Prostate cancer could be treated with a revolutionary one-hour procedure using electrical currents to destroy hard-to-reach tumours, according to leading surgeons. The new technique, called irreversible electroporation or Nanoknife, has recently been used for the first time in the NHS and provides hope for thousands of men who face surgery or radiotherapy with distressing side-effects.

The NHS has now carried out six operations using the procedure, which is minimally invasive and precise. Surgeons are optimistic about its potential as a standard treatment for certain types of prostate cancer. Unlike traditional treatments that can cause urinary problems or loss of sexual function, the Nanoknife method can be carried out quickly and result in fewer side effects by administering short electrical pulses into tumours, significantly reducing risks to healthy tissues surrounding it.

Charities have praised this “amazingly simple” treatment that could help up to 20,000 men diagnosed with localised disease each year. The Nanoknife technique is among other focused therapies – such as cryotherapy and focused ultrasound – available only at major specialist centres. The speed and efficiency of day cases procedures also makes them much more attractive within an already overwhelmed system.

The use of targeted electronic therapies opens new doors into the fight against one of the most common cancers among UK men. It is expected that similar techniques will be trialled soon so they can become more widely used across hospitals in England as part of efforts to tackle a huge cancer backlog made worse by Covid-19 related delays.

Developers rejoice! Microsoft has released TypeScript 5.0, bringing with it numerous improvements and features to the popular programming language. TypeScript builds on JavaScript by adding syntax for types that can be used for type-checking, resulting in greater code accuracy and reliability.

This release includes new decorators standard implementation, improved functionality to better support ESM projects in Node and bundlers, better control of generic inference for library authors, expanded JSDoc functionality, simplified configuration and other significant changes to make TypeScript smaller and faster.

But don’t worry if you’re already familiar with TypeScript – the update will not require developers to relearn how to use it as nothing has been significantly changed or removed. While there are a few deprecations for less-used options in version 5.0, upgrading should be no different than previous updates. To get started using TypeScript 5.0, you can obtain it through NuGet or npm.

What’s new

The release marks a significant milestone as it brings many changes such as case-insensitive import sorting improvements in editor scenarios which now work better with existing tooling by default; specifies a minimum required version of Node.js (12.20) in its package.json; supports decorators placed before or after export and export default; permits bundler module resolution option when –module option is set to esnext; and more.

Decorators

TypeScript also introduces decorators – an upcoming ECMAScript feature allowing customization of classes and their members in a reusable way while keeping everything DRY (don’t repeat yourself). By defining functions like “loggedMethod”, we can apply them to existing methods like “greet” without modifying the actual greet method every time we want to add logging before or after the method executes making modularization easy than ever before.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been taking the tech industry by storm in the past few months, with its ability to disrupt various industries. Ukrainian and Russian developers came up with an app called Mubert, which aims to generate brand-new tracks using human-made loops and samples. Algorhythm was one of the first AI events of its kind held by promoter George Pinnegar at an East London nightclub.

Mubert uses people’s preferred likes or dislikes of generative music to create better adaptations for future use. This then allows musicians who created the samples used during Mubert’s generation a cut from their sounds’ effective use.

The absence of a DJ was something different as it tested how revellers would react to AI-generated techno beats and rhythmic drumbeats from Mubert. Rose Cuthbertson, an AI master’s student, commented that the music could be more complex but still fun to dance to. Meanwhile, 26-year-old computer programmer Pietro Capece Galeota thought it did a pretty good job at keeping things going without any physical bodies manning the DJ booth.

Mubert CEO Paul Zgordan acknowledged that while this could mean some musicians ultimately losing their gigs, providing them with opportunities through Mubert is also opening doors in other areas within their field.

“We want to save musicians’ jobs but in our own way,” he said during a videolink interview. “We want to give them this opportunity to earn money with the AI.”

Zgordan believes that there is still much work needed before Mubert can function like ChatGPT as music is more intricate than text composition.