Oceans help cool down the world. Startups are betting they can tweak the chemistry of seas to make them do even more.

It is a radical idea that has yet to be proven on a commercial scale and causes some to worry about potential risks. But at least a dozen young companies are embarking on the world’s first major projects to get oceans to soak up more carbon dioxide, encouraged by billions of dollars in federal and corporate funding for efforts that remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

A startup that uses an electrochemical method to remove carbon from seawater is building its first commercial-scale plants in Singapore and Quebec. Removing the carbon boosts the ocean’s ability to soak up more from the atmosphere. The U.S. government recently awarded it and a competitor with a similar approach some of the first federal funding for carbon removal. 

Another startup is set to pour about 9,000 tons of sand mixed with a yellow-green mineral called olivine near the waters off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. When the sand dissolves in water, it triggers a series of chemical reactions that drive carbon removal.

Read it all.

Oceans absorb about 30% of the carbon from the atmosphere. Startups are developing technologies to rev up that power. https://t.co/oM5JP6VR7H via @WSJ

— WSJ Science (@WSJscience) June 25, 2024

Researchers and activists in the trenches of the long fight against H.I.V. got a rare piece of exciting news this week: Results from a large clinical trial in Africa showed that a twice-yearly injection of a new antiviral drug gave young women total protection from the virus.

“I got cold shivers,” said Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, an investigator in the trial of the drug, lenacapavir, describing the startling sight of a line of zeros in the data column for new infections. “After all our years of sadness, particularly over vaccines, this truly is surreal.”

Yvette Raphael, the leader of a group called Advocacy for Prevention of H.I.V. and AIDS in South Africa, said it was “the best news ever.”

Read it all.

It is 70 years since at&t’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s.

Read it all.

An energy-rich future is not just some environmentalist fever dream. Our special issue explores how the exponential rise of solar power will change the world https://t.co/4rJ2lJfF2t pic.twitter.com/YLSXWNKraj

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 20, 2024

By the time children born today are in kindergarten, artificial intelligence (AI) will probably have surpassed humans at all cognitive tasks, from science to creativity. When I first predicted in 1999 that we would have such artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2029, most experts thought I’d switched to writing fiction. But since the spectacular breakthroughs of the past few years, many experts think we will have agi even sooner—so I’ve technically gone from being an optimist to a pessimist, without changing my prediction at all.

After working in the field for 61 years—longer than anyone else alive—I am gratified to see AI at the heart of global conversation. Yet most commentary misses how large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini fit into an even larger story. AI is about to make the leap from revolutionizing just the digital world to transforming the physical world as well. This will bring countless benefits, but three areas have especially profound implications: energy, manufacturing and medicine. 

Read it all.

“AI is about to make the leap from revolutionising the digital world to transforming the physical world as well,” writes Ray Kurzweil in a guest essay. The futurist says amid countless benefits, there will be profound implications in three areas https://t.co/ty57b4HqrY

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 18, 2024

For the first time, researchers have detected a significant dip in atmospheric levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons — harmful gases that deplete the ozone layer and warm the planet.

Almost 30 years after nations first agreed to phase out these chemicals, which were widely used for air conditioning and refrigeration, scientists say global concentrations peaked in 2021. Since then, the ozone-depleting potential of HCFCs in the atmosphere has fallen by about three-quarters of a percentage point, according to findings published Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Though small, that decline comes sooner than expected, scientists say — and it represents a significant milestone for the international effort to preserve the layer of Earth’s stratosphere that blocks dangerous ultraviolet sunlight.

The world agreed to ban this dangerous pollutant — and it’s working – The Washington Post https://t.co/Qfa9bSUAii

— Steve Berkowitz (@steveberkowitz) June 12, 2024

Diagnosing dementia early gives us more time to put precautions in place and to study exactly how the condition progresses – and a new method for predicting conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease is promising up to nine years of advance warning.

