Month: March 2026

By Blair Sabol

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    COLLEGE PARK, Maryland (WMAR) — A 2D blast from the past is now training the future of what 3D AI vehicles may look like on the roads: Super Mario Kart.

“It’s like our Tamagochis back in the day,” associate professor at the University of Maryland Dr. Mumu Xu said. “We’re trying to provide mathematical guardrails to show that AI systems can be safe.”

Xu studies aerospace engineering and is running the study with her students. They “teach” Mario to drive himself using artificial intelligence, by gamifying the system.

“We give positive points for finishing the lap, negative points for going off the road, negative points for going backwards,” Xu explained. “[Mario] will overtime… will learn what gives him more points and what doesn’t and he eventually learns that if you finish a lap you get the most amount of points.”

It’s all in the name of safety.

“Right now AI is such a black box that there’s no formal way to show that something is safe. And so, it’s a little bit scary if you’re thinking about putting these cars on the roadway because I can’t guarantee that it’s going to perform well every single time,” Xu said.

There were a few road bumps along the way.

“It started out where he was hopping and just wouldn’t move at all. Because he didn’t want to get penalized,” Xu explained. “He ‘reward hacked’ and just basically made loops over and over again to checkpoint one and would come back to the start and come back again.”

But after some trial and error, AI Mario figured out how to finish a lap. Xu says it took six months.

“We train Mario for millions of millions of times,” she explained.

Now that he’s fully on track, they can take the data to figure out which path he takes is the safest, or what needs to change in order to do so.

Notably, Waymo has been seeking state approval in Maryland for clearance for its vehicles to drive in Baltimore.

The company has already been mapping out parts of Baltimore City with human drivers supervising.

The bills are unlikely to pass this session.

The company’s cars have been hitting the roads in 11 other cities, like Austin, TX and Phoenix, AZ. But, in some cases its cars have faced real life obstacles that are more serious than just banana peels or turtle shells.

“Those are all the corner cases that you can’t really hard to predict and so you want to be able to find them before you deploy these vehicles,” Xu said.

Now for the final lap of the game, Dr. Xu says they’re looking to go multi-player.

“One of the things we’re looking at is this notion of transfer learning. It’s that, if you train Mario here, without anybody else. Now we put him in an environment with other players. How’s he going to do?”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Pheben Kassahun

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    WEST SENECA, New York (WKBW) — March is National Kidney Month, a time to raise awareness about kidney health and the urgent need for living donors.

As of September 2024, nearly 90,000 people were waiting for a kidney, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration. While a record 6,800 living donors donated a kidney in 2019, the waitlist remains extensive.

For patients like Nichole Jenson, finding a donor is a chance at a full life. Jenson has faced numerous health challenges since 2017, beginning with lipedema and lymphedema, a swelling disorder.

“In 2021, I ended up having sepsis, and I was hospitalized for 11 days in the ICU and then had to go into rehab, basically to relearn to walk and have lymphoedema therapy. And at that time, my kidneys almost went into full renal failure,” Jenson said.

Jenson learned her kidneys were functioning at around 15 percent. Following the diagnosis, she shifted her lifestyle, lost 200 pounds, and focused on her health. She is now on the kidney transplant list and advocates for others on the same journey.

“That’s probably the scariest part of it all, I’ve been through so many surgeries, and I can handle all that, but I think being on dialysis is the scariest thing for me,” Jenson said.

Kidney disease is often described as the “silent killer” because symptoms rarely appear until the disease reaches advanced stages, making dialysis a necessity.

“When the kidney is starting to get scarred down and you don’t have a 100 percent function, you go down to 90 percent, you don’t notice it. You go down to 80 percent, you don’t notice it, 70 percent, 60 percent, 50 percent, actually, you don’t start noticing it until your kidney function is around 20 percent or less,” Dr. Liise Kayler said.

Kayler is the division chief of transplantation at ECMC. She said that without functioning kidneys, people die within about three weeks.

“It eliminates toxins and fluids from your body. If you don’t have something doing that, then the toxins and fluids build up,” Kayler said.

Symptoms of kidney failure include puffy ankles, shortness of breath, itching, nausea, and vomiting. Because these mirror other illnesses, doctors emphasize the importance of regular checkups.

“They can see your kidney function very easily with a simple blood test; they can see it every year and see which direction it’s trending and how good or good it is or not,” Kayler said.

If a patient’s kidney function trends in the wrong direction, they are referred to a specialist. Most people waiting for a transplant rely on dialysis to survive.

“It is a great treatment in terms of it keeps people alive, but it’s hard on a person’s body,” Jeremy Morlock said. “It’s hard on a person’s mental health. Most people on dialysis are treated four hours a day, three days a week. It’s exhausting.”

Morlock, the director of the Kidney Foundation of Western New York, aims to raise awareness about the life-changing benefits of becoming a living donor.

“It’s a pretty wonderful thing. If you want to be a kidney donor, the transplant center will do a really thorough medical workup to make sure that the person is able to undergo that surgery, that they’re going to be able to function well long term with just one kidney,” Morlock said.

For patients waiting on the list, the support of medical teams and potential donors makes all the difference.

“They’re so supportive and they make the process supportive and they make the process just so much better, and I’m so thankful for all of them,” Jenson said.

Becoming an organ donor requires extensive testing to ensure the donor’s safety and the compatibility of the organ.

For patients on the waiting list, the support of medical teams and potential donors makes all the difference.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Maki Becker

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    CHEEKTOWAGA, New York (WKBW) — Western New Yorkers are stepping up to help TSA agents at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport who have been working without a paycheck for more than five weeks.

The airport put out the word on Monday, and by 8 a.m. Tuesday, dozens of people began dropping off gift cards of all kinds to support the workers.

According to NFTA’s Kelly Khatib, the Buffalo Niagara International Airport recieved $16,000 in gift card donations during Tuesday’s drive.

“There’s people in Western New York that care more than the darn government,” one person said.

Volunteers whose usual job is to bring their therapy dogs to the terminal were busy collecting the cards on Tuesday.

“We’ve had McDonald’s, we’ve had Aldi’s, we’ve had Tops,” a volunteer said.

“I feel uplifted by all this generosity. I’m just amazed by how generous people are,” a volunteer said.

“This is phenomenal. The people just keep coming,” a volunteer said.

So far, the Buffalo Niagara International Airport isn’t seeing the long lines like at other airports, but the TSA agents here are nevertheless not getting paid as the partial government shutdown drags on.

This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. WKBW verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.