ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
An ‘AI Scientist’ Is Inventing and Running Its Own Experiments
Will Knight | Wired
“At first glance, a recent batch of research papers produced by a prominent artificial intelligence lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver might not seem that notable. Featuring incremental improvements on existing algorithms and ideas, they read like the contents of a middling AI conference or journal. But the research is, in fact, remarkable. That’s because it’s entirely the work of an ‘AI scientist’ developed at the UBC lab together with researchers from the University of Oxford and a startup called Sakana AI.”
BIOTECH
Beyond Gene-Edited Babies: The Possible Paths for Tinkering With Human Evolution
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world—and making an edited baby is flatly illegal in most countries surveyed by legal scholars. But advancing technology could render the embryo issue moot. New ways of adding CRISPR to the bodies of people already born—children and adults—could let them easily receive changes as well.”
ROBOTICS
Boston Dynamics’ New Electric Atlas Can Do Push-Ups
Brian Heater | TechCrunch
“Until today, we’ve seen exactly 40 seconds of Boston Dynamics’ new electric Atlas in action. The Hyundai-owned robotics stalwart is very much still in the early stages of commercializing the biped for factory floors. For now, however, it’s doing the thing Boston Dynamics does second best after building robots: showing off in viral video form.”
BIOTECH
The Next Frontier for mRNA Could Be Healing Damaged Organs
Emily Mullin | Wired
“Faccioli and Hu are part of a University of Pittsburgh team led by Alejandro Soto-Gutiérrez attempting to revive badly damaged livers like these—as well as kidneys, hearts, and lungs. Using messenger RNA, the same technology used in some of the Covid-19 vaccines, they’re aiming to reprogram terminally ill organs to be fit and functioning again.”
GOVERNANCE
Silicon Valley Is Coming Out in Force Against an AI-Safety Bill
Caroline Mimbs Nyce | The Atlantic
“In part, the debate over the bill gets at a core question with AI. Will this technology end the world, or have people just been watching too much sci-fi? At the center of it all is [Scott] Wiener. Because so many AI companies are based in California, the bill, if passed, could have major implications nationwide. I caught up with the state senator yesterday to discuss what he describes as his ‘hardball politics’ of this bill—and whether he actually believes that AI is capable of going rogue and firing off nuclear weapons.”
TRANSPORTATION
Waymo Wants to Chauffeur Your Kids
Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch
“Soon, parents in range of Waymo robotaxis might not have to worry about picking up their kids from after-school activities—or any time, really. The San Francisco Standard reports that Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary, is considering a subscription program that would let teens hail one of its cars solo and send pickup and drop-off alerts to their parents.”
COMPUTING
DNA Computer Can Play Chess and Solve Sudoku Puzzles
Alex Wilkins | New Scientist
“Computers made from DNA have previously only been able to store information or perform computations on it—now a new device can do both. A computer made from DNA that can solve basic chess and sudoku puzzles could one day, if scaled up, save vast amounts of energy over traditional computers when it comes to tasks like training artificial intelligence models.”
AUTOMATION
Boulder-Like 3D-Printed Homes Will Feature Up to Three Floors
Adam Williams | New Atlas
“Most 3D-printed homes are currently arranged on one floor, which can obviously be a little limiting. However, an upcoming project in the Netherlands shows that this might not be the case for long as it will build new houses that will include up to three floors, showcasing the increasing complexity of 3D-printed architecture.”
ENERGY
World’s ‘Largest Solar Precinct’ Approved by Australian Government
Keiran Smith | Associated Press
“Australian company Sun Cable plans to build a 12,400-hectare solar farm and transport electricity to the northern Australian city of Darwin via an 800-kilometer (497-mile) overhead transmission line, then on to large-scale industrial customers in Singapore through a 4,300-kilometer (2,672-mile) submarine cable. The Australia-Asia PowerLink project aims to deliver up to six gigawatts of green electricity each year.”
DIGITAL MEDIA
No One’s Ready for This
Sarah Jeong | The Verge
“Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes. This is all about to flip—the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.”
SPACE
Against All Odds, an Asteroid Mining Company Appears to Be Making Headway
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“[AstroForge’s Odin mission] will be a rideshare payload on the Intuitive Machines-2 mission, which is due to launch during the fourth quarter of this year. If successful, the Odin mission would be spectacular. About seven months after launching, Odin will attempt to fly by a near-Earth, metallic-rich asteroid while capturing images and taking data—truly visiting terra incognita. Odin would also be the first private mission to fly by a body in the solar system beyond the moon.”
Image Credit: Eren Yıldız / Unsplash
