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☆ Emergent BioSolutions to lay off about 400 employees
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-08 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

A nurse demonstrates the application of the NARCAN nasal spray medication at a outpatient treatment center in Indiana, Pennsylvania, U.S. August 9, 2017. REUTERS/Adrees Latif/File PhotoAug 8 (Reuters) - Emergent BioSolutions (EBS.N) on Tuesday decided to cut 400 jobs and scale back operations at some its facilities, pivoting its focus on core products such as overdose reversal nasal spray Narcan and anthrax vaccines. Smaller biotech companies have been struggling to finance drug development programs and that has hampered their ability to deliver on contract research services for over a year. The company had nearly 2,500 employees as of Dec.31, according to its regulatory filing. Emergent expects to incur an estimated cost of between about $19 million and $21 million in the third quarter of 2023.

Persons: Adrees Latif, Sriparna Roy, Shounak Dasgupta, Arun Koyyur Organizations: REUTERS, Thomson Locations: Indiana , Pennsylvania, U.S, Bayview, Baltimore, Canton , Massachusetts, Bengaluru

☆ Judge temporarily exempts women with complicated pregnancies from Texas abortion ban
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-05 | by ( Kanishka Singh | Thomson Reuters | Kanishka Singh Is A Breaking News Reporter For Reuters In Washington Dc | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File PhotoAug 4 (Reuters) - Women in Texas with complicated pregnancies are exempted from a state abortion ban under a temporary injunction issued on Friday, with the judge citing a lack of clarity on the ban's medical exemptions. Travis County District Court Judge Jessica Mangrum in her ruling sided with women and doctors who sued Texas over the abortion ban. The Texas Attorney General's Office said Saturday it had filed a notice of an accelerated appeal directly to the Texas Supreme Court. The office said the filing stays the ruling pending a decision by the Texas Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court last year stripped away national abortion rights.

Persons: Evelyn Hockstein, Jessica Mangrum, Mangrum, general's, Roe, Wade, Kanishka Singh, David Shepardson, Leslie Adler, William Mallard, David Gregorio Our Organizations: Texas State Capitol, REUTERS, Texas, Texas Attorney General's, Texas Supreme, for Reproductive Rights, Reproductive, U.S, Supreme, The U.S, Thomson Locations: Texas, Austin , Texas, U.S, Travis, The, Washington

☆ The best way to show off your emerging A.I. skills to land a job: You don’t need ‘years of experience' yet
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-28 | by ( Jennifer Liu | In Jljenniferliu | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

The job market for tech workers remains strong, and especially so for those picking up emerging artificial intelligence skills. For comparison, India was hiring for 25,900 AI jobs and the UK was hiring for 16,825 roles involving the skill in June. But given the emerging and quickly developing nature of the tools, it can be tricky to display your expertise in a particular AI skill as a job candidate, Neave says. With that being said, Neave recommends interested job applicants build up their AI skills and stand out from the competition in three key ways:Stay on top of developments. "If you want to take it to the next level, you can fine-tune these large language models based on your proprietary business data," Neave says.

Persons: James Neave, Adzuna's, Neave, it's Organizations: Stanford, MIT Locations: U.S, India

☆ U.S. FDA approves second over-the-counter opioid overdose reversal drug
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-28 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

Naloxone, packaged with instructions, is one of the items given out by the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition outreach workers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the prescription-free sale of the second opioid overdose reversal drug, its manufacturer Harm Reduction Therapeutics said on Friday. The approval of the drug, called RiVive, will provide patients with another over-the-counter option in the United States, where drug-related overdose deaths surpassed 100,000 in 2021. Harm Reduction said it anticipates that RiVive will be available early next year, primarily to harm-reduction organizations and state governments. Harm Reduction Therapeutics has partnered with contract drug manufacturer Catalent Inc to manufacture RiVive.

