In recent years, researchers have figured out that the constellation of diseases known as cancer is in fact hundreds of distinct diseases. Though each one may manifest itself a little differently, diagnosing the type of cancer is extremely difficult, and makes a huge difference in how doctors treat the disease. Now researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have teamed up with doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital to develop a computer model that can pull in a patient's data to suggest diagnoses to their physicians. The researchers published their work earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
What's the difference between a working painkiller and a placebo? Well, you can see it in people's brains. Brain and pain researchers in the U.K. and U.S. report they've developed a prototype algorithm that is able to tell whether a patient took a working analgesic versus a placebo. The algorithm works by analyzing fMRI scans of the patient, made soon after he or she takes the medicine.
You might think writing 10,000 articles per day would be impossible. But not for a Swede named Sverker Johansson. He created a computer program that has written a total of 2.7 million articles, making Johansson the most prolific author, by far, on the "internet's encyclopedia." His contributions account for 8.5 percent of the articles on Wikipedia, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Hristo Bojinov wants you to forget your password. More precisely, he wants you to never really know it in the first place. Bojinov, a computer scientist at Stanford, and his colleagues have developed a computer program that can implant passwords in a person's subconscious mind - and retrieve them subconsciously too. The technique could make it impossible for, say, a high-security government agent to reveal his password; the agent wouldn't actually know the secret code. Eventually, the use of subconscious passwords could even trickle down to the rest of us. And considering the precarious state of password protection, that probably can't happen soon enough.
