Latest news with #Inbar
Perth Now
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Lucifer star Inbar Lavi gives birth
Lucifer star Inbar Lavi secretly welcomed her first child into the world in June. The 38-year-old actress and her husband, Dan Bar Shira, announced the arrival of their little girl, Ariel Lavi Bar Shira, who was born on June 28, weighing 5 lbs.11 oz. She told People magazine: 'A newborn is a tornado of emotions. Waves of bliss in a sea of chaos. We're trying to stay steady and present for it all. Grateful is an understatement." Inbar announced her pregnancy on Instagram in February and reflected on her fertility journey. On the challenges they faced, she penned: '2 and a half years of patience, love, treatments and faith have led us to you. 'If you're reading this, on your own winding road to parenthood, know this; it's never easy, but you WILL find your way.' The couple embarking on parenthood comes almost four years after they tied the knot in Israel. Inbar and Dan - who reside in Los Angeles - first met at the Burning Man festival in 2019. She recalled at the time of the nuptials: 'We met at Burning Man so we wanted our wedding to emulate a feeling of free-flow festival. We also both love the beach so we knew it would have to have waves nearby." Inbar is best known for portraying Raviva on the 2012 MTV series Underemployed, Vee on the 2014 Fox television series Gang Related, and Sheba on the Fox series Prison Break. She played Eve in the final three seasons of the Netflix series Lucifer. Before meeting Dan, Inbar had a relationship with Last Man Standing actor Christoph Sanders between 2011 and 2015.
Morocco World
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Morocco World
Iran Shatters Myth of Israel's Invincible Iron Dome
While Israeli officials claim that 90% of Iranian missiles have been intercepted since June 13, reports indicate that Israel's defenses are being overwhelmed, with the long-touted Iron Dome reportedly close to depletion. Citing an individual briefed on United States and Israeli intelligence assessments, The Washington Post revealed that Israel's missile defense can only hold for another 10-12 days without direct US resupply or escalation. 'They will need to select what they want to intercept,' said the anonymous expert. 'The system is already overwhelmed.' Strained air defenses Israel's air defense network is composed of multiple overlapping systems: the Iron Dome, David's Sling, the Arrow missile system, Spyder and Patriot batteries, and experimental laser technology currently under development. But this entire architecture is deeply dependent on US funding and munitions—especially the Iron Dome, to which the US has allocated over $3 billion since 2011. Israeli media estimates that keeping the missile defense operational costs the occupation around $285 million per night. Tal Inbar, an Israeli missile expert affiliated with the US-based Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA), noted that Israel is increasingly forced to rely on the Arrow system, which costs $3 million per interceptor, to confront Iran's more advanced projectiles. The Iron Dome, Inbar added, is nearly useless against Iran's high-speed ballistic missiles—likening its deployment to 'shooting a 9-millimeter pistol' at hypersonic threats racing through the upper atmosphere. He also pointed out that in 2014, Israel sought a ceasefire with Hamas just before it ran out of interceptors—a precedent that could influence Israel's current posture as its arsenal drains once again. Israeli intelligence estimated that Iran had around 2,000 long-range missiles, claiming to have destroyed a significant portion through covert operations and unprovoked strikes on Friday. The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) allege that Iran has launched around 400 missiles so far and that Israeli operations have wiped out a third of Iran's missile launchers. But despite a recent decrease in Iranian barrages, Israeli analysts warn that more than half of Iran's missile stockpile likely remains intact, with some of it concealed in underground silos– claims that should be approached with skepticism, given Israel's long record of fabricating intelligence to justify its indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks. Israel's failure to intercept Iranian missiles has become more visible since it launched direct strikes on Iranian territory. On Friday, Iranian missiles pierced Israeli defenses and hit near the IOF's central command in Tel Aviv. On Sunday, another missile disabled a key oil refinery near Haifa. By Tuesday, footage showed multiple impacts around an intelligence hub north of Tel Aviv, with one missile reportedly striking inside the headquarters of IOF intelligence Suppressing the impact Israel has been censoring domestic coverage of the damage caused by Iranian missiles since at least October 2024, fueling speculation that the scale of destruction is far greater than officially admitted. Under Israeli military law, any article related to 'security issues' must be reviewed by the military censor, leaving news outlets to decide what to submit—a system that has enabled deep opacity. According to +972 Magazine, Israel fully banned 1,635 articles in 2024 and censored another 6,265, averaging 21 military interventions into journalism per day. As a result, much of the footage circulating from inside Israel—especially showing the aftermath of Iranian missile strikes—is believed to have been leaked via cyberattacks rather than released by state or media sources. Cyber threat intelligence firm Hackmanac reported that Israel was among the most heavily targeted countries for cyberattacks in the last week. Days befores Israel's attacks on Iran, Iranian Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib told state TV that Iran holds a 'treasure trove' of Israeli sensitive documents that could strengthen Iran's offensive position. Like the Iron Dome, which has been mythologized as invincible but is now faltering under real pressure, the cracks in Israel's combat and information control systems are becoming impossible to ignore. The Israeli regime, increasingly unable to defend its infrastructure or shape global narratives, now clings to existence through violent land theft in the West Bank and a rabid genocide on Gaza—an effort to hold on to its unravelling power and legitimacy.