Persons: drugmaker, Michael Hufford, BioSolutions Organizations: Reduction Coalition, U.S . Food, Drug Administration, Therapeutics, Harm, Catalent Inc Locations: Baltimore, U.S, United States

☆ US FDA approves second over-the-counter opioid overdose reversal drug
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-28 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

July 28 (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the prescription-free sale of the second opioid overdose reversal drug, its manufacturer Harm Reduction Therapeutics said on Friday. The approval of the drug, called RiVive, will provide patients with another over-the-counter option in the United States, where drug-related overdose deaths surpassed 100,000 in 2021. Harm Reduction said it anticipates that RiVive will be available early next year, primarily to harm-reduction organizations and state governments. Harm Reduction Therapeutics has partnered with contract drug manufacturer Catalent Inc (CTLT.N) to manufacture RiVive. Reporting by Sriparna Roy and Bhanvi Satija in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja DesaiOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Persons: drugmaker, Michael Hufford, Sriparna Roy, Bhanvi, Pooja Desai Organizations: U.S . Food, Drug Administration, Therapeutics, Harm, Catalent Inc, Thomson Locations: U.S, United States, Bengaluru

☆ When El Niño exacerbates global warming: Record heat, record flooding, record wildfires
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-15 | by ( Catherine Clifford | In Catclifford | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +11 min

Brown | Afp | Getty ImagesIf you feel like record-level extreme weather events are happening with alarming frequency, you're not alone. Global warming is making extreme weather events more severe, scientists said. But what is clear is that climate change makes it more likely that an extreme weather event will happen. "Higher temperatures from climate change are indisputable, and with each degree increase we're multiplying our changes of getting an extreme heat wave. Decreasing the greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels will help moderate the extreme weather trends.

Persons: Rai Rogers, Frederic J, Brown, Michael Mann, Brandon Bell, Phil Scott, Paul Ullrich, Mann, Ullrich, Justin Trudeau, El Niño, Timothy Canty, Canty, they're Organizations: Afp, Getty, University of Pennsylvania, CNBC, National Oceanic, Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, National Weather Service, Prediction, EMT, Emergency, Washington Post, The Washington Post, Anadolu Agency, University of California, Global, Wildfire, Bloomberg, University of Maryland, Government, Montreal Locations: Las Vegas , Nevada, California, Texas, Florida, United States, Northern, West Coast, Phoenix , Arizona, Nevada, Arizona, Montpelier , Vermont, Vermont, Canada, New York City, Anadolu, Davis, Lytton , British Columbia, El, Americas, Gulf, Pacific Northwest, Ohio, Northeastern, Ankara, Turkiye, Montreal

☆ Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ Takes a Note From Taylor Swift: Leave a Mark
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-04 | by ( Jon Caramanica | More About Jon Caramanica | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Rodrigo is 20 now, and “Guts,” due in September, will be her second album. And while “Drivers License” and its fallout became tabloid fodder, the public narrative wasn’t encoded into the song itself. “Vampire” changes that. On “Drivers License,” Rodrigo still saw the other woman as an enemy, or source of tension, but now on “Vampire,” she understands what the lines of allegiance truly are, marking an emergent feminist streak. Here, she finds kinship with her ex’s other partners, and lambastes herself for thinking she ever was the exception: “Every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news/You called them crazy, God, I hate the way I called ’em crazy too.”

Persons: Rodrigo, Bia, Mayer, Swift, John, ”, ” Rodrigo, lambastes Locations: Angeles

CNN —A Nicaraguan national who died last week in federal immigration custody had spent more than one year in detention. Despite having been recommended for release more than seven months ago, he continued to be held in immigration custody, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. In November 2022, an ICE panel recommended Rocha-Cuadra be released from custody, but officials at the facility declined to release him, a statement from the SPLC said. In a written statement to the press, Rocha-Cuadra’s brother joined a chorus of immigration rights advocates calling for the ICE facility to be investigated. Rocha-Cuadra had been in immigration custody after crossing the border illegally near Andrade, California, on April 17, 2022, according to a statement from ICE earlier this week.

Persons: Ernesto Rocha, Rocha, Cuadra, Ernesto, “ NOLA, Cuadra’s, Frank Rocha, noncitizen, “, ” Organizations: CNN —, Nicaraguan, Southern Poverty Law Center, Immigration, Customs, New Orleans ICE Field Office, “, “ NOLA ICE ”, ICE, CNN, GEO, Inc, GEO Group, . Immigration, Healthcare, Central Louisiana ICE Processing, ICE Health Services Corps Locations: Cuadra, ICE’s, Jena , Louisiana, Andrade , California, ICE’s Central Louisiana

"It's hard to think of an area that this couldn't help," said Diogo Rau, Eli Lilly chief information and digital officer. He said Lilly already is using generative AI to write patient safety reports and clinical narratives, and ultimately, it will play a role in drug discovery. One of the most anticipated uses for generative AI is in customer relationship management, and that is happening at more companies. Others noted their firms are in the early days of rolling out code generation tools using gen AI, as well as AI "co-pilots" across many roles, and using generative AI to help make investment decisions. Generative AI could enable a more customized and pro-security posture for organizations," he said.