The method, developed by a team from the Queen Mary University of London in the UK and Monash University in Australia, involves a neurobiological model that analyzes brain scans captured by functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

In tests, the model was more than 80 percent accurate at predicting the development of dementia. That has huge potential in terms of early diagnosis, and it also addresses another challenge: the large number of people with dementia who don’t get diagnosed at all.

“Predicting who is going to get dementia in the future will be vital for developing treatments that can prevent the irreversible loss of brain cells that causes the symptoms of dementia,” says neurologist Charles Marshall, from the Queen Mary University of London.

Dementia Breakthrough: Brain Scans Predict Disease Up to 9 Years Early https://t.co/iuabrmwIa3

— ScienceAlert (@ScienceAlert) June 12, 2024

Scientists have developed a glowing dye that sticks to cancer cells and gives surgeons a “second pair of eyes” to remove them in real time and permanently eradicate the disease. Experts say the breakthrough could reduce the risk of cancer coming back and prevent debilitating side-effects.

The fluorescent dye spotlights tiny cancerous tissue that cannot be seen by the naked eye, enabling surgeons to remove every last cancer cell while preserving healthy tissue. That could mean fewer life-changing side effects after surgery.

The technique was developed by scientists and surgeons at the University of Oxford in collaboration with the California biotech company ImaginAb Inc and was funded by Cancer Research UK.

“We are giving the surgeon a second pair of eyes to see where the cancer cells are and if they have spread,” said Freddie Hamdy, professor of surgery at the University of Oxford. “With this technique, we can strip all the cancer away, including the cells that have spread from the tumour, which could give it the chance to come back later.”

Scientists develop glowing dye that sticks to cancer cells in breakthrough study https://t.co/FBYjCa8nYp

— The Guardian (@guardian) June 10, 2024

Coastal areas up and down the East Coast are sinking at the same time sea levels are rising. Parts of Beaufort, Colleton and Charleston counties sank more than 2 inches since 2007, and some areas on St. Helena Island sank more than 3 inches, The Post and Courier previously reported.

Sinking land — a problem also called subsidence and settlement — can make flooding worse, cause septic tanks to fail, damage underground infrastructure, and cause buildings and bridges to crack.

So can we slow it down? Here’s what we found out.

Parts of South Carolina are sinking, and quickly. Can we slow it down? https://t.co/xVQX3VRcFk

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) June 3, 2024

For more than a year, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has warned about a wave of election interference that could make 2016 look cute. No respectable foreign adversary needs an army of human trolls in 2024. AI can belch out literally billions of pieces of realistic-looking and sounding misinformation about when, where and how to vote. It can just as easily customize political propaganda for any individual target. In 2016, Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s digital campaign director, spent endless hours customizing tiny thumbnail campaign ads for groups of 20 to 50 people on Facebook. It was miserable work but an incredibly effective way to make people feel seen by a campaign. In 2024, Brad Parscale is software, available to any chaos agent for pennies. There are more legal restrictions on ads, but AI can create fake social profiles and aim squarely for your individual feed. Deepfakes of candidates have been here for months, and the AI companies keep releasing tools that make all of this material faster and more convincing.

Almost 80 percent of Americans think some form of AI abuse is likely to affect the outcome of November’s presidential election. Wray has staffed each of the FBI’s 56 field offices with at least two election-crime coordinators. He has urged people to be more discerning with their media sources. In public, he’s the face of chill. “Americans can and should have confidence in our election system,” he said at the International Conference on Cyber Security in January. Privately, an elected official familiar with Wray’s thinking told me the director is in a middle manager’s paradox: loads of responsibility, limited authority. “[Wray] keeps highlighting the issue, but he won’t play politics, and he doesn’t make policy,” that official said. “The FBI enforces laws. The director is like, ‘Please ask Congress where the laws are.’”

