In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot’s coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. Then he came across a post on Reddit about…
A new industrial facility in suburban Seattle is giving off a whiff of futuristic technology. It can safely treat fecal waste from people and livestock while recycling nutrients that are crucial for agriculture but in increasingly short supply across the nation’s farmlands. Within the 2.3-acre plant, which smells lightly of ammonia, giant rotating spindles turn…
Each year, about half a million Americans are diagnosed with Clostridioides difficile, a common bacterial infection of the large intestine. Only some patients respond to antibiotics. Infection recurs in about 20% of patients and proves fatal in about 30,000 cases annually. But there is a highly effective, albeit unconventional, treatment: fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), which…