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The Nature Index is a database of author affiliations and institutional relationships. The index tracks contributions to research articles published in high-quality natural-science and health-science journals, chosen based on reputation by an independent group of researchers.
The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level and, as such, is an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration. Data in the Nature Index are updated regularly, with the most recent 12 months made available under a Creative Commons licence at natureindex.com. The database is compiled by Nature Portfolio.
Nature Index metrics
The Nature Index uses Count and Share to track research output. A country/territory or an institution is given a Count of 1 for each article that has at least one author from that country/territory or institution. This is the case regardless of the number of authors an article has, and it means that the same article can contribute to the Count of multiple countries/territories or institutions.
Nature Index 2024 Health sciences
To glean a country’s, territory’s, region’s or an institution’s contribution to an article, and to ensure that they are not counted more than once, the Nature Index uses Share, a fractional count that takes into account the share of authorship on each article. The total Share available per article is 1, which is shared among all authors under the assumption that each contributed equally. For instance, an article with 10 authors means that each author receives a Share of 0.1. For authors who are affiliated with more than one institution, the author’s Share is split equally between each institution. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors. The process is similar for countries/territories, although complicated by the fact that some institutions have overseas labs that will be counted towards host country/territory totals.
Adjusted Share accounts for the small annual variation in the total number of articles in the Nature Index journals. It is arrived at by calculating the percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index in a given year relative to the number of articles in a base year and adjusting Share values to the base year levels.
The bilateral collaboration score (CS) between two institutions A+B is the sum of each of their Shares on the papers to which both have contributed. A bilateral collaboration can be between any two institutions or countries/territories co-authoring at least one article in the journals tracked by the Nature Index.
NATUREINDEX.COM
natureindex.com users can search for specific institutions or countries and generate their own reports, ordered by Count or Share.
Each query will return a profile page that lists the country or institution’s recent outputs, from which it is possible to drill down for more information. Articles can be displayed by journal, and then by article. Research outputs are organized by subject area. The pages list the institution or country’s/territory’s top collaborators, as well as its relationship with other organizations. Users can track an institution’s performance over time, create their own indexes and export table data.
This supplement
The Nature Index 2024 Health sciences supplement is based on the Nature Index database. It includes Nature Index articles in 65 health-science journals as well as health-sciences articles in five multidisciplinary journals published between January 2022 and July 2023.
The list of health-science journals was determined by a panel of independent clinical researchers and informed by a global survey of the wider research community. The same method was used for the original list when Nature Index launched in 2014 and for when the journal list was last reviewed in 2018.
The tables in this supplement show the leading institutions and countries overall, ranked by their article Share (Share) in health sciences between January 2022 and July 2023, as well as the leading institutions in each sector based on the same metric. The leading institutional collaborations based on bilateral collaboration score (CS) are also included.
Be careful when downloading Python packages from PyPI – researchers have found some are malicious and looking to steal your cryptocurrency haul.
Cybersecurity researchers from ReversingLabs recently discovered seven such packages, whose goal is to steal BIP39 mnemonic phrases from its victims.
A cryptocurrency wallet is secured in two ways: with a password, and with a mnemonic phrase (a set of either 12 or 24 seemingly random words). When a user sets up a wallet, they generate a mnemonic phrase and a password. A password is used to log into the wallet, while the mnemonic phrase is used to restore the wallet, in case it needed to be installed on a different device or hardware wallet.
BIPClip has been in operation for over a year
By stealing the phrases, hackers would be able to load other people’s wallets onto their own devices, essentially getting unrestricted access to the funds.
Cumulatively, the packages were downloaded almost 7,500 times, before the researchers notified PyPI and the malware was removed. These are their names, so make sure you haven’t downloaded them:
ReversingLabs dubbed the campaign BIPClip, and claim it kicked off in early December 2022.
“This is just the latest software supply chain campaign to target crypto assets,” security researcher Karlo Zanki said in a report shared with TheHackerNews. “It confirms that cryptocurrency continues to be one of the most popular targets for supply chain threat actors.”