Gift Article
Why this year’s election interference could make 2016 look cute
The first big AI crisis isn’t some hypothetical far off in the future. It’s coming on Election Day.
Opinion By Josh @Tyrangiel
May 30, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EDT https://t.co/tVtkR6qJMe

— K_Conner (@kvconner) May 30, 2024

Prior to joining T. Rowe Price, Poppy Allonby spent more than twenty years at Blackrock, predominately in equity investment roles and latterly as Managing Director, Head of Global Product Group, EMEA & APAC. Between 2014 and 2022, she was on the Church Commissioners’ Board of Trustees and a member of its Assets Committee.

“I am delighted and honoured to join the Church Commissioners as its CIO, an organisation globally recognised as a leader in sustainable investment,” said Poppy Allonby. “My focus will be on delivering strong, consistent returns to meet the Commissioners’ core purpose, which is to support the mission and ministry of the Church of England – and to do so in an ethical, sustainable way.”

The Church Commissioners has provided the Church with over £3.5bn in funding since 2009, with £1.2bn to be distributed during the current 2023-2025 triennium – a 30% increase on the previous triennium, thanks in large part to the excellent investment returns generated by the Commissioners’ Investment team. The fund has delivered 14 years of positive returns, while building a reputation as a global leader in responsible investment.

Exciting news @ccsforengland! Poppy Allonby is their new #endowment CIO. Poppy brings +21 years of expertise to the #CIO role. @Matttoledo1 @ChiefInvOfficerhttps://t.co/XCcQDVITtG#alts #privatemarkets #energytransition #duediligence #compliance #ESG #Vidriofinancial

— Vidrio Financial (@VidrioFinancial) May 31, 2024

Raquel Campos’ water issues started in January, when her condo building’s manager sent residents a message saying that the city hadn’t delivered water to its cistern. Four days later, taps in the upscale residence went dry.

Campos has lived in the wealthy Polanco neighborhood for 18 years and said she has never experienced water issues like this. Her husband paid to shower at a nearby hotel and she called water delivery companies that were overwhelmed with a sudden deluge of requests from the neighborhood. The water in Campos’ building came back within a few days, but with much lower pressure. Water is now delivered about every two weeks. Each unit has paid to cover the cost, increasing their monthly condo expenses by 30 percent.

Water scarcity has long been an issue in Mexico City, with the brunt of the shortages happening in lower-income neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city center. But recently, residents in some of the city’s wealthier neighborhoods have also been running out of water as hot temperatures, low rainfall and poor infrastructure have converged to create a crisis across the sprawling metropolis.

We’ll always have water, just not enough of it.

Mexico City and millions of its residents could run out of water in weeks

– metropolitan area of 22 million gets @ 1/4 of water from system that’s running dry….
could be unable to provide water by 6/26https://t.co/PXeC4OT0kY

— Jan SMH Harper (@SmhJan) May 29, 2024

OpenAI said on Tuesday that it had begun training a new flagship artificial intelligence model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT.

The San Francisco start-up, which is one of the world’s leading A.I. companies, said in a blog post that it expected the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it strove to build “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The new model would be an engine for A.I. products including chatbots, digital assistants akin to Apple’s Siri, search engines and image generators.

OpenAI also said it was creating a new Safety and Security Committee to explore how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies.

“While we are proud to build and release models that are industry-leading on both capabilities and safety, we welcome a robust debate at this important moment,” the company said.

OpenAI Says It Has Begun Training a New Flagship A.I. Model#LLM
via @NYTimes https://t.co/bWJHhNNbB5

— ronfriedmann (@ronfriedmann) May 28, 2024

Ms Howatch, 52, believes God has been guiding her. Although she made her first fortune writing blockbusters such as Penmarric, success and its trappings left her spiritually empty. She had houses in several countries, drove a Porsche and a Mercedes and after the break-up of her marriage had too many ‘facile, transient liaisons’. In the early Eighties she told her editor she would be late with a novel and he said: ‘What will I tell the accountants?’

‘I was not interested in fame and fortune any more – I’d had it all since I was 30 and it hadn’t satisfied me. So I thought, ‘If I’m not in it for that and I’m not in it to keep my publishers in the black, what the hell am I doing it for?’

‘God seized me by the scruff of the neck, slammed me against the nearest wall and shook me until my teeth rattled. I thought: ‘Okay, what does God actually require of me?”