Persons: OpenAI, Diogo Rau, Eli Lilly, Lilly, Rau, Eddie Fox, It's, Fox, Nicole Coughlin, Cybersecurity, ransomware, Jim Richberg, Richberg, Joe Levy, Sophos, it's, Levy Organizations: CNBC, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, TEC, CNBC Technology, Epic, AIs Locations: Cary , North Carolina, Fortinet

☆ Investing in Space: Here are the rockets chasing to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-08 | by ( Michael Sheetz | In Michaeljsheetz | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +14 min

SpaceXCNBC's Investing in Space newsletter offers a view into the business of space exploration and privatization, delivered straight to your inbox. Overview: Chasing the FalconNo rocket has been better-described as a "workhorse" than SpaceX's Falcon 9. Aside from Blue Origin's New Glenn, the early theme is rockets that are close to the capability of Falcon 9 and less expensive. – CNBC, which the lawsuit says were used for NASA projects including the International Space Station and the Space Launch Systems rocket. – Firefly Aerospace: The rocket builder says the deal will bolster its launch, spacecraft, and lunar lander businesses.

Persons: CNBC's Michael Sheetz, Phil Smith, SpaceX's, Glenn, Smith, –, Smith doesn't, CNBC ULA, Tory Bruno, Jeff Bezos, ULA, – Read, Shepard, Bob Smith, Jim Free, Artemis, HawkEye, – Hydrosat, Leonardo DiCaprio, – Momentus, Westinghouse EchoStar's Hughes, – EchoStar, Iris Lan, Sumara Thompson, King, Lan, – NASA Celeste Ford, Ford, – SpiderOak Melissa Quinn, Quinn Organizations: SpaceX CNBC's, SpaceX, Falcon, Boeing, NASA, CNBC, CNBC Department of Defense, Ukraine, Starlink, Pentagon, –, Space Station, Systems, CNBC SpaceX, Cargo, International Space, FAA, Intelsat, Japan Airlines, Embraer, – Intelsat, Rocket, ONE, Washington, Spaceflight, Aerospace, Aerospace Spacecraft, York, MaC Venture Capital, Broom Ventures, Veto, TechCrunch Viasat, Air Force, Viasat, Westinghouse, U.S . Department of Justice, – NASA, Ford, Stellar Solutions Locations: Florida, China, Russia, Colorado, Ukrainian, Bellevue , Washington, Cortado, Cornwall

☆ Sudan's war scatters country's emergent art scene
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( Adam Makary | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

Abdullah is a member of a youthful art scene that gained momentum from the popular uprising against autocrat Omar al-Bashir and finds itself scattered by war four years later. "We've always been repressed, especially during Bashir's time," said 28-year-old Rahiem Shadad, who co-founded Downtown Gallery in Sudan's capital in 2019. Shadad's gallery has raised just over $8,500 of a $30,000 target to support artists financially during the war. Painter and retired art professor Salah Abdelhay fled to Egypt with his wife and two daughters. Reporting by Adam Makary and Fatma Fahmy Editing by Aidan Lewis and Christina FincherOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Persons: Rahiem Shadad, Omar al, Bashir, Yasmeen Abdullah, I'd, Abdullah, autocrat Omar al, We've, Shadad, Muhammed Yusuf, Yusuf, Khalid Abdelrahman, Painter, Salah Abdelhay, Adam Makary, Aidan Lewis, Christina Fincher Organizations: REUTERS, Downtown, Thomson Locations: Khartoum, Sudan, Cairo, Egypt, CAIRO, Sudan's, Shendi, Omdurman, Wadi Halfa

☆ Opinion | Political Correctness Used to Be Funny. Now It’s No Joke.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( Pamela Paul | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Yet more unfathomable: that there would be any affection for anything about that era’s nascent political correctness with its penchant for words like “womyn” and other idealistic but often ill-conceived efforts to reimagine the dictionary. In the wake of my 30th college reunion last month at Brown University, a notorious locus for politically correct thought back in the day, those emergent P.C. At that time, word purification rituals were experienced all in good fun or at least, in good fun-making. Even at its peak, ’90s-style political correctness was at least as much self-satire as a movement to be reckoned with. With the exception of its most earnest practitioners — strategically isolated within semiotics departments and grad school dormitories — undergrads from across the political spectrum considered political correctness a passing fad or an attempt at academic esotericism rather than an actual recommendation for how to comport yourself in public.