Newsweek
07-05-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
Research Budget Cuts Are Testing AI's Limits
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Clinical trials are facing a crisis amid growing delays, diminishing success rates and rising costs. Companies across the stakeholder spread are investing in AI to ease some of the longstanding operational challenges—but new threats of federal funding cuts are raising questions that tech alone can't answer. On May 2, the White House unveiled a budget proposal that would cut funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by nearly $18 billion. The nearly 40 percent reduction would eliminate funding for multiple research programs, including the National Institute of Nursing Research and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. As the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, the NIH is considered a global paragon. Budget cuts could lead to permanent cracks in the increasingly fragile research ecosystem, threatening the United States' position as an international leader in medicine, life sciences and biopharma. Newsweek asked several clinical research, data and tech professionals if AI could offset the damage. Here's what it can and can't solve, according to the experts. While clinical trials could benefit from advancements in AI, innovation may still be stunted by funding cuts at federal research organizations, experts told Newsweek. While clinical trials could benefit from advancements in AI, innovation may still be stunted by funding cuts at federal research organizations, experts told Newsweek. How is AI improving clinical trials and drug discovery? Pharmaceutical research and development costs have risen substantially over the past few decades, according to recent analyses. In the 1990s, it cost less than $1 billion to develop one new drug. Today, that price has more than tripled to $3.5 billion. Clinical trial costs are also increasing, with phase III trials costing 30 percent more in 2024 than they did in 2018. Meanwhile, more than one in five trials faced delayed start dates last year—and success rates have fallen under 8 percent. The numbers don't paint a pretty picture, according to Orr Inbar, CEO of QuantHealth, a company that uses AI to optimize trial design. "We're doing more trials," Inbar said, "and yet we're less successful at them, and we're also less cost efficient in doing them." Trials can fail for both clinical and operational reasons. Sometimes, the drugs fail to demonstrate safety or efficacy, while other times, clinical trials run out of funding or struggle to recruit enough patients. QuantHealth works on both fronts, using data and AI to simulate trial outcomes. This allows pharmaceutical companies to modify their protocol before the trial starts, adjusting the target population or the way the drug is administered to improve their shot at success. By predicting better candidates and drug targets, AI can help reduce cost and cut back on wasted time and resources throughout the trial process, according to Alister Campbell, vice president of global science and technology at Dotmatics—a scientific software company that helps pharmaceutical, biotech and research organizations gather and organize centralized data. "We're seeing AI used as a computational tool that increases the efficiency of all the steps [in trial design]," Campbell said. "By doing that, we can reduce the time it takes to get a drug to market." The advent of AI has also helped companies like Walgreens crack the clinical trial space, which once had a high barrier to entry. The retail pharmacy giant launched its clinical trial business in June 2022, helmed by Chief Biopharma Officer Ramita Tandon. It has since engaged more than 17 million patients, educating them on clinical trials, offering participation and helping them to register. Previously, a human team would have had to sift through Walgreens' rich network of store, pharmacy and health care transactions to identify patient insights that could be relevant for clinical trials. The company still employs human clinicians to scan the AI model's output for bias and ensure that its suggested cohorts are applicable to the study and representative of real-world patient populations—but the labor lift is much lower than it would have been without the tech, Tandon said. "We sit on such a tremendous treasure trove of insights here at Walgreens, and so certainly, we can't use human labor to be able to canvas that ecosystem to find patients," Tandon told Newsweek. "AI enables us—with speed and precision—to