how they evolved in different hosts, she says. And expanding the pool of known viruses makes it easier to find more viruses that are similar, says Babaian. “All of a sudden you can see things that you just weren’t seeing before.” The team wasn’t able to determine the hosts of the viruses they identified, which should be investigated further, says Mahar. Researchers are particularly interested in knowing whether any of the new viruses infect archaea, an entire branch of the tree of life for which no RNA viruses have been clearly shown to infect. Shi is now developing a model to predict the hosts of these newly identified RNA viruses. He hopes this will help researchers to understand the roles that viruses have in their environmental niches.
Instead of throwing a big party, Tammy Zanotti celebrated her 50th birthday by taking up competitive bodybuilding. She left her first meet a medallist.
Have you noticed that your older loved ones don’t stand quite as tall as they used to? It’s not your mind playing tricks on you. In fact, men may lose an inch of height between the ages of 30 and 70, while women can lose about 2 inches. Typically, from age 40, half an inch is lost with each passing decade. Those who live up to age 80 and beyond may lose an additional inch (both sexes)….Continue reading….
Urbanization promotes economy, mobility, access and availability of resources, but on the other hand, generates higher levels of pollution, violence, crime, and mental distress. The health consequences of the agglomeration of people living close together are not fully understood. Particularly, it remains unclear how variations in the population size across cities impact the health of the population. We analyze the deviations from linearity of the scaling of several health-related quantities, such as the incidence and mortality of diseases, external causes of death, wellbeing, and health-care availability, in respect to the population size of cities in Brazil, Sweden and the USA. We find that deaths by non-communicable diseases tend to be relatively less common in larger cities, whereas the per-capita incidence of infectious diseases is relatively larger for increasing population size. Healthier life style and availability of medical support are disproportionally higher in larger cities. The results are connected with the optimization of human and physical resources, and with the non-linear effects of social networks in larger populations. An urban advantage in terms of health is not evident and using rates as indicators to compare cities with different population sizes may be insufficient.
The non-linear health consequences of living in larger cities Luis E. C. Rocha, Anna E. Thorson, Renaud Lambiotte
Wanted you to be aware that a U.S. House of Representatives Resolution Recognizing the importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts in Medical Education was introduced on April 30, 2024 by Congresswoman […]
In this talk, Dr. Peter Gray compellingly brings attention to the reality that over the past 60 years in the United States there has been a gradual but, overall dramatic decline in children's freedom to play with other children, without adult direction. Over this same period, there has been a gradual but overall dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness, suicide, and narcissism in children and adolescents. Based on his own and others' research, Dr. Gray documents why free play is essential for children's healthy social and emotional development and outlines steps through which we can bring free play back to children's lives.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
In a Q&A, PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff, the Perelman School of Medicine’s Giorgio Sirugo, and Case Western Reserve University’s Scott Williams shed light on the “quagmire” of race, ethnicity, genetic ancestry, and environmental factors and their contribution to health disparities.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.