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'Duplicative language.'

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1. Chemists have used ChatGPT to design and conduct complex chemical reactions using a robotic laboratory set-up. The system, called Coscientist, can design, code and carry out several reactions — making compounds including paracetamol and aspirin in the wet lab using its robot apparatus. The approach was described in Nature on 20 December. “The moment I saw a non-organic intelligence be able to autonomously plan, design and execute a chemical reaction that was invented by humans, that was amazing,” says chemist Gabe Gomes at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who led the research. “It was a ‘holy (cow)’ moment.” Fast-paced improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) have seen applications for these tools proliferate throughout science. (Source: nature.com, italics mine)

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2. Using artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have discovered a class of compounds that can kill a drug-resistant bacterium that causes more than 10,000 deaths in the United States every year. In a study appearing in Nature, the researchers showed that these compounds could kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) grown in a lab dish and in two mouse models of MRSA infection. The compounds also show very low toxicity against human cells, making them particularly good drug candidates. A key innovation of the new study is that the researchers were also able to figure out what kinds of information the deep-learning model was using to make its antibiotic potency predictions. This knowledge could help researchers to design additional drugs that might work even better than the ones identified by the model. (Sources: broadinstitute.org, nature.com)

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3. The U.S. government spent more on health care last year than the governments of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Austria, and France combined spent to provide universal health care coverage to the whole of their population (335 million in total), which is comparable in size to the U.S. population of 331 million. Overall, health care spending grew 4% in 2022 from the previous year, accounting for 17.3% of gross domestic product. The increase was largely driven by growth in Medicaid and private health insurance spending. (Source: statnews.com)