2025-11-08 23:00:00
The Next Big Quantum Computer Has ArrivedIsabelle Bousquette | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“Helios contains 98 physical qubits, and from those can deliver 48 logical error-corrected qubits. This 2:1 ratio is unique and impressive, said Prineha Narang, professor of physical sciences and electrical and computer engineering at UCLA, and partner at venture-capital firm DCVC. Other companies require anything from dozens to hundreds of physical qubits to create one logical qubit.”
In a First, AI Models Analyze Language as Well as a Human ExpertSteve Nadis | Quanta
“While most of the LLMs failed to parse linguistic rules in the way that humans are able to, one had impressive abilities that greatly exceeded expectations. It was able to analyze language in much the same way a graduate student in linguistics would—diagramming sentences, resolving multiple ambiguous meanings, and making use of complicated linguistic features such as recursion.”
Wireless, Laser-Shooting Brain Implant Fits on a Grain of SaltMalcolm Azania | New Atlas
“Along with their international partners, researchers at Cornell University have developed a micro-neural implant so tiny it could dance on the head of a pin, and so astonishingly well-engineered that after implantation in a mouse, it can wirelessly transmit data about brain function for more than a year under its own power.”
Quantum Computing Jolted by DARPA Decision on Most Viable CompaniesAdam Bluestein | Fast Company
“For a technology that could produce world-changing feats but remains far from maturity—and into which billions of investment dollars have been flowing in recent months—the QBI validation is profound. The QBI’s first judgments, announced yesterday, reconfigure the competitive landscape, bolstering some powerful incumbents and boosting lesser-known players and outlier approaches. They also delivered a formidable gut punch to a couple of industry pioneers.”
Our First Terraforming Goal Should Be the Moon, Not MarsEthan Siegel | Big Think
“The only way to prepare a world for human inhabitants is to make the environment more Earth-like: terraforming. While most of humanity’s space dreams have focused on Mars, a better candidate may be even closer: the moon. Its proximity to Earth, composition, and many other factors make it very appealing. Mars should be a dream, but not our only one.”
This Genetically Engineered Fungus Could Help Fix Your Mosquito ProblemJason P. Dinh | The New York Times ($)
“Researchers reported last week in the journal Nature Microbiology that Metarhizium—a fungus already used to control pests—can be genetically engineered to produce so much of a sweet-smelling substance that it is virtually irresistible to mosquitoes. When they laced traps with those fungi, 90 percent to 100 percent of mosquitoes were killed in lab experiments.”
10,000 Generations of Hominins Used the Same Stone Tools to Weather a Changing WorldKiona N. Smith | Ars Technica
“The oldest tools at the site date back to 2.75 million years ago. According to a recent study, the finds suggest that for hundreds of millennia, ancient hominins relied on the same stone tool technology as an anchor while the world changed around them.”
The First New Subsea Habitat in 40 Years Is About to LaunchMark Harris | MIT Technology Review ($)
“Once it is sealed and moved to its permanent home beneath the waves of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary early next year, Vanguard will be the world’s first new subsea habitat in nearly four decades. Teams of four scientists will live and work on the seabed for a week at a time, entering and leaving the habitat as scuba divers.”
Waymo’s Robotaxis Are Coming to Three New CitiesAndrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“Waymo said it plans on launching commercial robotaxi services in three new cities: San Diego, Las Vegas, and Detroit. The announcement comes after the company said it would begin rapidly scaling to bring its fully driverless technology to more people on a faster timeline.”
AI Capabilities May Be Overhyped on Bogus Benchmarks, Study FindsAJ Dellinger | Gizmodo
“You know all of those reports about artificial intelligence models successfully passing the bar or achieving PhD-level intelligence? Looks like we should start taking those degrees back. A new study from researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that most of the popular benchmarking tools that are used to test AI performance are often unreliable and misleading.”