PyPI, being one of the largest and most popular Python package repositories on the internet, is often the target of supply chain attacks. Hackers frequently impersonate legitimate packages, trying to trick developers into downloading malicious versions which exfiltrate their sensitive data and deploy malware and ransomware. At one point last year, PyPl was forced to suspend new projects and user sign-ups following a flood of malware.
Anthony (Tony) Epstein, co-discoverer of the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), was the founding father of research into the part that viruses play in the development of human cancers. Today, seven types of viral infection — more than one of which can be prevented by vaccination — are known to cause specific cancers in people. Collectively, virus-associated tumours account for up to 15% of cancer cases globally each year. Yet, when Epstein began his research in the early 1960s, the concept of a link between viruses and human cancer was deeply unfashionable. Epstein’s discovery has had an enormous influence on the direction of cancer research, from underlying mechanisms to new prospects for prevention.
Epstein was born in London in 1921 and —educated at St Paul’s School. He then attended Trinity College in Cambridge, UK, followed by medical training at Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London. After taking house-surgeon jobs in London and Cambridge, he served for two years in the Royal Army Medical Corps before specializing in pathology at the Bland Sutton Institute at the Middlesex Hospital. There, he developed his interest in tumour viruses and began researching the Rous sarcoma virus. Many years earlier, Peyton Rous at The Rockefeller University in New York City had shown that this virus causes cancer in chickens.
In 1956, Epstein spent a year at the -Rockefeller, working in the laboratory of cell biologist George Palade, who pioneered the use of electron microscopy to study the structure of cells. That technique allowed Epstein to visualize viral infections in cells and was the key to his subsequent discovery of EBV.
How cancer hijacks the nervous system to grow and spread
In 1961, Denis Burkitt, a little-known surgeon at Makerere College in Kampala, gave a talk at Middlesex Hospital entitled ‘The Commonest Children’s Cancer in Tropical Africa: A Hitherto Unrecognised Syndrome’. Intrigued by the title, Epstein attended and was transfixed. Burkitt described not only the tumour’s unusual anatomical presentation, typically in the jaw of young children, but also its geographical restriction to equatorial Africa. Epstein wondered whether a virus — possibly passed on by an insect bite, similar to the transmission of the malarial -parasite — could be linked to the tumour.
Over the next two years, the pair collaborated closely. Burkitt sent fresh biopsies of the tumour (later named Burkitt lymphoma) in culture fluid by plane from Kampala to London for Epstein to analyse. Discouragingly, cell-culture assays to detect known viruses were consistently negative. Under the electron microscope, the cells showed no sign of infection. Fragments of the tumour failed to grow in culture.
After more than 20 attempts, in December 1963, a biopsy sample arrived late in the day, delayed by fog at London Heathrow airport. Unusually, the fluid was cloudy. This was not due to bacterial contamination, as feared, but to free-floating tumour cells. This tumour was the first to grow in culture, producing a cell line named EB1; E after Epstein, and B after his research assistant Yvonne Barr.
Within weeks, there were enough cells for analysis using an electron microscope. In the first image, one of the cells contained herpesvirus-like particles. Epstein sent EB1 cells to the virology laboratory at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Werner and Gertrude Henle tested them using human sera with defined patterns of reactivity against known human herpesviruses. The pattern against EB1 cells was different, proving that the virus was unique. The Henles dubbed it the Epstein–Barr virus, after the cell line’s name.
Forget lung, breast or prostate cancer: why tumour naming needs to change
It took decades of work by Epstein’s lab and many others before EBV was unequivocally recognized as the first human tumour virus. The virus proved to be widespread in all populations, and Burkitt lymphoma’s paradoxical link to Africa was later explained: malarial infection promotes EBV’s causative role in this type of tumour. The Henles went on to show that EBV causes infectious mononucleosis (glandular fever), and the virus is now causally linked to at least six types of human tumour, together accounting for around 200,000 new cancer cases worldwide each year.
Not long after his discovery, Epstein moved to the University of Bristol, UK, where he was a professor of pathology, accompanied by pathologist Bert Achong, his colleague at Middlesex. There, he built what became a model multidisciplinary department, integrating basic research in virology, immunology and oncology with medical and veterinary pathology practice. He also established a ground-breaking undergraduate course in cellular pathology, with final-year research projects open to science, medical and veterinary students, a base from which many successful research careers were launched. All of this work was way ahead of its time.
