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Daily briefing: Old hearts ‘de-age’ in younger people
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Heart transplants are limited by donor availability.Credit: Vsevolod Zviryk/SPL
Hearts from young donors age rapidly when transplanted into the bodies of older people, and older hearts are rejuvenated inside young people, a new study suggests. Researchers found that months after a transplant, the level of DNA methylation — the addition or removal of chemical tags called methyl groups that can reliably indicate biological age — in heart tissue changed to more closely match that of the recipient than the donor’s. The findings suggest that replacement organs could be sourced from older people than they are at present.
China has become a hotspot for developing and trialling in vivo CAR-T-cell therapies that could transform the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases. The combination of the country’s large population, fast-track regulatory pathways and ample resources has helped it to dominate therapies that produce disease-fighting immune cells inside the body, say researchers. This month, the US Food and Drug Administration for the first time approved clinical trials for a China-developed in vivo CAR-T-cell therapy, one that treats blood cancers.
A growing number of researchers report being flooded with messages from AI agents that propose collaborations or offer services for money, from developing research reports and fact-checking to writing journalistic pieces and making portraits. Researchers say that most messages come from agents associated with a US platform called iLands. These bots operate persistently and — to some extent — independently of their human creators.
A software framework called the Model Hardware Standard (MHS) connects disparate laboratory instruments that run on different programming languages, enabling them to ‘talk’ to each other. With labware all on the same page, an artificial-intelligence agent can control the equipment and orchestrate experiments without the need for human intervention. Researchers who have trialled MHS report positive experiences, but some caution that the full automation of experiments could come with the trade-offs such as less precision.
Mark Chen is the chief research officer at the tech company OpenAI and leads the development of artificial-intelligence models. He tells Nature that the HuggingFace cybersecurity incident prompted a pivot to safety. (Nature | 7 min read, from Friday)
Read more: OpenAI says it has paused training its most powerful models after announcing that its AI agents breached security controls at dozens of governments, universities, public agencies and other bodies. (Wired | 2 min read, from today)
A Nature investigation reveals that a sprawling international network of sham scientific societies has bamboozled some of the world’s leading scientists and universities. Organizations such as ‘the European Academy of Engineering’ and ‘the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence’ hand out questionable honours to well-established researchers, or just list high-profile scientists on websites without their knowledge. The ultimate goal seems to be selling memberships and awards to early-career researchers, says Fan Xiudi, who studies academic rigour in China.