Unesco Adopts Global Standards on ‘Wild West’ Field of NeurotechnologyAisha Down | The Guardian
“The standards define a new category of data, ‘neural data,’ and suggest guidelines governing its protection. A list of more than 100 recommendations ranges from rights-based concerns to addressing scenarios that are—at least for now—science fiction, such as companies using neurotechnology to subliminally market to people during their dreams.”
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2025-11-07 23:00:00
The new radio portrait of the Milky Way is the most sensitive, widest-area map at these frequencies to date.
The Milky Way is a rich and complex environment. We see it as a luminous line stretching across the night sky, composed of innumerable stars.
But that’s just the visible light. Observing the sky in other ways, such as through radio waves, provides a much more nuanced scene—full of charged particles and magnetic fields.
For decades, astronomers have used radio telescopes to explore our galaxy. By studying the properties of the objects residing in the Milky Way, we can better understand its evolution and composition.
Our study, published recently in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, provides new insights into the structure of our galaxy’s galactic plane.
To reveal the radio sky, we used the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope in the Australian outback, composed of 4,096 antennas spread over several square kilometers. The array observes wide regions of the sky at a time, enabling it to rapidly map the galaxy.
Between 2013 and 2015, the array was used to observe the entire southern hemisphere sky for the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (or GLEAM) survey. This survey covered a broad range of radio wave frequencies.
The wide frequency coverage of GLEAM gave astronomers the first “radio color” map of the sky, including the galaxy itself. It revealed the diffuse glow of the galactic disk, as well as thousands of distant galaxies and regions where stars are born and die.
With the upgrade of the array in 2018, we observed the sky with higher resolution and sensitivity, resulting in the GLEAM-eXtended survey (GLEAM-X).
The big difference between the two surveys is that GLEAM could detect the big picture but not the detail, while GLEAM-X saw the detail but not the big picture.
To capture both, our team used a new imaging technique called image domain gridding. We combined thousands of GLEAM and GLEAM-X observations to form one huge mosaic of the galaxy.
Because the two surveys observed the sky at different times, it was important to correct for the ionosphere distortions—shifts in radio waves caused by irregularities in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Otherwise, these distortions would shift the position of the sources between observations.
The algorithm applies these corrections, aligning and stacking data from different nights smoothly. This took more than 1 million processing hours on supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Western Australia.
The result is a new mosaic covering 95 percent of the Milky Way visible from the southern hemisphere, spanning radio frequencies from 72 to 231 megahertz. The big advantage of the broad frequency range is the ability to see different sources with their “radio color” depending on whether the radio waves are produced by cosmic magnetic fields or by hot gas.
The emission coming from the explosion of dead stars appears in orange. The lower the frequency, the brighter it is. Meanwhile, the regions where stars are born shine in blue.
These colors allow astronomers to pick out the different physical components of the galaxy at a glance.
The new radio portrait of the Milky Way is the most sensitive, widest-area map at these low frequencies to date. It will enable a plethora of galactic science, from discovering and studying faint and old remnants of star explosions to mapping the energetic cosmic rays and the dust and grains that dominate the medium within the stars.
The power of this image will not be surpassed until the new SKA-Low telescope is complete and operational, eventually being thousands of times more sensitive and with higher resolution than its predecessor, the Murchison Widefield Array.
This upgrade is still a few years away. For now, this new image stands as an inspiring preview of the wonders the full SKA-Low will one day reveal.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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2025-11-07 05:10:57
The technology unleashes self-replicating viruses called phages on food bacteria to continuously hunt down and destroy bad bugs.
It’s a home cook’s nightmare: You open the fridge ready to make dinner and realize the meat has spoiled. You have to throw it out, kicking yourself for not cooking it sooner.
According to the USDA, a staggering one-third of food is tossed out because of spoilage, leading to over $160 billion lost every year. Much of this food is protein and fresh produce, which could feed families in need. The land, water, labor, energy, and transportation that brought the food to people’s homes also goes to waste.