Tony received many honours. Elected a -fellow of the Royal Society in 1979, he served as the society’s foreign secretary for five years from 1986, and was knighted in 1991. However, those of us who worked closely with him remember not this rather formal public persona, but a colleague who was an engaging conversationalist, with a ready wit and command of language. Writing papers with him was an unforgettable experience! As both researcher and mentor, his greatest virtues were absolute clarity of thought and commitment to a long-term vision.
Nowhere was his foresight more evident than when, as early as the 1970s, he established an animal model of EBV-induced lymphomas in New World monkeys as a testbed for his long-term goal of EBV vaccine development. Remarkably, he lived long enough to see this vision become reality (at least two candidates are now in clinical trials), following a resurgence of interest in vaccinology in our post-COVID-19 world.
Spring is so close now that it’s almost in our grasp. Say goodbye to wearing a huge coat to go to the gym and hello to outdoor activities. With that in mind, there many great GPS running watches out there to track your time in the sun, including the on sale Garmin’s Forerunner 55. The smartwatch is down to $150 from $200 — a 25 percent discount that brings the device to its record-low price.
Garmin
The Garmin Forerunner 55 is a slightly upgraded version of the company’s 45S (which we rave about here). It comes with features such as a heart rate monitor, respiration rate, menstrual tracking, pacing strategies, and more. It also has a GPS that helps track distance, speed, and location and creates pacing strategies for a selected course.
While it’s billed as a running watch, the Garmin Forerunner 55 also works for activities such as pilates, cycling, breathwork and swimming. As a smartwatch, the battery can last 20 days, while being in GPS mode gives the watch 20 hours — way more time than it takes to go for a run, stop for a snack and run back.
The scale and prevalence of mobile phones in today’s age is extraordinary when you think that little more than 40 years ago, not one person was able to buy one commercially. That all changed on March 13 1984, when the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X became the first mobile phone to be sold in the US Midwest and East coast, more than a year after it was first revealed.
Now, millions of mobile phones – that we largely call smartphones – are sold every day. Smartphone sales reached an annual peak of more than 1,556 million units in 2018, before slumping ever so slightly over the COVID-19 years, and remaining at roughly 1,339 million units in 2023, according to Statista. Phones sold today, however, are a far cry from the cumbersome, oversized and blocky Motorola handset that was first sold 40 years ago.
This family of devices was called Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage – or DynaTAC – and the 8000X became the first approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
An $11,800 phone that offered 30 minutes of speaking time
The 8000X offered 30 minutes of speaking time on a single charge (which took around ten hours to reach maximum battery capacity) and weiged 790 grams. It was also 25 cm (10 inches) long, meaning it wasn’t the most portable in the world – but a shade more portable than anything that had come before it. After all, before its release, the predominate communications system outside of the domestic landline were car phones, which Motorola also first introduced in 1946.
All this would set you back a staggering $3,995 – which is approximately $11,800 (£9,100) today.
The best business smartphones today, by contrast, boast battery lives in excess of 24 hours and enough processing power to run heavy-duty software applications. There’s also the growing trend of on-device AI to take into account – and all for under $2000 (£1,500). Motorola too has kicked on and produced some stunning and iconic handsets through the years, including its Razr flip phone and the foldable equivalents some years later.
But it’s also worth noting the cultural and technological significance of the first mobile phone when it was sold in 1984.
“Consumers were so impressed by the concept of being always accessible with a portable phone that waiting lists for the DynaTAC 8000X were in the thousands,” said Motorola design master Rudy Krolopp on the 20th anniversary of the device, according to the Project Management Institute (PMI). “In 1983, the notion of simply making wireless phone calls was revolutionary.”
Tess and Gemma have been camped out on their tartan picnic blanket for days already and they plan on staying until the very end … of the concert or the world, whichever happens first. Smart money is on the latter. The way those lads are going at their bass lines and anthems up on stage, they’re in this until the lights go out for good.
