How a Common Stomach Bug Causes Cancer | Was Your Clothing Made By Forced Labor? These Startups Can Tell You | Can AI detectors save us from ChatGPT? I tried 5 online tools to find out | ZDNET | Professional raconteur Fran Lebowitz thinks art should be useless

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How a Common Stomach Bug Causes Cancer - The Atlantic

At first, doctors didn’t believe that bacteria could live in the stomach at all. Too acidic, they thought. But in 1984, a young Australian physician named Barry Marshall gulped down an infamous concoction of beef broth laced with Helicobacter pylori bacteria. On day eight, he started vomiting. On day 10, an endoscopy revealed that H. pylori had colonized his stomach, their characteristic spiral shape unmistakeable under the microscope.

Left untreated, H. pylori usually establishes infections that persist for an entire lifetime, and they’re common: Half of the world’s population harbors H. pylori inside their stomach, as do more than one in three Americans. In most cases, the microbe settles into an asymptomatic chronic infection, but in some, it becomes far more troublesome. It can, for example, cause enough damage to the stomach lining to create ulcers. Worse still, H. pylori can lead to cancer. This single bacterium is by far the No. 1 risk factor in stomach cancers worldwide. By one estimate, some 70 percent can be attributed to H. pylori.

But what still puzzles doctors years later is why H. pylori has such different consequences for different people. Why is it asymptomatic in most but carcinogenic in others? Although the full answer is complex, one key factor seems to be mutations in H. pylori itself. Not every strain is created equal. The presence of select genes intensifies H. pylori’s pathogenicity, and even a single mutation in a single gene, scientists recently found, enhances the link to cancer. A small genetic tweak in a common stomach bug could have profound consequences for us, its unwitting hosts.

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Was Your Clothing Made By Forced Labor? These Startups Can Tell You - Forbes

A technology typically reserved for murder trials has found a hot new application: figuring out where in the world the cotton in your shirt is from.

Similar to how a prosecutor might test a blood stain on a victim’s dress to zero in on a suspect, New Zealand-based Oritain is using forensic science to tell companies if they’re guilty of using cotton from problematic places like Turkmenistan or China’s Xinjiang region, which are known for using forced labor.

The startup has seen the number of such requests rise by more than fivefold since 2020 as pressure from consumers and regulators over the use of forced labor has mounted, and today helps over 100 major brands and retailers like Shein, Primark and Lacoste run thousands of tests a month. It looks for possible matches by running a company’s products against samples in its database.

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Can AI detectors save us from ChatGPT? I tried 5 online tools to find out | ZDNET -

When I first looked at the question of whether it's possible to fight back against AI-generated plagiarism, and how that might work, it was January 2023, just a few months into the world's exploding awareness of generative AI. Now, almost a year later, it feels like we've been exploring generative AI for years and years, but we've really been looking at the issue for a matter of months.

In any case, this is an updated version of that original January article. When I first tested GPT detectors, I used three: the GPT-2 Output Detector, Writer.com AI Content Detector, and Content at Scale AI Content Detection. The best result was 66% correct, from the GPT-2 Output Detector. This time, I'm adding three more: GPTZero, ZeroGPT (yes, they're different), and Writefull's GPT Detector.

Unfortunately, I'm removing the Writer.com AI Content Detector from our test suite because it failed back in January and it failed again now. See below for a comment from the company, which their team sent me after the original article was published in January.

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Professional raconteur Fran Lebowitz thinks art should be useless - Vox

Does anyone have it figured out as well as Fran Lebowitz? She spent the 1970s hanging out with Andy Warhol and writing two books that made her the toast of her generation (1978’s Metropolitan Life and 1981’s Social Studies). Then she claimed writer’s block, hung it all up, and declined to publish anymore. Now she’s in the amorphous career of public speaker: acerbic and crankily funny, but not exactly a standup comic; politically engaged and insightful, but not exactly a pundit. You know. She’s Fran Lebowitz.

Ahead of Lebowitz’s speaking event at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre on October 21, I called her up to see if I could get her to give me a piece of her mind. Lebowitz obliged. Together, we discussed whether AI is stealing, what makes art art, and how to build a life you love. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

So you are about to do a new show in conversation with Marlon James at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. Do you know what you’ll be talking about?

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