Canada’s McMaster University has a solution. A team of scientists wrapped virus-packed microneedles inside a paper towel-like square sitting at the bottom of a Ziploc container. It’s an unusual duo. But the viruses, called phages, specifically target bacteria related to food spoilage. Some are already approved for consumption.
Using microneedles to inject the phages into foods, the team decontaminated chicken, shrimp, peppers, and cheese. All it took was placing the square on the bottom of a storage dish or on the surface of the food. Mixing and matching the phages destroyed multiple dangerous bacterial strains. In some cases, it made spoiled meat safe to eat again based on current regulations.
It’s just a prototype, but a similar design could one day be used in food packaging.
“[The platform] can revolutionize current food contamination practices, preventing foodborne illness and waste through the active decontamination of food products,” wrote the team.
It’s easy to take food safety for granted. The occasional bad bite of leftover pizza might give you some discomfort, but you bounce back. Still, foodborne pathogens result in hundreds of millions of cases and tens of thousands of deaths every year according to the World Health Organization. Bacteria like E. Coliand Salmonella are the main culprits.
Existing solutions rely on antibiotics. But they come with baggage. Flooding agriculture with these drugs contributes to antibacterial resistance, impacting the farming industry and healthcare.
Other preservative additives—like those in off-the-shelf foods—incorporate chemicals, essential oils, and other molecules. Although these are wallet-friendly and safe to eat, they often change core aspects of food like texture and flavor (canned salsa never tastes as great as the fresh stuff).
Maverick food scientists have been exploring an alternative way to combat food spoilage—phages. Adding a bath of viruses to a bacteria-infected stew is hardly an obvious food safety strategy, but it stems from research into antibacterial resistance.
Phages are viruses that only infect bacteria. They look a bit like spiders. Their heads house genetic material, while their legs grab onto bacteria. Once attached, phages inject their DNA into the bacteria and force their hosts to reproduce more viruses—before destroying them.
Because phages don’t infect human cells, they can be antibacterial treatments and even gene therapies. And they’re already part of our food production system. FDA-approved ListShield, for example, reduces Listeria in produce, smoked salmon, and frozen foods. PhageGuard S, approved in the US and EU, fights off Salmonella. Other phage-based products include sprays, edible films, and hydrogel-based packaging used to decontaminate food surfaces.
Even better, phages self-renew. They are “self-dosing antimicrobial additives,” wrote the team.
But size has been a limiting factor: They’re too big. Phages struggle to tunnel into larger pieces of food—say, a plump chicken breast. Although they might swiftly wipe out bacteria on the surface, pathogens can still silently brew inside a cutlet.
The new device was inspired by medical microneedle patches. These look like Band-Aids, but loaded inside are medications that can seep deeper into tissues—or in this case, food.
To construct food-safe microneedles, the team tested a range of edible materials and homed in on four ingredients. These included gelatin, the squishy protein-rich component at the heart of Jell-O, and other biocompatible materials readily used in medical devices. The ingredients were poured into a mold, baked into separate microneedle patches, and checked for integrity.
Each ingredient had strengths and weakness. But after testing the patches on various foods—mushrooms, fish, cooked chicken, and cheese—one component stood out for its reusability and ability to penetrate deeper. Called PMMA, the coating is already used in food-safe plexiglass and reusable packaging.
The team next loaded multiple phages that target different food-spoiling bacteria into PMMA scaffolds and challenged the patches to neutralize bacterial “lawns.” True to their name, these are fuzzy microscopic bits of bacteria that form a carpet. You’ve probably seen them at the bottom of a food container you’ve left far too long in the fridge.
The phage patches completely erased both E. Coli and Salmonellain steaks with high levels of the bacteria. Another test pitted the patches against existing methods in leftover chicken that had lingered 18 hours in unsafe food conditions. Compared to directly injecting phages or applying phage sprays, the microneedle patch was the only strategy that kept the chicken safe to eat according to current regulations.