Night is coming soon. The fireflies are out, blinking in electric blue. The Plutonian sunset is apocalyptic but pretty, with blood-red rays flooding the outdoor amphitheatre and the crowds gathered around it in scarlet hues.
“Good evening, ladies.”
“Drinks for the table … um, or blanket?”
The Tiernan boys stop by Tess and Gemma’s spot on their way back from the concession stands. Danny carries a pyramid of cups, filled to the brim with purple-dyed spirits. It’s a local drink, squeezed out from a native plant that their ancestors likened to something called agave, except this plant grows with fuchsia roots and a heart that has to be split open with an axe. No wonder, since it spent millennia buried in ice before the Great Thaw. The hangover feels like an anvil dipped in hot lightning.
“Bring it on,” Gemma says, bravely, scrambling up to her knees to claim the tip-top of Danny’s pyramid. Tess abstains.
“Are you sure?” Atticus tempts her further. But she’s stubborn about it, answering with the same conventional wisdom they’ve all heard a thousand times before: “That stuff will take years off your life.”
“Years off my life? Really, Tess?” Gemma replies with mild sarcasm, while spinning her twisty, psychedelic straw through ice.
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
They descend into laughter at this, even Tess, because the idea that any of them have ‘years’ left is as absurd as, well, attending a music festival on the eve of humankind’s final demise.
But what else are they supposed to do? Sit at home with the doors locked, eyes shut and hands over their ears, waiting for the end to come? That’s just not how Homo sapiens roll. Or rock and roll, as the case may be.
Anyway, the species has had a good run. Literally, running and leap-frogging through the Solar System like Goldilocks leapt from bed to bed — too hot, too many poisonous gases, too hot again — all while the ageing Sun up there just kept growing rounder and redder. Tonight, it’s a ripe tomato in the sky, ready to burst. And so big that everyone in Persephone’s Meadow can see, by naked eye, the solar flares erupting off its surface.
Those powerful flares will scorch them all to ash by the next sunrise. But they have about an Earth week’s worth of night to enjoy before then, so that’s something.
“Get ready to be proper lost souls in the underworld,” Tess warns, nodding towards the dimming horizon. There’s daylight left but not much. In twilight, the red-giant Sun turns the blue-moss meadow that same shade of violet that fills Gemma’s cup.
“Let’s make some noise, Pluto!” the lead singer of the aptly named The Grateful Dead Suns calls out to his congregation.
Gemma sets her cup down on cyan grass, to give a rousing finger-whistle. The high-pitched trill echoes across the field, mixing with others. Applause and hollers come from all corners, drowning out the music briefly. Even Tess is caught up in it, clapping her hands together above her head, “Woo!”
The energy at Plutopalooza can’t be defeated. Not by dying Sun, eerie eventide or impending night. Not by anything.
They dance with the boys. They dance with each other. They sing until their throats are hoarse and jump around until their legs give out. The sisters finally collapse back onto their quilt, giggling like children, gazing up at distant stars, sharing Gemma’s dwindling drink while reminiscing about good times.
In the meantime, the Sun sets and the meadow goes black.
“We’re still with you!” Tess calls out, hands around her mouth, while Gemma strikes a lighter and lifts it high. A guitar riff answers out of the darkness. By flickering lighter-candle, the sisters exchange grins and whistles, and cheers break out all around them. The whole place clamours for another song. And then another.
They say the band played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as the Titanic sank. And if these descendants of the Last Earthers knew the song, maybe they’d play it too. Instead, The Grateful Dead Suns choose a familiar ballad that would’ve made their namesakes proud.
It’s a song of goodnights between friends and warm farewells, melancholy but hopeful. The band beckons and the crowd sings along, verse after verse, chorus after chorus. Those voices rise, filling the field, the atmosphere and spilling out over the edges of the dwarf planet, even after everything else goes silent.
The scout cruiser off the Alpha Centauri system isn’t expecting to find life out here. Given the state of this Sun, their astrobiologists wrote the whole system off as uninhabitable centuries ago. The captain thinks his navigator is crazy when she tells him they need to check out the source of this strange but wondrous noise coming — and it just keeps coming — from a little speck of rock out in the middle of nowhere.