Persons: Ethan Hawke’s, —, changin, ’, ” Organizations: Brown University, Brown Daily Herald Locations: Brown

☆ How to talk about A.I. like an insider
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-21 | by ( Kif Leswing | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

AI ethics describes the desire to prevent AI from causing immediate harm, and often focuses on questions like how AI systems collect and process data and the possibility of bias in areas like housing or employment. AI safety describes the longer-term fear that AI will progress so suddenly that a super-intelligent AI might harm or even eliminate humanity. Alignment is the practice of tweaking an AI model so that it produces the outputs its creators desired. Inference — The act of using an AI model to make predictions or generate text, images, or other content. Large language model — A kind of AI model that underpins ChatGPT and Google's new generative AI features.

☆ When Black Liberation Is the Family Business
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Michael P. Jeffries | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

AN AMERIKAN FAMILY: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created, by Santi Elijah HolleyIn 1994, Tupac Shakur gave a stirring interview to MTV about his career and penchant for controversy. Shakur grew up poor and embedded in a Black revolutionary family. He was not always angry, but he insisted Black rage was logical: America exploited and persecuted Black people, extracting talented survivors like him from the ghetto, and condemning those left behind to violence and early death. “I’m not saying I’m going to rule the world, or I’m going to change the world,” he said. Reading the book, one searches for some other emergent nation, one imagined by generations of Black revolutionaries, solid in its constitution and aims: safety, dignity and self-determination for Black people.

☆ DeepMind cofounder says Google should be 'pretty worried' because old school search engines will be gone in a decade. 'That moment is done.'
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-15 | by ( Alistair Barr | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has a chilling warning for Google, his former employer: The internet as we know it will fundamentally change and "old school" Search will be gone in a decade. During his final period at Google, Suleyman worked on LaMDA, a large language model. With or without Google, the search experience will evolve to be conversational and interactive, Suleyman said on the No Priors podcast. There will be business AIs, government AIs, nonprofit AIs, political AIs, influencer AIs, brand AIs. Now, that's going to become much more dynamic, and interactive.

☆ Codename Burnham: Amazon has a secret new home robot with ChatGPT-like features that understands a lot more of its surroundings.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Amazon is working on an upgraded version of its home robot Astro, powered by 'Burnham' technology. The robot has ChatGPT-like features, using large language models and other advanced AI. This is a new phase for Astro and the latest example of Amazon adding AI models to existing products. In one of these documents related to Burnham, Amazon describes an Astro product that costs $995. As LLMs were growing in scale, they started demonstrating "emergent skills in both inference and problem-solving," one of the Amazon documents stated.

☆ Silicon Valley's Hail Mary moment
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-07 | by ( Linette Lopez | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +14 min

Silicon Valley has entered the Hail Mary phase of its business cycle — a desertic part of a tech-industry downturn where desperation can turn into recklessness. Don't fear the robotsTo understand the Hail Mary moment, it's important to understand the actual capabilities of technology these tech titans are touting. Again, what Musk is describing is AI general intelligence — something much more advanced than the generative AI OpenAI is building on at the moment. During the pandemic when governments were handing out cash and people were stuck at home, the world bought everything Silicon Valley was selling. But those are exactly the types of workers getting laid off in Silicon Valley right now.

☆ Opinion | Why Journalists Have More Freedom Than Professors
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That’s important, because surveys consistently find that “woke” values are twice as prevalent among younger leftists than among older leftists. Over eight in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading U.S. colleges say speakers who say B.L.M. What’s more, seven in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. First, the media is, by definition, an outward-facing, audience-driven enterprise, dependent on some kind of mass market for its viability.

☆ 'Godfather of AI' warns that 'bad actors like Putin or DeSantis' could use AI to win wars or manipulate voters
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( Britney Nguyen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Geoffrey Hinton told MIT Tech Review he worries how AI tools he helped create will be used. He said "bad actors like Putin or DeSantis" could use AI tools in wars and elections. "Look, here's one way it could all go wrong," Geoffrey Hinton told the MIT Tech Review. "We know that a lot of the people who want to use these tools are bad actors like Putin or DeSantis. "I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have," Hinton told the Times.

