ESPN's Stephen A. Smith said Ron DeSantis has "lost his damn mind" after the Florida governor signed legislation to ban diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programs at Florida universities.

Smith admitted he was not an "aficionado on this subject" but still took aim at the Florida governor.

The ESPN host began his rant with an insult that turned into somewhat of a backhanded compliment.

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"And in the case of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — at this pace, he might go down as one of the stupidest people I’ve ever seen," Smith said earlier this week on his podcast. "And we know he’s not stupid. We know how smart he is.

"If you’re DeSantis, it’s bad enough you’ve alienated the Latino community. It’s bad enough you’ve alienated tens of millions of women because, I assure you, even though you have an abundance of women against abortion, most would like the right to make the choice for themselves as opposed to having male politicians dictate those choices for them. Now, we get to this latest stuff, and this is where it hits home for me, 'cause I’m a Black man, and we’re talking about the NAACP.

"Respectfully to the governor, Ron DeSantis, who obviously has offended Latinos, Blacks, women — have you lost your mind or do you just want to throw away the election? Is that what you’re trying to do?"

DeSantis signed the legislation, SB 266, on the campus of New College of Florida, an institution to which he has made drastic changes this year. SB 266 prevents any public university from using state funding to pay for DEI programs, and it also grants university presidents more authority over hiring practices.

The bill is DeSantis' latest offensive against what he calls "woke" influences on education. Recent years have also seen him pass legislation that grants parents more authority over their children's education in elementary, middle and high school.

In addition to the funding ban, DeSantis also signed a bill to ban public universities from requiring students and faculty to provide "diversity statements" to be admitted or hired. Such statements typically are meant to demonstrate how an applicant's experiences would help make a campus more diverse and inclusive.

DeSantis officially announced his bid to become the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election earlier this week.

Fox News' Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.

Scientists have found a drug that could combat drug-resistant infections – and they did it using artificial intelligence.

Using a machine-learning algorithm, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Canada's McMaster University have identified a new antibiotic that can kill a type of bacteria responsible for many drug-resistant infections. 

The compound kills Acinetobacter baumannii, which is a species of bacteria often found in hospitals. It can lead to pneumonia, meningitis and other serious infections. 

The microbe is also a leading cause of infections in wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Over the past decades, many pathogenic bacteria have become increasingly resistant to antibiotics, while few new antibiotics have been developed.

MIT said in a release that researchers identified the drug from a catalog of nearly 7,000 potential drug compounds using a machine-learning model that they trained to evaluate whether a chemical compound will inhibit the growth of the bacteria.

In order to get training data for the model, they first exposed the bacteria grown in a lab dish to around 7,500 different chemical compounds in order to see which could inhibit growth of the microbe. They fed the structure of each molecule into their model and told it whether each structure could inhibit bacterial growth.

After the model was trained, it was used to analyze a set of 6,680 compounds it had not seen before, and researchers narrowed down 240 hits to test experimentally, focusing on compounds with structures that were different from those of existing antibiotics or molecules from the training data. That testing led to nine antibiotics, including one that was very strong. 

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The compound, which was originally explored as a potential diabetes drug, turned out to be extremely effective at killing the bacteria. However, it had no effect on other species of bacteria.

The university noted that a "narrow spectrum" killing ability is desirable because it minimizes the risk of bacteria rapidly spreading resistance against the drug. Further, the drug would likely spare the beneficial bacteria that live in the human gut and help to suppress opportunistic infections.

The scientists named the drug abaucin and showed in studies in mice that it could treat wound infections caused by the bacteria. In lab tests, it was also found to work against a variety of drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii strains isolated from human patients. The drug was shown to kill cells by interfering with a process known as lipoprotein trafficking in additional experiments. Cells use that to transport proteins from the interior of the cell to the cell envelope. 

A lab at McMaster University is now working for others to optimize the medicinal properties of the compound and hopefully develop it for eventual use in patients. 

The study's authors also plan to use their modeling approach to identify potential antibiotics for other types of drug-resistant infections.

The findings were published Thursday in the journal "Nature Chemical Biology."