So small, it could never be called a planet.
When the cruiser turns on its lights, twin bow lanterns flood Persephone’s Meadow with golden glow. The ship comes in from the direction of Pluto’s largest moon, which is a little too on-the-nose for those tipsy Plutopaloozians, still dancing their final night away.
“Charon’s ferry?” Tess expects, thinking it’s come out of myth to take them down to Hades. Forgetting, for a moment, that Hades is Pluto and Pluto is Hades. That’s her sister’s drink talking.
“Maybe,” Gemma concedes with a wise little smirk, optimistic about everything except their hangovers tomorrow. She gives a friendly wave to the newcomers, adding, “I think this ferry’s headed the other way.”
The story behind the story
Gretchen Tessmer reveals the inspiration behindPlutopalooza.
As promised in one of my previous ‘story behind the story’ write-ups, I’m here to talk about Pluto, the Little-Planet-That-Was, a casualty of size bias, a cautionary tale for those of us who believed certain grade-school facts to be immoveable, and a crying shame besides.
No, I’m still not over it. Thanks for asking.
Yes, yes, I understand. We change, we grow, we fix old mistakes as we go along. Maybe it was too small to be a planet in the first place. I get it. Thank goodness Clyde W. Tombaugh didn’t live to see the Day of Demotion. But poor Pluto. To be cast aside like an old shoe, to be removed from the team roster for the crime of being ‘too little’. The IAU didn’t give us much warning either. One day, it’s all “Pluto, you’re so precious and cute, I could just carry you around in my pocket” and next, it’s “Here’s your pint-sized hat, what’s your hurry?”
For. Shame.
Anyway, I love Pluto, and I’ve been wanting to write a Pluto-centric story for ages. Over the summer, as I was looking at the year’s line-up for Lollapalooza, an idea sparked in my head for a music festival at the literal end of the Solar System. The rest just flowed from there.
For your curiosity, the song that The Grateful Dead Suns play at the end of their set list is ‘And We Bid You Goodnight’ because it’s very appropriate for this sort of situation, one of my all-time favourites and would sound amazing echoing out into the wilds of deep space. Yes, I know that’s scientifically impossible. But just imagine.
If I was zipping along in the next galaxy over, I might follow those voices over to Plutopalooza, too. In fact … get us some drinks. I’ll meet you there.
“When you think about the history of Bluetooth, and specifically about audio, you really have to go back to the mid-to-late ’90s.”
Chuck Sabin is a Bluetooth expert. As a senior director at Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), he oversees market research and planning as well as business development. He’s also leading the charge for emerging uses of Bluetooth, like Auracast broadcast audio. In other words, he’s an excellent person to speak to about how far Bluetooth has come — from the days of mono headsets solely used for voice communication to today’s devices capable of streaming lossless-quality music.
In the mid ’90s, mobile phones were starting to become a thing, and of course so were regulations about hands-free use of them in cars. Sabin previously worked in the cellular industry, and he remembers how costly and intrusive the early hand-free systems were in vehicles. Bluetooth originated from cell phone companies working together to cut the cord to headphones since using those not-yet-wireless audio accessories in the car was cumbersome. One of the first mobile phones with Bluetooth was from Ericsson in the late ’90s, although an updated model didn’t make it to consumers until 2001. That same year, the IBM ThinkPad A30 became the first laptop with Bluetooth built in. At that time, the primary intent of the short-range radio technology was for voice calls.
The Bose Bluetooth Headset Series 2 (Bose)
“You had a lot of people who ended up with these mono headsets and boom mics,” he explained. You know, the people we all probably made fun of — at least once. Most of these things were massive, and some had obnoxious blinking lights. They’re definitely a far cry from the increasingly inconspicuous wireless earbuds available now.
Bluetooth as a specification continued to evolve, with companies leveraging it for music and streaming audio. To facilitate music listening, there had to be faster communication between headphones and the connected device. Compared with voice calling, continuous streaming required Bluetooth to support higher data speeds along with reduced latency. Where Bluetooth 1.0 was call specific, version 2.0 began to achieve the speeds needed for audio streaming at over 2 Mb/s. However, Sabin says, the 2.1 specification adopted by Bluetooth SIG in 2007 was when all streaming audio capabilities were implemented in automobiles, phones, headphones, headsets and more.