The system was especially resilient to temperature changes. When applied to chicken or raw beef, the phage patches were active for at least a month at regular refrigerator temperatures, “ensuring compatibility with food products that require prolonged storage,” wrote the team.
The system can be tailored to tackle different bacteria, especially by mixing up which phages are included. Using a variety could potentially target strains of bacteria throughout the food production line, making the final product safer.
The team is planning to integrate the platform into food packaging materials, which would ensure the microneedles are in constant contact with the food and deliver a large dose of phages that self-replicate to continue warding off bacteria. Other ideas include sprinkling phage-loaded materials directly onto food during manufacturing and production.
The idea of eating viruses might seem a little weird. But phages naturally occur in almost all foods, including meat, dairy, and vegetables. You’ve likely already eaten these bacteria-fighting warriors at some point as they’re silently hunting down disease-causing bacteria.
The vaccine could prevent foodborne illness and reduce waste. It’s easy to adapt to different strains of bacteria, food-safe, and cost effective, wrote the team, making it “well suited for applications within the food industry.”
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2025-11-05 04:51:23
A bioprinter with a printhead the size of a sesame seed could deliver hydrogels to surgical sites.
Elephant trunks and garden hoses hardly seem like inspirations for a miniature 3D bioprinter.
Yet they’ve led scientists at McGill University to engineer the smallest reported bioprinting head to date. Described in the journal Devices, the device has a flexible tip just 2.7 millimeters in diameter—roughly the length of a sesame seed.
Bioprinters can deposit a wide range of healing materials directly at the site of injury. Some bioinks combat infections in lab studies; others deliver chemotherapy to cancerous sites, which could prevent tumors from recurring. On the operating table, biocompatible hydrogels injected during surgery help heal wounds.
The devices are promising but most are rather bulky. They struggle to reach all the body’s nooks and crannies—including, for example, the vocal cords.
It’s easy to take our ability to speak for granted and only appreciate its loss after catching a bad cold. But up to nine percent of people develop vocal-cord disorders in their lifetimes. Smoking, acid reflux, and chronic coughing tear at the delicate folds of tissue. Abnormal growths and cancers also contribute. These are usually removed with surgery that comes with a significant risk of scarring.
Hydrogels can help with healing. But because throat and vocal cord tissue is so intricate, current treatments inject it through the skin, rather than precisely into damaged regions.
But the new device can, in theory, sneak into a patient’s throat during surgery. Its tiny printhead doesn’t block a surgeon’s view, allowing near real-time printing after the removal of damaged tissues.
“I thought this would not be feasible at first—it seemed like an impossible challenge to make a flexible robot less than 3 mm in size,” Luc Mongeau, who led the study, said in a press release.
Although just a prototype, the device could one day help restore people’s voices after surgery and improve quality of life. It also could lead to the delivery of bioinks containing medications or even living cells to other tissues through the nose, mouth, or a small surgical cut.
Surgery inevitably results in scars. While these are an annoyance on the skin, excessive scarring—called fibrosis—seriously limits how well tissues can do their jobs.
Fibrosis in lungs after surgery, for example, leads to infections, blood clots, and a general decline in normal breathing. Scarring of the heart tampers with its electrical signals and often leads to irregular heartbeats. And for delicate tissues like vocal cords, fibrosis causes lasting stiffness, making it difficult to intonate, sing, or talk like before—essentially robbing the person of their voice.
Scientists have found a range of molecules that could aid the healing process. Hydrogels are one promising candidate. Soft, flexible, and biocompatible, hydrogel injections provide a squishy but structured architecture supporting vocal cords. Studies also suggest hydrogels boost the growth the healthy tissues and reduce fibrosis.
But because vocal cords are difficult to target, injections are handled through the skin, making it difficult to control where the hydrogel goes.
