📜  AI cracks the code

👋  Top of the morning. If you’re still feeling tortured over becoming a lawyer instead of a bestselling author, let this be your reassurance. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven — one of the most famous poems in history — made him just $9 when it was published in 1845, or ~$400 today. While the poem was an instant hit, reprinted 10+ times within weeks of publication, copyright laws didn’t yet exist to give Poe a cut, so he got paid, erm, nevermore.

NEWS FLASH 

🩺  AI is working the night shift: South African startup Healthleap raised $38m to build an AI tool that scans hospital patients’ records each night and flags patients who might have a missed condition before it worsens. The AI analyzes lab results, vitals, and medical professionals’ notes from the day and could be particularly useful for conditions like malnutrition and delirium, which are often diagnosed too late. Healthleap grew from three hospitals to 50+ and upped revenue 10x in the last year. Maybe one day that first-year resident can get more sleep.

🥾 These boots were made for stepping into: HandsFree Labs, the company behind Kiziks, launched a hands-free boot for construction workers and tradespeople. Blue Ox boots ($189) slide on easily, but will they stay on? In addition to testing the boots with 30k rounds in a compression machine (the equivalent of stepping in and out 10x a day for 10 years), HandsFree demonstrated that they stay on when hanging upside down or riding a wakeboard. In case that's ever a job requirement.

🧠 Chips on the brain: London-based startup MintNeuro raised $5m to scale a new type of semiconductor chip for neural implants, brain-computer interfaces, and other devices that are linked directly to the nervous system. Instead of developing a specific medical device, MintNeuro is creating the underlying hardware that can detect biological signals, process them, and send stimulation back to the tissue. The chips provide other companies with the building blocks for devices that address Parkinson's, epilepsy, depression, hearing loss, and other disorders.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Skin in the game: Fintech startup Agentiq wants sports fans to buy shares of their favorite athletes’ future earnings, turning the MLB into the Nasdaq and your time on the couch into serious business. 

• Water out of thin air: California-based startup Atoco, founded by a Nobel Prize winner, is developing machines that can harvest water from the waste heat of AI data centers. 

   

• More than just America's favorite ice cream flavor: Researchers found that the antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant properties of vanillin (from vanilla pods) can help heal wounds, treat ulcers, and deliver drugs. Calling someone vanilla... now a compliment?

• Not so fast, kids: OpenAI’s chatbot for users 13-17, ChatGPT for Teens, claimed to have additional safety features, but a new Common Sense Media report found that it failed to send a single parental notification during test conversations about serious self-harming behaviors. 
  

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM 

Can AI see cancer before it exists?

Everlywell just launched a $249, FDA-approved AI tool that scans a single mammogram and predicts your five-year breast cancer risk — no tumor required to flag it.

The catch nobody's talking about: a clean scan doesn't necessarily mean you're in the clear.

👉 Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

How AI could help unlock ancient secrets

Like your Netflix password, the secrets hidden in ancient scrolls don't do much good if they're lost to memory.

Thankfully, a new AI chatbot is helping scholars decipher fragments of ancient Greek on tattered papyrus, potentially revealing long-lost historical details — without the need for an oracle — per Wired.

It's all Greek to me

While most AI discussions focus on the future, researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences are, like, totally stuck in the past. Together with the French AI lab Mistral and tech services firm Sail Reply, the group developed “The world’s first advanced large language model for ancient Greek.”

Known as Apollo — after the Greek god of light, music, and archery (save that for trivia night) — the model is designed to help scholars more quickly identify tattered and torn papyrus fragments and fill in missing words and phrases.

It's kinda like a 2.5k-year-old Mad Libs — only you don't have to stifle your laughs in the backseat when your sibling suggests something wildly inappropriate.

Free for academics, Apollo can save countless hours of intricate, tedious work and help decipher 1m+ unread Greek papyri.

• Trained on 600m historical Greek words from manuscripts, papyri, and inscriptions.
  
• Identifies word gaps (no spacebar in ancient Greek!), dates documents, considers historical context, and consults relevant reference material.
  
• Suggests the most statistically likely word or passage.
  
• Researchers can select from multiple options — ensuring a human element for better accuracy.

The developers hope Apollo can help reveal undiscovered details and insights into ancient Greece, and potentially be used for other ancient languages and scholarly pursuits — though probably not for Mad Libs.

(Interestingly, the current AI writing debate echoes one of ancient Greece.)

Putting the AI in antiquity

AI is already helping to decipher other ancient secrets:

• Mapping 250k square miles of the Arabian Desert to find new archeological sites.
  
• Identifying hundreds of mysterious giant geoglyphs in Peru.
  
• Decoding rolled, carbonized scrolls that survived the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.
  
• Locating one of the world's oldest campfires.
  
• Recreated a 3D model of a centuries-old Indonesian relief — from a 134-year-old photo.
  
• Fragmentarium is helping decipher the Epic of Gilgamesh and other ancient cuneiform texts.
  
• The Aeneas system helps interpret ancient Latin inscriptions.

Impressive stuff. Now, if only they could help me remember my Netflix password.

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NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Private jet owners’ share of the taxes that go into the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which helps fund the Federal Aviation Administration, despite noncommercial private planes accounting for 7% of all US airspace activity, according to a recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies.

Translation: basically, while the rest of us squish into economy seats and squabble over armrests, report coauthor Chuck Collins says a “private jet billionaire class” worth a collective $31T is flying high on our hard-earned tax dollars, knowing that probably won’t ease any of the tension in the back of the plane.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1945, Raytheon filed a patent for the microwave oven. An employee, Percy Spencer, invented it by mistake.

🥕  Well, that’s sobering: A look inside ever-shifting US food prices.

🌍  Game: World borders have been wiped off the map. How well can you draw them back in?

🚨  That’s interesting: Remembering the Chicago Pile, AKA the first-ever nuclear reactor.

🐶  Aww: Skipping a few stairs isn’t for the faint of heart.

SHOWER THOUGHT

It's a special type of irony that requires a really tiny screwdriver to fix eyeglasses. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley, Singdhi Sokpo, Danny Jensen, and Bill Meincke.

Editing by: Sara "It’s all Greek to me" Friedman.

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