A cessation to the use animal testing is long overdue. Via Nature – Machine learning on mountain of safety data improves automated assessments. “Machine-learning software trained on masses of chemical-safety data is so good at predicting some kinds of toxicity that it now rivals — and sometimes outperforms — expensive animal studies, researchers report. Computer models could replace some standard safety studies conducted on millions of animals each year, such as dropping compounds into rabbits’ eyes to check if they are irritants, or feeding chemicals to rats to work out lethal doses, says Thomas Hartung, a toxicologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “The power of big data means we can produce a tool more predictive than many animal tests.” In a paper published in Toxicological Sciences on 11 July, Hartung’s team reports that its algorithm can accurately predict toxicity for tens of thousands of chemicals — a range much broader than other published models achieve — across nine kinds of test, from inhalation damage to harm to aquatic ecosystems…”