News

Israelis Have Successfully Grown Mouse Embryos In Artificial Wombs

Published

4 years ago

March 24, 2021

israelis have successfully grown mouse embryos in artificial wombs

Weizmann Institute Of Science

Thanks to the work of a group of Israeli scientists, we’re one step closer to being able to grow human babies in artificial wombs. The scientists, led by Professor Jacob Hanna, have successfully extracted 250 embryos from pregnant mice and placed them in a contraption designed to simulate the uterine wall and give the embryos the right conditions to grow.

“We have grown hundreds of mice in this way, in a method that has taken seven years to develop, and I’m still captivated every time I see it,” said Hanna, who works at the Weizmann Institute of Science, a public research university in Rehovot, Israel. “This could be relevant to other mammals, including humans, though we acknowledge that there are ethical issues related to growing humans outside the body.”

Hanna and his team have revealed their breakthrough in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, a multidisciplinary publication known for publishing the finest research from a variety of academic disciplines.

Previous experiments of this kind involved fetuses with already developed organs, such as when the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia grew fetal lambs for over four weeks in artificial wombs back in 2017. The Israel-based team started with five-days old embryos consisting of just 250 cells, placing them into a special liquid to provide nourishment.

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“By day 11, they make their own blood and have a beating heart, a fully developed brain. Anybody would look at them and say, ‘this is clearly a mouse fetus with all the characteristics of a mouse.’ It’s gone from being a ball of cells to being an advanced fetus,” explained Hanna.

While this experiment certainly invokes unsettling scenes from the movie Matrix, with machines growing humans in massive quantities to extract electricity from their bodies, scientists are still a long way from applying the research to create life outside the human body. It’s even possible that the ethical issues surrounding such research will lead to its bad, or at least a heavy regulation.

News

Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet Introduces Hybrid Reasoning

The latest model lets users choose between rapid responses or slower, but more methodical, step-by-step answers.

Published

22 hours ago

February 25, 2025

Nour Nasir

Anthropic

After an exciting start to 2025 with the release of DeepSeek’s Chatbot, it’s now Anthropic’s turn to unveil its latest AI model — Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The new tool is designed to strike a balance between speed and deeper responses, and is being marketed as the first hybrid reasoning model. Claude now gives users the option to choose between rapid responses or a more methodical, step-by-step approach, using a simple dropdown menu to let you decide how queries should be processed.

“We’ve developed Claude 3.7 Sonnet with a different philosophy from other reasoning models on the market. Just as humans use a single brain for both quick responses and deep reflection, we believe reasoning should be an integrated capability of frontier models rather than a separate model entirely,” Anthropic explains. “This unified approach also creates a more seamless experience for users”.

While Anthropic doesn’t call out OpenAI directly, the comparison is hard to ignore. OpenAI currently offers multiple models — GPT-4, o1, o1-mini, and o3-mini — creating a somewhat fragmented experience. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged this issue, posting on X, “We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence”.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet was also developed with a different focus in mind: Rather than prioritizing high-stakes math and coding challenges, Anthropic aimed to optimize real-world applications. According to the company, users will see notable improvements in areas like coding and front-end web development, reflecting how businesses and developers actually engage with AI.

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The new model is available starting today across all Claude plans, including Anthropic’s free tier. Developers can also access it through Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

Additionally, Anthropic is also rolling out a new tool called Claude Code, designed to streamline software development. This “agentic” system, currently in limited research preview, allows developers to assign coding tasks directly to Claude via a terminal interface. It can read and edit code, run tests, and even push commits to GitHub — offering a glimpse into a more automated, AI-assisted workflow.