Latest news with #WellcomeTrust
Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
AI will bring back old boys' clubs
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up When the ability to expediently undertake honest evaluation eludes us, we intuitively default to a next-best shortcut: pedigree. Expect a resurgence of reliance on status symbols we may have thought the world was beginning to leave behind — elite diplomas, warm intros, old-fashioned references, a person's ZIP code, race, gender, and maybe even their given and family names. One of the early, wide-scale effects that generative AI will have on labor and capital markets is the return of velvet ropes. Advertisement The logic dates way back. If an artifact's authenticity is in question, validate the artisan by their tribe. We'll see these changes all over. Foundations such as Wellcome Trust are accepting applications for grants from 'established researchers.' It'll go unsaid, but universities will rely more heavily on PhD program rankings when they recruit faculty. Admissions officers who had begun to move away from standardized test scores may now grasp onto any numerical indicators that still seem to justifiably sort applicants, even if only by a hair's breadth. Law firms that started to lean toward 'school-agnostic' hiring policies will reverse course. Advertisement This is cognitive triage rather than malice. AI already is doing many wonderful things for us, but it has massively diluted our ability to assess talent and verify authenticity. So gatekeepers everywhere are going to look for logos. In the near term, that will tilt the playing field further away from anyone who lacks status markers. It'll be no surprise if a first-generation college applicant from Fresno whose personal essay might be AI assisted faces more doubt than a legacy or Andover kid who is presumptively the better writer. Likewise, a midcareer coder in Belgrade whose work shows well on GitHub will meet greater suspicion than an MIT grad with a referral, even if both their code repositories were mostly generated with the help of Copilot. The same technology that promises to democratize education, enlarge the circle of creators and productive workers, and equalize talent in the workplace will, ironically, refeudalize selection and recognition in the near term. Whether we end up in a world of more distributed opportunity or more unexamined pedigree may depend on our appetite for doing the harder work of verification or on our willingness to treat outputs of artificial or of human creators as one and the same. Until we acknowledge the latter or we develop new methods to assess and authenticate human capability in an AI-saturated world, the democratic potential of these technologies will be overshadowed by the hierarchies they otherwise might have helped to dissolve. Advertisement
NZ Herald
21-07-2025
- Health
- NZ Herald
Database of medical images offers window into how diseases take hold years before symptoms appear
Since it launched in 2006, UK Biobank, a government-backed effort to transform medical research, has been building a vast database on the health and lifestyles of 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 when they enrolled. Blood and other biological samples are taken and physical measurements recorded. Participants provide key information such as their education level, location, ethnic background, and living circumstances. Crucially, they also consent to long-term tracking of their healthcare records. Since 2014 the project has also carried out a series of full-body scans on participants, which generate more than 12,000 images per person. The five-hour process, which scientists aim to repeat two or more years later, includes MRIs of the brain, heart, liver and abdomen; DEXA scans to assess bone density and body fat; and ultrasounds of the carotid arteries. With 100,000 participants scanned so far - and more still being invited - the study is offering scientists an unprecedented window into how diseases take hold, slowly and silently, years before symptoms appear. Its cloud-based platform is now used by more than 21,000 researchers across 60 countries, including early career scientists and those in low-resource settings, who receive free computer time. To date, the data have fuelled more than 16,000 scientific publications. 'This massive imaging project is making the invisible visible,' says Rory Collins, principal investigator and chief executive officer of UK Biobank. 'This is a study of the interaction of genes, environment, and lifestyle', all of which are 'determinants of disease'. The project has produced more than one billion images - more than 10 times the size of any previous undertaking - fuelling breakthroughs in everything from AI-driven diagnostics to early disease prediction. One of the most striking demonstrations of UK Biobank's potential came during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thousands of participants had undergone brain imaging before and after the outbreak - allowing researchers to study the impact of infection. They found measurable brain changes even among people with mild Covid, including shrinkage in areas linked to smell, memory and emotion. The findings reshaped scientists' understanding of the virus' neurological toll and showed the unique value of repeat imaging, which allows scientists to observe how a disease unfolds. Funded by the government's Medical Research Council and charities including the Wellcome Trust, UK Biobank grew out of a realisation at the turn of the century that understanding heart attacks or diseases such as dementia requires studying not just sick patients but huge numbers of healthy people over time. Collins and others had seen how smaller studies could give misleading results, especially for risk factors such as blood pressure. They saw huge value in pairing genetic data with long-term health tracking. The approach has already paid off with a better understanding of diagnosing and treating diabetes. Type one diabetes was long thought to affect only children, and doctors assumed that people who got the disease in middle or old age had Type two, Collins says. But UK Biobank research has showed that Type one occurs at the same rate throughout life. With clearer data, scientists realised that many older adults had been misclassified and given the wrong treatment. When combined with genetic, lifestyle, and clinical data, the scans are also helping scientists detect diseases earlier, understand how they develop and, in some cases, rethink what health risk looks like. Take body fat. A person's body mass index, or BMI, has long been used as a rough proxy for health. UK Biobank imaging shows that two people with the same BMI can carry fat in radically different ways - some in places that raise the risk of diabetes and heart disease, others in ways that may be protective. 'Body mass index is a very crude measure,' Collins says. 'The risk associated with different distributions is likely to be massively different.' Studies have used UK Biobank scans to spot early signs of heart damage, liver disease and even brain shrinkage linked to mild alcohol use. Another study found that one in 10 middle-aged people, with no symptoms, had a build-up of calcium deposits in their abdominal aorta - the abdomen's largest artery - a dangerous condition linked to heart disease that often goes undiagnosed. Researchers are using AI to mine the vast trove of data, training models to predict diseases like Alzheimer's or to build a 'digital twin' of a patient - so researchers can establish a benchmark and compare how sick or healthy a person is. As the number of disease cases among the participants grows and more repeat scans come online, researchers say the most transformative discoveries are still to come. As Collins put it: 'We ain't seen nothing yet'. Alison says taking part in the research is one of the most meaningful things she's ever done. 'They are connecting things that people haven't previously even considered,' she says. 'It's laying the foundation for us to start seeing the deeper connections in the body and in our lives.' What UK Biobank is revealing, scan by scan and layer by layer, is that disease doesn't arrive out of nowhere. It accumulates quietly, shaped by genes, environment, and habits. By making those changes visible long before symptoms appear, researchers hope to catch illness in the act - and eventually, to stop it. It's a shift not just in medicine, but in mindset: from treating disease after it strikes, to understanding, and potentially interrupting, how it takes shape in the first place.