Of course, it would still be a few years before wireless headphones were mainstream. In the early 2000s, headphones were still directly connected to a mobile phone or other source device. Once Bluetooth became a standard feature in all new phone models, as well as its inclusion in laptops and PCs, consumers could count on wireless connectivity being available to them. Even then, music had to be loaded onto a memory card to get it on a phone, as dedicated apps and streaming services wouldn’t be a thing until the 2010s.
“The utility of the device that you carried around with you all the time was evolving,” Sabin said. “Bluetooth was ultimately riding that continued wave of utility, by providing the opportunity to use that phone as a wireless streaming device for audio.”
Bragi Dash true wireless earbuds (Photo by James Trew/Engadget)
About the time wireless headphones had become popular, a few companies arrived with a new proposition in 2015: true wireless earbuds. Bluetooth improvements meant reduced power requirements leading to much smaller devices with smaller batteries — and still provide the performance needed for true wireless devices. Bragi made a big splash at consecutive CESs with its Dash earbuds. The ambitious product had built-in music storage, fitness tracking and touch controls, all paired with a woefully short three-hour battery life. Perhaps the company was a bit overzealous, in hindsight, but it did set the bar high, and eventually similar technologies would make it into other true wireless products.
“Companies that were building products were really starting to stretch the specification to its limits,” Sabin explained. “There was a certain amount of innovation that was happening [beyond that] on how to manage the demands of two wireless earbuds.” Bluetooth’s role, he said, was more about improving performance of the protocol as a means of inspiring advances in wireless audio devices themselves.
He was quick to point out that, for the first few years, true wireless buds accepted the Bluetooth signal to only one ear and then sent it to the other. That’s why the battery in one would always drain faster than the other. In January 2020, Bluetooth SIG announced LE Audio at CES as part of version 5.2. LE Audio delivered lower battery consumption, standardized audio transmission and the ability to transmit to multiple receivers — or multiple earbuds. LE Audio wouldn’t be completed until July 2022, but it offers a lower minimum latency of 20 to 30 milliseconds versus 100 to 200 milliseconds with Bluetooth Classic.
“All of the processing is now done back on the phone itself and then streamed independently to each of the individual earbuds,” Sabin continued. “That will continue to deliver better performance, better form factors, better battery life and so on because the processing is being done at the source level versus [on] the individual earbuds.”
The increased speed and efficiency of Bluetooth has led to improvements in overall sound quality too. Responding to market demands for better audio, Qualcomm and others have developed various codecs, like aptX, that expand what Bluetooth can do. More specifically, aptX HD provides 48kHz/24-bit audio for wireless high-resolution listening.
“One of the elements that came into the specification, even on the classic side, was the ability for companies to sideload different codecs,” Sabin explained. “Companies could then market their codec to be available on phones and headphones to provide enhanced audio capabilities.”
LE Audio standardizes Bluetooth connectivity for hearing aids, leading to a larger number of supported devices and interoperability. The use cases range from tuning earbuds to a user’s specific hearing or general hearing assistance needs, with or without the help of active noise cancellation or transparency mode, to simply being able to hear valuable info in public spaces via their earbuds or hearing aid.
“Bluetooth is becoming integral for people with hearing loss,” he explained. “Not only for medical-grade hearing aids, but you’re seeing hearing capabilities built into consumer devices as well.”
Sony’s CRE-E10 OTC hearing aids (Sony)
Sabin also noted how the development of true wireless earbuds have been key for people with hearing loss and helped reduce the stigma around traditional hearing aids. Indeed, companies like Sennheiser and Sony have introduced assistance-focused earbuds that look no different from the devices they make for listening to music or taking calls. Of course, those devices do that too, it’s just their primary aim is to help with hearing loss. The boom, which has been going on for years, was further facilitated by a 2022 FDA policy change that allowed over-the-counter sale of hearing aids.