An alternative is to 3D print hydrogels directly in the body and repair damage during surgery. Both handheld and robotic systems have been successfully tested in labs, and minimally invasive versions are on the rise. One design uses air pressure to bioprint hydrogels inside the intestines. Another taps into magnets to repair the liver. But existing devices are too large to accommodate vocal cords.
To heal vocal cords, an ideal mini 3D bioprinter must seamlessly integrate into throat surgeries. Here, surgeons insert a microscope through the mouth and suspend it inside the throat. While it sounds uncomfortable, the procedure is highly efficient with little pain afterward.
The printhead needs to snake around the microscope but also flexibly adjust its position to target injured sites without blocking the surgeon’s view. Finally, the speed and force of the hydrogel spray should be controllable—avoiding the equivalent of accidentally squeezing out too much superglue.
The new bioprinter’s has a printhead a bit like an elephant’s trunk. It has a flexible arm that easily slips into the throat with a 2.7-millimeter arched nozzle at the end. Picture it as a fine-point Sharpie connected to a flexible tube. Three cables operate the printhead and control nozzle movement by applying tension, like strings on a puppet.
The system’s brain is in the actuator housing, which looks like a tiny plastic gift box. It holds a syringe of hydrogel for the printhead and pilots the adjustable cables using motors that precisely move the printhead to its intended location with a custom algorithm. Other electronics allow the team to control the setup using a wireless gaming controller in real time.
The actuator can be mounted under a standard throat surgery microscope so it’s out of the way during an operation, wrote the team.
To put the device through its paces, the team used the mini bioprinter to draw a range of shapes, including a square, heart, spiral, and various letters on a flat surface. The printhead accurately deposited thin lines of hydrogel, which can be stacked to form thicker lines—like repeatedly tracing drawings using a fine-tipped pen.
The team also tried it out in a mock vocal cord surgery. The “patient” was an accurate 3D model of a person’s throat but with different types of wounds to its vocal cords, including one that completely lacked half of the tissue. The bioprinter successfully made the repairs and reconstructed the missing vocal cord without issue.
“Part of what makes this device so impressive is that it behaves predictably, even though it’s essentially a garden hose—and if you’ve ever seen a garden hose, you know that when you start running water through it, it goes crazy,” said study author Audrey Sedal.
The flexibility comes at a cost. Though the printhead design deforms to prevent injury to tissues, this also means it’s more prone to mechanical vibrations from the actuator’s motors, which dings its accuracy.
As of now the mini printer requires manual control, but the team is working on a semi-autonomous version. More importantly, it needs to be pitted against standard hydrogel injection methods in living animals to show it’s safe and effective.
“The next step is testing these hydrogels in animals, and hopefully that will lead us to clinical trials in humans to test the accuracy, usability, and clinical outcomes of the bioprinter and hydrogel,” said Mongeau.
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2025-11-04 01:21:59
A new study suggests orbital data centers could be carbon neutral, but steep technical challenges remain.
As global demand for computing continues to explode, the carbon footprint of data centers is a growing concern. A new study outlines how hosting these facilities in space could help slash the sector’s emissions.
Data centers require enormous amounts of power and water to operate and cool the millions of chips housed within them. Current estimates from the International Energy Agency peg their electricity consumption at around 415 terawatt hours globally, roughly 1.5 percent of total consumption in 2024. And the Environmental and Energy Study Institute says that large data centers can use as much as five million gallons per day for cooling.
With demand for computing resources growing by the day, in particular since the rapid adoption of resource-guzzling generative AI across the economy, this threatens to become an unsustainable burden on the planet.
But a new paper in Nature Electronics by scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore suggests that hosting data centers in space could provide a potential solution. By relying on the abundant solar energy available in orbit and releasing waste heat into the cold vacuum of space, these facilities could, in principle, become carbon neutral.
“Space offers a true sustainable environment for computing,” Wen Yonggang, lead author of the study, said in a press release. “By harnessing the sun’s energy and the cold vacuum of space, orbital data centers could transform global computing.”