find those patients for trial." AI can even enhance the privacy of de-identified medical data, said Miruna Sasu, president and CEO of COTA Healthcare. Its platform pulls data from electronic medical records, cleans and adjudicates the clinical notes, then returns them to health care organizations for research and development purposes. An AI agent called CAILIN now sits atop that data and can answer questions about it via a search bar, according to Sasu. This makes the work easier and more cost-effective by eliminating the need for a data scientist. It also helps protect privacy, because a human does not have to comb through individual records to glean insights from the set. The AI market for drug discovery is "huge," per Dr. Jo Varshney, CEO of VeriSIM Life—a company that creates digital twins of humans and animals, then uses AI to simulate a drug's effect on them. "One of the ways we are trying to circumvent these challenges of [reduced] federal funding is by using a lot of AI," she said. The tech can still identify novel therapies, patient populations or biomarker discoveries while researchers wait for new avenues of funding (or more solid decisions about existing ones). "This is where technology can be very helpful, because science cannot wait," Varshney continued. "We have to keep moving forward, no matter what impacts the external environments create." Protesters hold signs decrying funding cuts outside of the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, on March 8, 2025. Protesters hold signs decrying funding cuts outside of the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, on March 8, 2025. MICHAEL MATHES/AFP via Getty Images What can't AI cure in clinical trials and drug discovery? Still, Varshney said, this is a "very challenging time for any biotech company." Federal funding is a significant support to the research industry, and without it, innovation is likely to stall. Inbar, QuantHealth's CEO, expressed similar concerns. When people hear about resource constraints, they tend to think that AI will step in and fill those gaps—but his experience has been the opposite. Organizations that cut funds and lay off teams are rarely looking for ways to improve efficiency, Inbar said. Rather, they enter survival mode, reverting to core principles and focusing on getting through the day. "They get this knee-jerk reaction of fear and stress," he said, "and that actually, a lot of times, stifles creativity." The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been working to advance AI integration in the drug discovery process, but if the agency faces the proposed $6.5 billion funding reduction, Inbar predicts those programs will fizzle out. However, if the FDA is further crunched, companies that focus on regulatory submissions could really shine, according to Inbar. The FDA timeline already drags because of errors in data submissions; more than half of trials submit at least one amendment throughout the process, and the average number of amendment submissions is 4.5 per trial, according to a 2023 study. Companies that use AI to review dossiers and prevent submission errors could help reduce the burden on the regulatory side. Yet, experts agree that even the most mature AI agent is not a replacement for the knowledge and funding support federal agencies provide. On May 6, the American Association for Cancer Research called upon Congress to halt the "draconian" budget cuts; it assembled a cohort of nearly 400 medical research organizations to organize local meetings, speak with representatives and make the case for strengthening investments in NIH research. It's impossible to tell the future, but Inbar believes budget cuts will have an enduring impact—one that outlives this administration, regardless of the next one's decisions. "Those people [that are let go] are going to find new jobs, probably in the private sector, where they're better paid," he said. "If and when funding comes back, most of them aren't going to come back to [government jobs]." "That's a loss of institutional knowledge that is definitely going to be a lasting effect." QuantHealth is one of many brands submitting to Newsweek's AI Impact Awards, which recognize unique and innovative AI solutions that solve critical issues or advance capabilities across various industries. The awards highlight measurable impacts AI delivers in various business operations, including marketing, customer experience, product development and supply chain optimization. For more information or to register for Newsweek's AI Impact Summit, please visit this webpage.