–From there and quoted by yours truly in yesterday’s Pentecost sermon (emphasis mine)

Followers may be glad to read that @Cambridge_Uni has announced that I am to become a professor in October. This is an ideal opportunity for me to reiterate our gratitude to Susan Howatch for endowing the Starbridge position around thirty years ago. pic.twitter.com/Qk2i5U41f0

— Andrew Davison (@AP_Davison) June 14, 2023

A lifelike artificial intelligence with a smooth, alluring voice enchants and impresses its human users — flirting, telling jokes, fulfilling their desires and eventually winning them over.

I’m summarizing the plot of the 2013 movie “Her,” in which a lonely introvert named Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is seduced by a virtual assistant named Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

But I might as well be describing the scene on Monday when OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, showed off an updated version of its A.I. voice assistant at an event in San Francisco.

The company’s new model, called GPT-4o (the o stands for “omni”), will let ChatGPT talk to users in a much more lifelike way — detecting emotions in their voices, analyzing their facial expressions and changing its own tone and cadence depending on what a user wants. If you ask for a bedtime story, it can lower its voice to a whisper. If you need advice from a sassy friend, it can speak in a playful, sarcastic tone. It can even sing on command.

Read it all.

Financial Times @ft: A.I.'s 'Her' Era Has Arrived – The New York Times. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #aistrategy https://t.co/9VjteQTn5G

— Nordic AI Artificial Intelligence Institute (@nordicinst) May 14, 2024

Last May, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said the company would use artificial intelligence to reimagine all of its products.

But because new generative A.I. technology presented risks, like spreading false information, Google was cautious about applying the technology to its search engine, which is used by more than two billion people and was responsible for $175 billion in revenue last year.

On Tuesday, at Google’s annual conference in Mountain View, Calif., Mr. Pichai showed how the company’s aggressive work on A.I. had finally trickled into the search engine. Starting this week, he said, U.S. users will see a feature, A.I. Overviews, that generates information summaries above traditional search results. By the end of the year, more than a billion people will have access to the technology.

A.I. Overviews is likely to heighten concerns that web publishers will see less traffic from Google Search, putting more pressure on an industry that has reeled from rifts with other tech platforms. On Google, users will see longer summaries about a topic, which could reduce the need to go to another website — though Google downplayed those concerns.

Read it all.

Google Takes the Next Step in Its A.I. Evolution https://t.co/dz8E5zBfI8

— postiglione@ucc.edu (@Postiglione5888) May 14, 2024

April was the Earth’s 11th consecutive month of record-breaking heat, with warmer weather already sweeping across Asia and a hotter-than-usual summer expected in Europe.

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month’s temperatures globally were 1.58C (2.8F) above historical averages and marked the hottest April on record. The past 12 months have been 1.61C higher than pre-industrial temperatures, exceeding the 1.5C threshold that policymakers and scientists say could threaten life on the planet.

“Whilst temperature variations associated with natural cycles like El Niño come and go, the extra energy trapped into the ocean and the atmosphere by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases will keep pushing the global temperature towards new records,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

World Extends Run of Heat Records for 11th Straight Month https://t.co/058Y6sQ6Hd

— Shehzad Younis شہزاد یونس (@shehzadyounis) May 8, 2024

Researchers have identified a genetic trait that makes it virtually “guaranteed” a person will get Alzheimer’s, in a discovery that may pave the way to better targeted treatments and earlier diagnoses.

A study found that having two copies of a specific gene makes it almost inevitable that a person will eventually develop symptoms.

Experts said the discovery may help the development of targeted treatments and could enable genetic testing and earlier interventions.

More than 900,000 people have dementia in the UK, the majority of whom have Alzheimer’s. There is no cure for the disease, although treatments have been found to slow its progress.

Read it all (subscription).

@thetimes reports researchers have identified a genetic trait that virtually ‘guarantees’ Alzheimer’s disease.

Huge news!