☆ Watch an A.I. Learn to Write by Reading Nothing but Jane Austen
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Aatish Bhatia | Aatish Bhatia Spent Weeks Reading Dozens Of A.I. Research Articles | Training Tiny Language Models On His Computer. Before Coming To The Times | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +12 min

This is how language models usually start off: They guess randomly and produce gibberish. Over many, many rounds of training, language models can learn to write. As language models grow larger, the patterns that they learn can become increasingly complex. More is differentOther than the additional fine-tuning stages, the primary difference between nanoGPT and the language model underlying chatGPT is size. Large language models can become highly unpredictable, as evidenced by Microsoft Bing A.I.’s early interactions with my colleague Kevin Roose.

☆ Here are Wednesday's biggest analyst calls: Tesla, Coinbase, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Roku & more
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Michael Bloom | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +7 min

Here are Wednesday's biggest calls on Wall Street: Needham upgrades TransUnion to buy from hold Needham upgraded the stock after its earnings report Tuesday. Deutsche Bank reiterates Apple as buy Deutsche said it's standing by its buy rating heading into earnings next week. Bank of America downgrades Danaher to neutral from buy Bank of America downgraded the commercial products company after a "disappointing" earnings report. Bank of America reiterates General Motors as buy Bank of America said it's standing by its buy rating after the company's earnings on Tuesday. " Bank of America reiterates Roku as buy Bank of America said it's bullish heading into Roku earnings after the bell on Wednesday.

☆ An AI safety expert outlined a range of speculative doomsday scenarios, from weaponization to power-seeking behavior
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-15 | by ( Will Gendron | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

A research paper by an AI safety expert speculates on future nightmarish scenarios involving the tech. A recent paper authored by Dan Hendrycks, an AI safety expert and director of the Center for AI Safety, highlights a number of speculative risks posed by unchecked development of increasingly intelligent AI. Emergent goals: It's possible that, as AI systems become more complex, they obtain the capability to create their own objectives. An AI safety expert outlined a range of speculative doomsday scenarios from weaponization to power-seeking behavior. A similar sentiment was recently expressed in an open letter signed by Elon Musk and a number of other AI safety experts.

☆ This is what happened when 25 AI avatars were let loose in a virtual town
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Researchers let 25 AI avatars loose in a virtual town. "To be honest, I don't like Sam Moore," the AI Tom said. Jaime Sevilla, an AI researcher not involved in the study, told Insider the models behind the study could be applied to non-player characters in video games. After all, the AI agents in the study were prone to hallucinations — like failing to recall certain events — which he attributes to how the model was trained. While researchers concluded their AI agents displayed emergent human behaviors, Woolridge said "we need to be skeptical" and "question" what AI tells us at face value.

☆ ChatGPT may be able to predict stock movements, finance professor shows
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Kif Leswing | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Alejandro Lopez-Lira, a finance professor at the University of Florida, says that large language models may be useful when forecasting stock prices. If ChatGPT can display the emergent ability to understand headlines from financial news and how they might impact stock prices, it could could put high-paying jobs in the financial industry at risk. About 35% of financial jobs are at risk of being automated by AI, Goldman Sachs estimated in a March 26 note. But the specifics of the experiment also show how far so-called "large language models" are from being able to do many finance tasks. "On the regulation side, if we have computers just reading the headlines, headlines will matter more, and we can see if everyone should have access to machines such as GPT," said Lopez-Lira.

☆ Health misinformation is lowering U.S. life expectancy, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf says
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-11 | by ( Meg Tirrell | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

watch nowLife expectancy in the U.S. is between three and five years lower than the average in other high-income countries — and the gap comes in part from misinformation, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said. He said there's a need for better regulation, including "specific authorities at FDA, FTC and other areas" to root out misinformation. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf testifies before a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing to examine an update on the ongoing Federal response to COVID-19, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., June 16, 2022. The FDA commissioner spoke about multiple topics including efforts to cut drug prices, a priority for the Biden administration and lawmakers from both parties in Congress. Incentives for researchCaliff is also encouraging the drug industry to consider investments in neglected areas of research.

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