To validate their proposal, the researchers used digital-twin simulations of orbital computing systems to model how they would generate power, manage heat, and maintain connectivity. The team investigated two potential architectures: one designed to reduce the footprint of data collected by satellites themselves and another that would receive data from Earth for processing.
The first model would involve integrating data processing capabilities into satellites equipped with sensors—for example, cameras for imaging the Earth. This would make it possible to carry out expensive computations on the data on board before transmitting just the results back to the ground, rather than processing the raw data in terrestrial data centers.
The other approach involves a constellation of satellites equipped with full servers that could receive data from Earth and coordinate to carry out complex computing tasks like training AI models or running large simulations. The researchers note that this kind of distributed data center architecture—as opposed to assembling a large, monolithic data center in orbit—is technologically feasible with today’s satellite and computing technologies.
The team’s analysis suggests that the considerable carbon footprint of launching hardware into space could be offset within five years of operation, after which the facilities could run indefinitely on renewable energy.
Significant technical and logistical hurdles remain. Computer chips are vulnerable to radiation, an ever-present danger in space, which would necessitate the use of specialized radiation-hardened processors. Long-term maintenance of the facilities would also require in-orbit servicing technologies that don’t yet exist. And as computing technologies rapidly improve, chips depreciate in just a few years. Keeping orbital data centers stocked with the latest and greatest could be costly.
But the NTU team isn’t the first to float the idea of shifting computing facilities into space. Last year, French defense and aerospace giant Thales published a study exploring the feasibility of the idea. And next month, the startup Starcloud will launch a satellite carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU as a first step towards creating a network of orbital data centers.
While realizing the vision is likely to require technical breakthroughs and a huge amount of investment, one solution to computing’s ever growing carbon footprint may be above our heads.
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2025-11-01 22:00:00
Nvidia Becomes First $5 Trillion CompanyHannah Erin Lang | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“Nvidia is now larger than AMD, Arm Holdings, ASML, Broadcom, Intel, Lam Research, Micron Technology, Qualcomm, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing combined, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Its value also exceeds entire sectors of the S&P 500, including utilities, industrials and consumer staples.”
1X Neo Is a $20,000 Home Robot That Will Learn Chores via TeleoperationMariella Moon | Engadget
“In an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern, 1X CEO Bernt Børnich explained that the AI neural network running the machine still needs to learn from more real-world experiences. Børnich said that anybody who buys NEO for delivery next year will have to agree that a human operator will be seeing inside their houses through the robot’s camera. It’s necessary to be able to teach the machines and gather training data so it can eventually perform tasks autonomously.”
A New Startup Wants to Edit Human EmbryosEmily Mullin | Wired ($)
“In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. The backlash against He was immediate. Scientists said the technology was too new to be used for human reproduction and that the DNA change amounted to genetic enhancement. …Now, a New York–based startup called Manhattan Genomics is reviving the debate around gene-edited babies.”
OpenAI Reportedly Planning ‘Up to $1 Trillion’ IPO as Early as Next YearMike Pearl | Gizmodo
“An anonymously sourced report from Reuters claims that OpenAI is planning an initial public offering that would value the AI colossus at ‘up to $1 trillion.’ Just on Tuesday the company formally completed its slow evolution from an ambiguous non-profit to a for-profit company. Now it appears to be formalizing plans to become one of the world’s centers of economic power—at least on paper.”
AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance WorkersWill Knight | Wired ($)
“A new benchmark measures how well AI agents can automate economically valuable chores. Human-level AI is still some ways off. …’I should hope this gives much more accurate impressions as to what’s going on with AI capabilities,’ says Dan Hendrycks, director of CAIS. He adds that while some agents have improved significantly over the past year or so, that does not mean that this will continue at the same rate.”
