1st Session

1. Introduce yourself.

2. How was your mid-term exam?

3. Do you have any food for relieving stress? Can you recommend some?

4. Do you have any good tips to relieve stress?

AI Could Make Complex Brain Surgery Safer

Artificial intelligence (AI) could make complex brain surgery safer within two years, a top British surgeon has said.

AI technology will allow doctors to find small tumors and structures like blood vessels more accurately, brain surgeon Hani Marcus of University College London Hospitals (UCLH) told the BBC.

This should reduce the risk to patients during surgery, especially surgery around the pituitary gland, Marcus said.

UCLH has developed an AI system that has learned from over 200 videos of brain surgery near the pituitary gland, which is found at the base of the brain. The size of a grape, it controls hormones in the body ― and accidentally damaging it during brain surgery can cause blindness.

In just 10 months, UCLH's AI built the knowledge that a surgeon would take about 10 years to develop, allowing it to help surgeons more accurately find ― and avoid ― the boundary of the pituitary gland.

"Surgeons like myself ― even if you're very experienced ― can, with the help of AI, do a better job to find that boundary than without it," Marcus said.

"You could, in a few years, have an AI system that has seen more operations than any human has ever or could ever see."

The AI already helps new doctors learn brain surgery, the BBC said.

And this isn't the only way AI could be used to help medicine in the future.

UCLH is developing other AI to help find and diagnose some cancers earlier, and to diagnose hearing problems.

In the US, Stanford University is developing AI to analyze millions of patient records to make better predictions of the results and risks of different kinds of brain surgery.

And scientists at Harvard University have developed AI that can analyze DNA in brain tumors during surgery, allowing surgeons to make much faster decisions on further treatment, such as whether to place drugs into the brain during surgery.

1. What are your thoughts on the use of AI to make brain surgery safer?

2. What impact do you think AI will have on healthcare and medicine?

3. What jobs or industries do you think AI could make safer or more accurate?

4. How do you think your country's healthcare system compares to others around the world?

5. It is difficult to think of a major industry that AI will not transform. ― Andrew Ng. Do you agree?

2nd Session

1. Introduce yourself.

2. It’s already November and just two months of 2023 left. How do you think?

3. How was your 2023?

4. Are you excited that 2024 is coming?

Study Finds Ages When People Are Happiest

Do you ever think you were happiest as a child? A new study has found this may be true ― but while you may be less cheerful as you get older, you may also be more satisfied with life.

Researchers in Germany and Switzerland looked at data from previous studies with a total of over 460,000 participants. They were interested in how satisfied people said they were with their lives, and also in something called "positive affect" and "negative affect."

Positive affect is a term used in psychology to talk about how people feel cheerful and happy emotions, while negative affect is used for feelings like anger, fear and sadness.

It was found that while people tended to be most cheerful as children, they became more satisfied with their lives as they got older ― until they got very old, at which point they became less satisfied and less happy too.

From the data, the researchers found that life satisfaction decreased from age 9 to 16, then increased a little until age 70, and decreased again until age 96 ― the oldest age for which data was available.

But positive affect ― or cheerfulness ― decreased almost continuously from age 9 to age 94.

Negative affect went up and down between ages 9 and 22, but then decreased until age 60. After that, it increased again until age 87.

The researchers noted that changes in life satisfaction tended to be smaller than changes in positive and negative affect.

The decrease in life satisfaction between ages 9 and 16 were probably due to the physical and social changes of puberty, the researchers said.

Meanwhile, the decrease in satisfaction and increase in negative affect among the very old were likely connected to the health problems of old age, as well as decreasing social interaction.

The study authors wrote that their results show that programs to help people feel happier later in life could be useful.

1. What are your thoughts on the findings of this study?

2. Do you think you were happiest as a child?

3. Do you find it surprising that life satisfaction decreases from age 9 to 16?

4. Why do you think cheerfulness decreases from age 9 onwards?

5. What do you think are the best things about getting older?