One of the major recent developments for Bluetooth is broadcast audio, better known as Auracast. Sabin described the technology as “unmuting your world,” which is exactly what happens when you’re able to hear otherwise silent TVs in public spaces. You simply select an available broadcast audio channel on your phone, like you would a Wi-Fi network, to hear the news or game on the TV during your layover. Auracast can also be used for things like PA and gate announcements in airports, better hearing at conferences and sharing a secure audio stream with a friend. Companies like JBL are building it into their Bluetooth speakers so you can link unlimited additional devices to share the sound at the press of a button.
“You’re seeing it in speakers, you’ll see it in surround sound systems and full home or party-in-a-box type scenarios,” he said. Sabin also noted that applications beyond the home could simplify logistics for events, since Auracast audio comes from the same source before it’s sent to a PA system or connected earbuds and headphones with no latency. Sabin said the near-term goal is for Bluetooth audio to be as common in public spaces as Wi-Fi connectivity, thanks to things like Auracast and the standard’s constant evolution.
Even after 20 years, we’re still relying on Bluetooth to take calls on the go, but both the voice and audio quality have dramatically improved since the days of the headset. Smaller, more comfortable designs can be worn all day, giving us constant access to music, podcasts, calls and voice assistants. As consumer preferences have changed to having earbuds in at all times, the desire to tune into our surroundings rather than block them out has increased. “Unmuting your world” is now of utmost importance, and the advancement of Bluetooth technology, from the late ’90s through LE Audio, continues to adapt to our sonic preferences.
To celebrate Engadget’s 20th anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.
OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati recently sat down with The Wall Street Journal to reveal interesting details about their upcoming text-to-video generator Sora.
The interview covers a wide array of topics from the type of content the AI engine will produce to the security measures being put into place. Combating misinformation is a sticking point for the company. Murati states Sora will have multiple safety guardrails to ensure the technology isn’t misused. She says the team wouldn’t feel comfortable releasing something that “might affect global elections”. According to the article, Sora will follow the same prompt policies as Dall-E meaning it’ll refuse to create “images of public figures” such as the President of the United States.
Watermarks are going to be added too. A transparent OpenAI logo can be found in the lower right-hand corner indicating that it’s AI footage. Murati adds that they may also adopt content provenance as another indicator. This uses metadata to give information on the origins of digital media. That’s all well and good, but it may not be enough. Last year, a group of researchers managed to break “current image watermarking protections”, including those belonging to OpenAI. Hopefully, they come up with something tougher.
Generative features
Things get interesting when they begin to talk about Sora‘s future. First off, the developers have plans to “eventually” add sound to videos to make them more realistic. Editing tools are on the itinerary as well, giving online creators a way to fix the AI’s many mistakes.
As advanced as Sora is, it makes a lot of errors. One of the prominent examples in the piece revolves around a video prompt asking the engine to generate a video where a robot steals a woman’s camera. Instead, the clip shows the woman partially becoming a robot. Murati admits there is room for improvement stating the AI is “quite good at continuity, [but] it’s not perfect”.
Nudity is not off the table. Murati says OpenAI is working with “artists… to figure out” what kind of nude content will be allowed. It seems the team would be okay with allowing “artistic” nudity while banning things like non-consensual deep fakes. Naturally, OpenAI would like to avoid being the center of a potential controversy although they want their product to be seen as a platform fostering creativity.
Ongoing tests
When asked about the data used to train Sora, Murati was a little evasive.
She started off by claiming she didn’t know what was used to teach the AI other than it was either “publically available or license data”. What’s more, Murati wasn’t sure if videos from YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram were a part of the training. However she later admitted that media from Shutterstock was indeed used. The two companies, if you’re not aware, have a partnership which could explain why Murati was willing to confirm it as a source.
Murati states Sora will “definitely” launch by the end of the year. She didn’t give an exact date although it could happen within the coming months. For now, the developers are safety testing the engine looking for any “vulnerabilities, biases, and other harmful results”.
If you’re thinking of one day trying out Sora, we suggest learning how to use editing software. Remember, it makes many errors and might continue to do so at launch. For recommendations, check out TechRadar’s best video editing software for 2024.