Understanding more about causes can lead to new and better ways of diagnosing, treating and caring for people in the future. (1/3)https://t.co/NpTyIAt7Pg

— Alzheimer's Society (@alzheimerssoc) May 7, 2024

A pair of glasses from Meta shoots a picture when you say, “Hey, Meta, take a photo.” A miniature computer that clips to your shirt, the Ai Pin, translates foreign languages into your native tongue. An artificially intelligent screen features a virtual assistant that you talk to through a microphone.

Last year, OpenAI updated its ChatGPT chatbot to respond with spoken words, and recently, Google introduced Gemini, a replacement for its voice assistant on Android phones.

Tech companies are betting on a renaissance for voice assistants, many years after most people decided that talking to computers was uncool.

Will it work this time? Maybe, but it could take a while.

Read it all.

"Tech companies are betting on a renaissance for #voiceassistants, many years after most people decided that talking to computers was uncool.

Will it work this time? Maybe, but it could take a while."https://t.co/HougUGelmm

— Stephen Loynd (@loyndsview) May 2, 2024

Eternal God, the whole cosmos sings of thy glory, from the dividing of a single cell to the vast expanse of interstellar space: We offer thanks for thy theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who didst perceive the divine in the evolving creation. Enable us to become faithful stewards of thy divine works and heirs of thy everlasting kingdom; through Jesus Christ, the firstborn of all creation, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
"The Phenomenon of Man" 1955 https://t.co/EESxPHOalG pic.twitter.com/Ml3P6adAIF

— Nicholas P Schiavone (@NickSchiavone) April 4, 2024

The artificial-intelligence boom is sending Silicon Valley’s talent wars to new extremes.

Tech companies are serving up million-dollar-a-year compensation packages, accelerated stock-vesting schedules and offers to poach entire engineering teams to draw people with expertise and experience in the kind of generative AI that is powering ChatGPT and other humanlike bots. They are competing against each other and against startups vying to be the next big thing to unseat the giants.

The offers stand out even by the industry’s relatively lavish past standards of outsize pay and perks. And the current AI talent shortage stands out for another reason: It is happening as layoffs are continuing in other areas of tech and as companies have been reallocating resources to invest more in covering the enormous cost of developing AI technology.

“There is a secular shift in what talents we’re going after,” says Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks. “We have a glut of people on one side and a shortage on the other.”

Read it all.

“There is a secular shift in what talents we’re going after,” says Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks. “We have a glut of people on one side [in tech] & a shortage on the other” https://t.co/yfHihwU937

— Jim Russell (@ProducerCities) March 27, 2024

Mark Kelly of Recorded Future, a cyber-security firm, says his company is aware of about 50 hacking groups in China, including private firms working for the mss or People’s Liberation Army. There are undoubtedly many more. Mr Kelly describes China’s cyber-espionage efforts as “orders of magnitude” greater in scale than those mounted by Russia or North Korea.

As the indictment shows, they are surprisingly devolved. Some of them specialise in spying on different parts of the world, says Nigel Inkster, a former deputy head of Britain’s spy agency, mi6. They have considerable leeway to do as they wish, he says: “I’m not even sure that there is any kind of formal political clearance mechanism.” Much of their work is subcontracted to private firms. Last month a huge online dump of documents from one such company, i-Soon, showed its involvement in large-scale cyber-snooping on behalf of a variety of government agencies.

The West’s anxieties, not least about the hackers’ theft of corporate data, are becoming increasingly manifest. In January the head of the fbi, Christopher Wray, said that China’s state-sponsored hackers outnumbered his agency’s cyber-personnel by “at least 50 to one”. He added that China’s hackers are laying the groundwork for a possible Chinese strike, “positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities.”

Read it all.

The West’s anxieties about Chinese cyber-espionage are becoming increasingly manifest. But if it hopes that naming, shaming and sanctions will dissuade the spooks, it is likely to be disappointed https://t.co/MnQGij3lds

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 27, 2024

A team led by Google scientists has developed a machine-learning tool that can help to detect and monitor health conditions by evaluating noises such as coughing and breathing. The artificial intelligence (AI) system, trained on millions of audio clips of human sounds, might one day be used by physicians to diagnose diseases including COVID-19 and tuberculosis and to assess how well a person’s lungs are functioning.