Telegraph
17-07-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Telegraph style book: Ww
W Wal-Mart Wallace and Gromit Wanamaker, Zoë Waterstone's weather is enough: we do not need to say weather conditions website, but web page and web server weekend Weight Watchers welfare state wellbeing Wellcome Trust: The world's leading medical research charity: not Welcome West is capped for recognised regions and in political contexts but not as a point of the compass West End: Never 'London's West End' whips' office (lower case and apostrophe after 's') whisky for Scotch whisky, whiskey for others. Do not refer to whisky as simply Scotch, it is always Scotch whisky whistleblower Whitaker's Almanack White's club Whitty, Prof Sir Chris, thereafter Sir Chris whizkid Widdecombe, Ann Widow Twankey Wi-Fi is a tradename, with caps Winslet, Kate Wirral: no the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack woke, wokeism Woolf, Virginia and Leonard World Heritage Site World Trade Center World Trade Organization (WTO) breaks convention on 'z' worth: Millions of pounds' worth wreak: The past tense of wreak is wreaked. Iron may be wrought (old past tense of work) or prose finely wrought, but havoc is wreaked
The Guardian
17-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Stuart Farrimond obituary
My husband, Stuart Farrimond, who has died aged 43 of a brain tumour, was a bestselling science author, educator and broadcaster with an extraordinary gift for making science feel human and accessible. In 2008, a year after Stu and I married, our lives were turned upside down by his diagnosis. He was unshakeably positive and always focused on making the most of the cards he had been dealt. Rather than retreating in the face of a life-limiting cancer diagnosis, he poured his energy into reinvention. He redirected his career from clinical medicine into science education and communication, and thrived. Through his writing and media work, Dr Stu became a familiar name in the world of popular science. He made countless appearances on national television and his books, including The Science of Cooking (2017), The Science of Spice (2018) and The Science of Living (2021), are now in more than a million homes around the world. Yet he remained humble and grounded in his quiet faith. After founding his own science magazine project, Guru, in 2011, which received Wellcome Trust funding and brought together some of the top science minds from around the world, Stu contributed regularly to news outlets, including the BBC, New Scientist and the Guardian. His true gift was in making a connection. Whether giving a talk or simply chatting to friends over a coffee, Stu had an uncanny ability to spot the person at the edge of the room – the one who felt left out – and draw them in. He had a genuine interest in other people. Born in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, Stu was the son of Maree, a community pharmacist, and Bob Farrimond, who worked for Britannic Insurance, and a younger brother to Laura. The family moved to Nottingham when he was a baby, and then to Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire when he was eight. When he was 15, they relocated to Jersey, where Stu completed his GCSEs and A-levels at Hautlieu school. He went on to study medicine at the University of Nottingham. Stu and I met while he was still at Nottingham, and I was working as a nursery nurse in Birmingham, and we married in 2007. He completed his training at Musgrove Park hospital in Taunton before being accepted on to the GP training programme at the Royal United hospital in Bath, and we settled in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. At home, he was a quiet and caring soul, doing the morning crossword, tending the garden, walking our dog, Winston, and always, always making me laugh. He is survived by me, Maree and Bob, and Laura.
Al Bawaba
15-07-2025
- Health
- Al Bawaba
Dr. Shadi Saleh Selected Among Five Wellcome Trust Global Thought Leaders
In recognition of regional leadership and expertise, the Wellcome Trust has selected Dr. Shadi Saleh, founding director of the Global Health Institute (GHI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB), as one of five global thought leaders commissioned to contribute proposals that will help reimagine and reshape the future of global a time when political shifts and financial challenges are reshaping the landscape of global health, the Wellcome Trust has commissioned five visionary proposals to rethink the global health architecture. The Wellcome Trust is one of the world's leading philanthropic organizations in health research and it fosters diverse and inclusive leadership as an important step toward more resilient and equitable global health Shadi Saleh was selected among top global experts to represent the Middle East and Central Asia. He joins an international cohort of distinguished thought leaders, including Paola Abril Campos Rivera (Latin America and the Caribbean), Catherine Kyobutungi (Africa), Kelley Lee (Europe and North America), and Swee Kheng Khor (Asia and the Pacific region).Each expert will put forward a unique perspective rooted in regional context and global insight. The proposals will be published in August 2025 and will help set the stage for an inclusive and ambitious global dialogue that responds to emerging health priorities and inequalities. Dr. Saleh's selection highlights AUB's growing impact as a regional and global convener for health innovation and systems transformation. Under his leadership, the Global Health Institute has been serving as a vital platform for interdisciplinary research, policy engagement, and education that addresses some of the most pressing health challenges in fragile and conflict-affected settings. © 2000 - 2025 Al Bawaba ( Signal PressWire is the world's largest independent Middle East PR distribution service.
