dcblogs shares a report from TechTarget: A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that generative AI boosts productivity by 14%, reduces stress, and increases employee retention in customer support roles. The workers who gained the most from this automation were newer and less experienced. Customer support is a stressful job. “A key part of agents’ jobs is to absorb customer frustrations while restraining one’s own emotional reaction,” the paper noted. But generative AI can act as an aide, using the customer’s chats as input and providing suggestions for empathetic responses and problem-solving in real-time.

The study found that generative AI reduced the likelihood of customers wanting to escalate issues to a supervisor. But it’s just one study, caution analyst. David Creelman, CEO of Creelman Research in Toronto, cautioned against putting too much weight on one study. “It’s too soon to start making conclusions about where this will have an impact and how big that impact will be,” he said.

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Source: Slashdot – Generative AI Systems Boost Productivity and Retention, Says Study

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A research team has turned the bodies of dead mice into vivid 3D maps of anatomy, with tissues, nerves, and vessels highlighted in color. The technique, which renders the corpses transparent and then exposes them to fluorescent antibodies that label distinct cell types, could help everything from drug development to understanding the spread of cancer, its creators and other scientists say. The developers, at the Helmholtz Munich research institute, call their technique wildDISCO — wild because it can work on any “wild type,” or normal, mice, and DISCO for 3D imaging of solvent-cleared organs. Building on their previous success at making mouse bodies transparent, the new technique removes cholesterol from the bodies so that a vast array of existing antibodies can penetrate deep into the animals.

“wildDISCO is a game changer — it allows us to see the hidden highways and byways in the body,” says Muzlifah Haniffa, a dermatologist and immunologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Newcastle University’s Biosciences Institute who was not involved in the research. The method should let scientists map a mouse at the cellular level and explore previously hidden links between tissues, like neural connections between organs, says neuroscientist Ali Erturk, director of Helmholtz Munich, who led the work, posted recently as a preprint. His group in Germany has already posted eye-catching videos of “flying” through the 3D anatomy of a mouse with different tissues labeled.

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Source: Slashdot – ‘Game Changer’ Method Lets Scientists Peer Into — and Fly Through — Mouse Bodies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs. The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos—and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a “robot.”

The startup company that developed the robot, Overture Life, says its device is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today. Right now, IVF labs are multimillion-dollar affairs staffed by trained embryologists who earn upwards of $125,000 a year to delicately handle sperm and eggs using ultra-thin hollow needles under a microscope. But some startups say the entire process could be carried out automatically, or nearly so. Overture, for instance, has filed a patent application describing a “biochip” for an IVF lab in miniature, complete with hidden reservoirs containing growth fluids, and tiny channels for sperm to wiggle through.

“Think of a box where sperm and eggs go in, and an embryo comes out five days later,” says Santiago Munne, the prize-winning geneticist who is chief innovation officer at the Spanish company. He believes that if IVF could be carried out inside a desktop instrument, patients might never need to visit a specialized clinic, where a single attempt at getting pregnant can cost $20,000 in the US. Instead, he says, a patient’s eggs might be fed directly into an automated fertility system at a gynecologist’s office. “It has to be cheaper. And if any doctor could do it, it would be,” says Munne.

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Source: Slashdot – The First IVF Babies Conceived By a Robot Have Been Born

Thelasko writes: Renowned data journalist, Nate Silver, announced he will be leaving the company as soon as his contract expires. Although Disney owns the FiveThirtyEight brand, it is believed that Silver retains ownership of the site’s algorithms. “ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting — this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond,” an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement. “We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism.”

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Source: Slashdot – Nate Silver To Leave FiveThirtyEight

According to a recent Twitter post from Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, the robotaxi service is now operating all day in San Francisco. The post says we will soon see Cruise “open up full operations in other cities,” which may soon include Dallas, Texas, according to a recent job listing. From the report: According to a recent LinkedIn post from Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, the robotaxi network is now running 24/7 rides across San Francisco, beginning with employees. As The Kilowatts points out on Twitter, nonemployees in the San Francisco area are still limited to about one-third of the city between f 10:00 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. In his post, Vogt said that in accordance with safety policies, around-the-clock public rides will roll out “very soon.”

Cruise is a robotaxi startup founded in the San Francisco Bay area in 2013. In the last decade, the company (along with plenty of support from GM) has made tremendous progress in its home state of California, where it continues to try and expand. Services that began in San Francisco have since grown to Phoenix, Arizona, and, most recently, Austin, Texas. In February, the Cruise president, CEO, and cofounder, Kyle Vogt, shared that the company had surpassed one million miles driven without anyone behind the wheel. In many ways, the city by the bay has become a proving ground for Cruise’s electric robotaxis, and its hilly, congested terrain will act as a testing site for yet another major milestone — around-the-clock robotaxi operations.

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Source: Slashdot – Cruise Robotaxis Now Run All Day In San Francisco

The Lenovo ThinkPhone by Motorola is being launched today in the U.S. for $699. It’s the first co-branded phone from Motorola that arrives nine years after Lenovo purchased the Motorola brand for $2.91 billion. According to The Verge, the smartphone offers “a suite of productivity features designed to work with ThinkPad laptops.” From the report: The ThinkPhone has a lot of the same stuff as a mainstream flagship phone, even though it’s priced just below the likes of the $799 Samsung Galaxy S23. It comes with a big 6.6-inch 1080p OLED with up to 144Hz refresh rate. Build quality is quite sturdy with an aluminum frame, Gorilla Glass on the front panel, and Lenovo’s signature textured aramid fiber back panel for a softer touch. The whole device is IP68 rated for strong dust and water resistance, and it’s also MIL-STD-810H compliant to protect against falls and more extreme conditions.

In addition to the ThinkPad-like look and feel, there’s a red key on the side of the phone in a nod to Lenovo’s classic keyboard nub. You can customize it to a degree: a double-press can be assigned one of the phone’s ThinkPad integration features, while a single-press can act as an app shortcut. Some apps will even let you launch certain features — mapping it to the “Pay” screen of the Starbucks app could save you a lot of embarrassing fumbling at the register, for example. The ThinkPhone is available first to enterprise customers, with general availability on April 28th via Motorola.com.

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Source: Slashdot – Motorola Unveils Co-Branded Lenovo ‘ThinkPhone’