This is not the first time a research group has explored using sound as a biomarker for disease. The concept gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scientists discovered that it was possible to detect the respiratory disease through a person’s cough.

What’s new about the Google system — called Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) — is the massive data set that it was trained on, and the fact that it can be fine-tuned to perform multiple tasks.

Read it all.

Google AI could soon use a person’s cough to diagnose disease

Machine-learning system trained on millions of human audio clips shows promise for detecting COVID-19 and tuberculosis. @marilenharo https://t.co/SyYt96CPk1

— Ashis Basu (@BasuAshis) March 22, 2024

First the cartel cut its teeth with drug trafficking. Then avocados, real estate and construction companies. Now, a Mexican criminal group known for its brutality is moving in on seniors and their timeshares.

The operation is relatively simple. Cartel employees posing as sales representatives call up timeshare owners, offering to buy their investments back for generous sums. They then demand upfront fees for anything from listing advertisements to paying government fines. The representatives persuade their victims to wire large amounts of money to Mexico — sometimes as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars — and then they disappear.

The scheme has netted the cartel, Jalisco New Generation, hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, according to U.S. officials who were not authorized to speak publicly, via dozens of call centers in Mexico that relentlessly target American and Canadian timeshare owners. They even bribe employees at Mexican resorts to leak guest information, the U.S. officials say.

Read it all.

“Over 5 years, American timeshare owners were bilked out of $288 million. The real number is most likely $350 million, as about 20% never register a complaint.”

A Mexican Drug Cartel’s New Target? Seniors and Their Timeshares https://t.co/DAKwfJwE37

— Dan Beucke (@DanBeucke) March 21, 2024

Debi Lucas had a tremor in her arm. Her feet froze when she tried to walk and she fell into her coffee table, busting her lip.

She went to a neurologist who thought she had Parkinson’s disease. Doctors normally diagnose the neurodegenerative condition by symptoms. Lucas, 59, had them.

But the neurologist, Dr. Jason Crowell, couldn’t be sure. The symptoms might be related to a traumatic brain injury Lucas suffered in a car accident decades earlier, he thought. Or they might be from her medications.

To find an answer, Crowell turned to a new test: a skin biopsy that can detect an abnormal protein people with Parkinson’s have inside their nerves. He took samples of skin near her ankle, knee and shoulder and sent them to a lab.

Read it all.

Parkinson’s disease can now be diagnosed with a skin biopsy that can detect an abnormal protein people with Parkinson’s have inside their nerves.

“The skin test basically is a window into the brain." https://t.co/rxT0u9XL6A https://t.co/rxT0u9XL6A

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 21, 2024

Researchers have used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help them make completely new antibodies for the first time. The proof-of-principle work, reported this week in a preprint on bioRxiv, raises the possibility of bringing AI-guided protein design to the therapeutic antibody market, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Antibodies — immune molecules that strongly attach to proteins implicated in disease — have conventionally been made using brute-force approaches that involve immunizing animals or screening vast numbers of molecules. AI tools that can shortcut those costly efforts have the potential to “democratize the ability to design antibodies”, says study co-author Nathaniel Bennett, a computational biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Ten years from now, this is how we’re going to be designing antibodies.”

Read it all.

Researchers have used generative artificial intelligence to help them make completely new antibodies for the first time https://t.co/pcb5is20jF

— nature (@Nature) March 19, 2024

Oceans marked 365 straight days of record-breaking global sea surface temperatures this week, fuelling concerns among international scientists that climate change could push marine ecosystems beyond a tipping point.

The consistent climb in temperatures reached a peak on Wednesday when the new all-time high was set for the past 12 months, at 21.2C.

