Celia Sampol

Created by the French digital PCR company Stilla, in collaboration with MGA Medtech, the new Nio™+ is a versatile, all-in-one, fit-for-throughput, digital PCR instrument with unparalleled user-friendliness. It is very compact, fast and highly automated. It also features interestingly innovative hardware and software. We visited the MGA Medtech factory in Mably, France where the machine was developed.

The Virtual Epileptic Patient (VEP) is a cutting-edge, non-invasive technique in computational neuroscience aimed at creating a digital twin of the brain of a patient suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy and requiring surgical intervention. The VEP enables clinicians to work on a 3D model of the brain, open it up, visualize activity, simulate epileptic seizures and test different approaches or hypotheses as if working on the actual patient’s brain.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate the presence of deceased individuals in the form of virtual conversational agents—often referred to as “deadbots”—raises complex ethical questions. Deadbots, holograms, conversational agents… Is AI stronger than death? This is one of the main questions addressed during the 14th European Forum on Bioethics from February 7-10 in Strasbourg, France.