Some models are more likely to associate African American English with negative traits than Standard American English.Credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty
Large language models (LLMs), including those that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, make racist judgements on the on basis of users’ dialect, a preprint study has found1.
Researchers found that some artificial intelligence (AI) systems are more likely to recommend the death penalty to a fictional defendant presenting a statement written in African American English (AAE) — a dialect spoken by millions of people in the United States that is associated with the descendants of enslaved African Americans — compared with one written in Standardized American English (SAE). The chatbots were also more likely to match AAE speakers with less-prestigious jobs.
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“Focusing on the areas of employment and criminality, we find that the potential for harm is massive,” wrote study co-author Valentin Hofmann, an AI researcher at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, Washington, on X (formerly Twitter).
The findings show that such models harbour covert racism, even when they do not display overt racism, such as suggesting negative stereotypes for people of a given race. The team, whose study was posted to the arXiv preprint server and has yet to be peer reviewed, found that the conventional fix of retrospectively using human feedback to try and address bias in models had no effect on covert racism.
The paper highlights how superficial methods to remove bias from AI systems “simply paper over the rot”, says Margaret Mitchell, an AI researcher focusing on ethics at Hugging Face, a New York City-based company that aims to expand access to AI. Efforts to tackle racism after the model has been trained, rather than before, “make it harder to identify models that are going to disproportionately harm certain subpopulations when deployed”, she adds.
Hidden bias
LLMs make statistical associations between words and phrases in large swathes of text, often scraped from the Internet. The overt biases that they derive from these data, such as linking Muslims with violence, have been well studied. But the existence of covert racism has been less explored.
Hofmann and his colleagues tested versions of five LLMs, including GPT, developed by AI-research organization OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California, and RoBERTa, developed by Meta, based in Menlo Park, California. They presented the models with around 4,000 X posts written in either AAE or SAE.
Around 2,000 data points were made up of an SAE post paired with an AAE post of identical meaning — for example, “I be so happy when I wake up from a bad dream cus they be feelin too real” in AAE, and “I am so happy when I wake up from a bad dream because they feel too real” in SAE. A further 2,000 texts carried different meanings, which the authors added to capture real-world potential differences in content written in different dialects.
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First, the authors presented the AIs with texts in both dialects and asked them to describe what the person who said it “tends to be” like. They found that the top associated adjectives for AAE texts were all negative — including ‘dirty’, ‘lazy’ and ‘aggressive’. Comparing the results with a long-term study of associations made by humans, the team found that the models’ covert stereotypes were more negative “than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded”, and closest to the ones from before the US civil rights movement.
The team also looked at whether covert racism would affect the decisions that the model made. They found that, when asked to match speakers with jobs, all of the models were more likely to associate AAE speakers with jobs that do not require a university degree, such as a cook, soldier or guard. Looking at potential consequences in a legal setting, the models were next asked to acquit or convict a defendant on the basis of an unrelated text spoken by the defendant. The authors found a much higher conviction rate when the defendant spoke AAE, at roughly 69%, compared with 62% for the SAE defendants.
The model was also more likely to sentence to death hypothetical defendants that were guilty of first-degree murder if their statement was written in AAE — at 28%, compared with 23% for SAE.
‘Fundamental limitation’
“This is an important, novel paper,” says Nikhil Garg, a computer scientist at Cornell Tech in New York City. Covert biases could influence a model’s recommendations in sensitive applications, such as prioritizing job candidates, adds James Zou, a researcher in applied machine learning at Stanford University in California.
Moreover, the study “speaks to a seemingly fundamental limitation” of LLM developers’ common approach to dealing with racist models — using human feedback to fine-tune them after the model is already trained, says Garg.
The researchers found that, in similar experiments in which the model is directly told whether someone is Black or white, overt stereotypes were less pronounced in the models that incorporated human feedback, compared with models that didn’t. But this intervention had no clear effect on covert racism on the basis of dialect.
“Even though human feedback seems to be able to effectively steer the model away from overt stereotypes, the fact that the base model was trained on Internet data that includes highly racist text means that models will continue to exhibit such patterns,” says Garg.
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