The world’s seas have yet to show any signs of dropping to typical, seasonal temperatures, with daily records consecutively broken since they first went off the charts in mid-March last year, according to data from the US National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration and the Climate Reanalyzer research collaboration.

Driven by human-caused climate change and amplified by the cyclical El Niño weather phenomenon that warms the Pacific Ocean, this exceptional heat has bleak implications.

Read it all.

„Climate graphic of the week: Oceans set heat records for more than 365 days in a row“ https://t.co/utI21M9PFM

— Özden Terli (@TerliWetter) March 18, 2024

…there is one reason why America’s crackdown is justified. TikTok has evolved into a broad media platform with 170m users in America alone. A third of American adults under 30 consider TikTok a source not just of entertainment but of news. It is therefore a real concern that it has links to China, whose government is in deep ideological conflict with the West and sees the media as a tool of propaganda.

Most countries place some restrictions on foreign ownership of old media (ask Rupert Murdoch, who became an American citizen before taking over Fox). A bid by Abu Dhabi’s ruling family for the Telegraph newspaper prompted Britain to announce this week that it will ban foreign governments from owning British publications. Yet TikTok is fast becoming more influential.

It is time for governments to apply the same logic to new media as they do to old. If anything, the new platforms require greater vigilance. A newspaper’s editorial line can be seen in black and white; by contrast, every TikTok user gets a different feed, and the company does not provide adequate tools to examine its output in aggregate. Even if studies suggest bias—some allege a skew in TikTok’s Gaza coverage, for instance—it is impossible to know whether TikTok’s algorithm is responding to users’ preferences, or to manipulation from Beijing.

Read it all.

The best outcome is one in which TikTok survives. But that requires separating such a prominent platform from the influence of a country as manipulative and ideological as China https://t.co/GfNCoDEGZm

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 13, 2024

Scientists have used artificial intelligence to illuminate the human body’s so-called dark genome and develop a potentially powerful new approach to cancer detection, monitoring and treatment.  

Investigators at Johns Hopkins University in the US have revealed how previously little-studied repeats of genetic code sequences — known as “junk DNA” or dark matter — are associated with tumours.

The research, published in Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday, shows how AI and other advanced computing technologies are deepening understanding of diseases and how to deal with them.    

“It’s like a grand unveiling of what’s behind the curtain,” said Victor Velculescu, co-author of the paper and an oncology professor at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel cancer centre, adding that it will “lead to new therapies, new diagnostics and new screening approaches for cancer”.

Read it all.

AI explores ‘dark genome’ to shed light on cancer growth https://t.co/4OVG0SmlY7

— Financial Times (@FT) March 13, 2024

Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade. Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.

Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.

Days earlier, a clutch of peer-reviewed papers confirmed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston had broken the world record for a large-scale magnet with a field strength of 20 tesla using the latest high-temperature superconducting technology. This exceeds the threshold necessary for producing net energy, or a “Q factor”, above 1.0.

“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, plasma doyen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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Nuclear fusion for the grid is coming much sooner than you think https://t.co/P26xF1Q4mT

— Dr. Daniel Stelter (@thinkBTO) March 13, 2024

During the next year, the United States faces an increasingly fragile global order strained by accelerating strategic competition among major powers, more intense and unpredictable transnational challenges, and multiple regional conflicts with far-reaching implications. An ambitious but anxious China, a confrontational Russia, some regional powers, such as Iran, and more capable non-state actors are challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as U.S. primacy within it. Simultaneously, new technologies, fragilities in the public health sector, and environmental changes are more frequent, often have global impact and are harder to forecast…The world that emerges from this tumultuous period will be shaped by whoever offers the most persuasive arguments for how the world should be governed, how societies should be organized, and which systems are most effective at advancing economic growth and providing benefits for more people.

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The Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community notes that the Chinese state-owned media targeted American political candidates on TikTok in the 2022 Midterms. Here's our investigation on how these accounts generated tens of million views https://t.co/yqNJHItzE7 pic.twitter.com/QIEhtnFzvQ

— Iain Martin (@_IainMartin) March 12, 2024