The $460 Billion Quantum Bitcoin Treasure HuntKyle Torpey | Gizmodo
“Satoshi’s early bitcoin stash creates massive opportunity for quantum computing startups. …These early Bitcoin addresses, including many that have been connected to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, may also be associated with private keys (passwords to the Bitcoin accounts basically) that are lost or otherwise not accessible to anyone. In other words, they’re sort of like lost digital treasure chests that a quantum computer could potentially unlock at some point in the future.”
How AGI Became the Most Consequential Conspiracy Theory of Our TimeWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)
“The idea that machines will be as smart as—or smarter than—humans has hijacked an entire industry. But look closely and you’ll see it’s a myth reminiscent of more explicitly outlandish and fantastical schemes. …I get it, I get it—calling AGI a conspiracy isn’t a perfect analogy. It will also piss a lot of people off. But come with me down this rabbit hole and let me show you the light.”
Life Lessons From (Very Old) Bowhead WhalesCarl Zimmer | The New York Times ($)
“By measuring the molecular damage that accumulates in the eyes, ears, and eggs of bowhead whales, researchers have estimated that bowheads live as long as 268 years. A study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday offers a clue to how the animals manage to live so long: They are extraordinarily good at fixing damaged DNA.”
Renewable Energy and EVs Have Grown So Much Faster Than Experts Predicted 10 Years AgoAdele Peters | Fast Company
“There’s now four times as much solar power as the International Energy Agency (IEA) expected 10 years ago. Last year alone, the world installed 553 gigawatts of solar power—roughly as much as 100 million US homes use—which is 1,500% more than the IEA had projected. …More than 1 in 5 new cars sold worldwide today is an EV; a decade ago, that number was fewer than 1 in 100. Even if growth flatlined now, the world is on track to reach 100 million EVs by 2028.”
Extropic Aims to Disrupt the Data Center BonanzaWill Knight | Wired ($)
“The startup’s chips work in a fundamentally different way to chips from Nvidia, AMD, and others, and promise to be thousands of times more energy efficient when scaled up. With AI companies pouring billions of dollars into building data centers, a completely new approach could offer a far less costly alternative to vast arrays of conventional chips.”
AI Browsers Are a Cybersecurity Time BombRobert Hart | The Verge
“‘Despite some heavy guardrails being in place, there is a vast attack surface,’ says Hamed Haddadi, professor of human-centered systems at Imperial College London and chief scientist at web browser company Brave. And what we’re seeing is just the tip of the iceberg.”
NASA’s Supersonic Jet Finally Takes off for Its First Super Fast, Super Quiet FlightPassant Rabie | Gizmodo
“NASA’s X-59 aircraft completed its first flight over the Southern California desert, bringing us closer to traveling at the speed of sound without the explosive, thunder-like clap that comes with it. The experimental aircraft, built by aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin, is designed to break the sound barrier, albeit to do it quietly.”
A Bay Area Grocery Store Will Be the First to Sell Cultivated Meat—but You Only Have a Limited Time to Try ItKristin Toussaint | Fast Company
“[Cultivated meat] has only appeared on a handful of restaurant menus since its approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But if you’re in the Bay Area, you’re in luck: Cultivated meat startup Mission Barns will be selling its pork meatballs (made with a base of pea protein plus the company’s cultivated pork fat) at Berkeley Bowl West, one location of an independent grocery store in California.”
Chimps Are Capable of Human-Like Rational Thought, Breakthrough Study FindsBecky Ferreira | 404 Media
“The chimpanzees were able to rationally evaluate forms of evidence and to change their existing beliefs if presented with more compelling clues. The results reveal that non-human animals can exhibit key aspects of rationality, some of which had never been directly tested before, which shed new light on the evolution of rational thought and critical thinking in humans and other intelligent animals.”
Is Waymo Ready for Winter?Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“In its first few years of operation, Waymo has strategically stuck to cities with warmer, drier climates—places like Phoenix, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Austin. But as it eyes a slate of East Coast cities, including Boston, New York City, and Washington, DC, for the next phase of its expansion, its abilities to handle more adverse weather will become a crucial test.”
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