BIOTECH
CRISPR Cancer Trial Success Paves the Way for Personalized Treatments
Heidi Ledford | Nature
“A small clinical trial has shown that researchers can use CRISPR gene editing to alter immune cells so that they will recognize mutated proteins specific to a person’s tumors. Those cells can then be safely set loose in the body to find and destroy their target. …’It is probably the most complicated therapy ever attempted in the clinic,’ says study co-author Antoni Ribas, a cancer researcher and physician at the University of California, Los Angeles. ‘We’re trying to make an army out of a patient’s own T cells.’i”
COMPUTING
IBM Pushes Qubit Count Over 400 With New Processor
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“Today, IBM announced the latest generation of its family of avian-themed quantum processors, the Osprey. With more than three times the qubit count of its previous-generation Eagle processor, Osprey is the first to offer more than 400 qubits, which indicates the company remains on track to release the first 1,000-qubit processor next year.”
ROBOTICS
Amazon’s New Robot Can Handle Most Items in the Everything Store
Will Knight | Wired
“Amazon built an ecommerce empire by automating much of the work needed to move goods and pack orders in its warehouses. There is still plenty of work for humans in those vast facilities because some tasks are too complex for robots to do reliably—but a new robot called Sparrow could shift the balance that Amazon strikes between people and machines.”
COMPUTING
LG’s New Thin and Stretchable Displays Could Be Used to Wrap Skin, Cars, and Furniture
Simon Cohen | Digital Trends
“LG Display has announced that it has created the world’s first stretchable display that can be deformed by up to 20% of its original size and shape without suffering any damage. …’Alongside its thin, lightweight design, the Stretchable display’s revolutionary technology offers next-level versatility for various daily scenarios,’ the company said in a press release. The display is ‘easily attachable to curved surfaces such as skin, clothing, furniture, automobiles and aircraft.’i”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This Free Comic Series Is Gorgeous. You’d Never Know AI Drew It
Leslie Katz | CNET
“i‘By the new year, even the trained eye probably won’t be able to perceive an AI generation from any other,’ Coulson says. ‘It’s exciting and terrifying at the same time. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, so we’re embracing the future as fast as we can.’ AI image generation is advancing so rapidly, he adds, that The Lesson, out Nov. 1, marks a clear visual step up from the first comic in the trilogy, Summer Island, a folk-horror story in the spirit of Midsommar that came out in August. During those three months, Midjourney went through two upgrades.i”
ETHICS
The Lawsuit That Could Rewrite the Rules of AI Copyright
James Vincent | The Verge
“Microsoft, its subsidiary GitHub, and its business partner OpenAI have been targeted in a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the companies’ creation of AI-powered coding assistant GitHub Copilot relies on ‘software piracy on an unprecedented scale.’ The case is only in its earliest stages but could have a huge effect on the broader world of AI, where companies are making fortunes training software on copyright-protected data.”
TECH
Twitter’s Potential Collapse Could Wipe Out Vast Records of Recent Human History
Chris Stokel-Walker | MIT Technology Review
“Almost from the time the first tweet was posted in 2006, Twitter has played an important role in world events. The platform has been used to record everything from the Arab Spring to the ongoing war in Ukraine. It’s also captured our public conversations for years. But experts are worried that if Elon Musk tanks the company, these rich seams of media and conversation could be lost forever. Given his admission to employees in a November 10 call that Twitter could face bankruptcy, it’s a real and present risk.”
TECHNOLOGY
The Age of Social Media Is Ending
Ian Bogost | The Atlantic
“As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.”
SECURITY
Cryptography’s Future Will Be Quantum-Safe. Here’s How It Will Work.
Leila Sloman | Quanta
“In 1994, the computer scientist Peter Shor discovered that if quantum computers were ever invented, they would decimate much of the infrastructure used to protect information shared online. That frightening possibility has had researchers scrambling to produce new, ‘post-quantum’ encryption schemes, to save as much information as they could from falling into the hands of quantum hackers.”
