It wouldn’t be completely out of character for Joe Rogan, the comedian turned podcaster, to endorse a “libido-boosting” coffee brand for men.

But when a video circulating on TikTok recently showed Mr. Rogan and his guest, Andrew Huberman, hawking the coffee, some eagle-eyed viewers were shocked — including Dr. Huberman.

“Yep that’s fake,” Dr. Huberman wrote on Twitter after seeing the ad, in which he appears to praise the coffee’s testosterone-boosting potential, even though he never did.

Read it all.

Making deepfakes once required elaborate software. But now there is a growing number of "cheapfakes" — convincing fake videos easily made by meme-makers and misinformation peddlers who are embracing AI. https://t.co/H2h42mr4IY

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 12, 2023

Parishes across England and Wales can now register to participate in Churches Count on Nature, an annual scheme where people visit churchyards and record the plant and animal species they encounter.

An adult and child taking part in the Churches Count on Nature, using a magnifying glass to look at wildlifeCaring for God’s Acre
The biodiversity survey, supported by environmental charities A Rocha UK and Caring for God’s Acre, as well as the Church of England and the Church in Wales, will take place from June 3 to 11, 2023.

In the last two years, 900 counting events took place across churches in England and Wales, and over 27,000 wildlife records were submitted to Caring for God’s Acre. Churches across all denominations take part in the count each year.

The data will be used to determine where rare and endangered species are located in the country and to aid churches of all denominations to increase biodiversity on their land for the enrichment of the environment and local communities. This year, species on some of the 17,500 acres of churchyards in England alone will be mapped, with a further 1,282 acres of churchyards in Wales.

As graveyards and church land are usually undisturbed and not used for farming, they can be host to a great variety of wildlife not seen in other green spaces, particularly in urban areas. Old churchyards often have fantastic flowery and species-rich grasslands as they have been so little disturbed over the centuries.

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Parishes across England and Wales can now register to participate in Churches Count on Nature. 🌳

Read more at https://t.co/wrywVybO6C.

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) March 8, 2023

“I think we might exceed a one-to-one ratio of humanoid robots to humans,” Elon Musk declared on March 1st. Coming from the self-styled technoking of Tesla, it was not so much a prediction as a promise. Mr Musk’s car company is developing one such artificially intelligent automaton, codenamed Optimus, for use at home and in the factory. His remarks, made during Tesla’s investor day, were accompanied by a video of Optimus walking around apparently unassisted.

Given that Mr Musk did not elaborate how—or when—you get from a promotional clip to an army of more than 8bn robots, this might all smack of science-fiction. But he has waded into a very real debate about the future of work. For certain forms of ai-enabled automation are fast becoming science fact.

Since November Chatgpt, an ai conversationalist, has dazzled users with its passable impression of a human interlocutor. Other “generative” ais have been conjuring up similarly human-like texts, images and sounds by analysing reams of data on the internet. Last month the boss of ibm, a computing giant, forecast that ai will do away with much white-collar clerical work. On March 6th Microsoft announced the launch of a suite of ai “co-pilots” for workers in jobs ranging from sales and marketing to supply-chain management. Excitable observers murmur about a looming job apocalypse.

Read it all.

Absolute levels of adoption of industrial robots remain low. Even South Korean firms, by far the world’s keenest robot-adopters, employ ten manufacturing workers for every industrial robot https://t.co/mwHsvq9LoZ

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 9, 2023

The Argonne National Laboratory in the US has essentially cracked the battery technology for electric vehicles, discovering a way to raise the future driving range of standard EVs to a thousand miles or more. It promises to do so cheaply without exhausting the global supply of critical minerals in the process.

The joint project with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) has achieved a radical jump in the energy density of battery cells. The typical lithium-ion battery used in the car industry today stores about 200 watt-hours per kilo (Wh/kg). Their lab experiment has already reached 675 Wh/kg with a lithium-air variant.

This is a high enough density to power trucks, trains, and arguably mid-haul aircraft, long thought to be beyond the reach of electrification. The team believes it can reach 1,200 Wh/kg. If so, almost all global transport can be decarbonised more easily than we thought, and probably at a negative net cost compared to continuation of the hydrocarbon status quo.

The Argonne Laboratory in Chicago is not alone in pushing the boundaries of energy storage and EV technology. The specialist press reports eye-watering breakthroughs almost every month. America, Europe, China and Japan are all in a feverish global race for battery dominance – or survival – and hedge funds are swarming over the field.

Read it all(registration or subscription).

The @argonne National Laboratory and @illinoistech have achieved a breakthrough in the energy density of battery cells that could push EVs beyond 1,000 miles on a charge, and potentially, eventually, power trucks, trains and mid-haul aircraft.https://t.co/qZOFi28aOW

— Andrew Westrope (@andrew_westrope) March 8, 2023

When the US last week added several units of BGI Group, a Chinese genetic sequencing firm, to its entity list restricting technology transfer, the primary justification was that the company had been “contributing to monitoring and surveillance”, including of ethnic minorities. Yet the human rights implications of China’s domestic surveillance state aren’t Washington’s only concern. The new regulations also state that BGI’s programmes of “collection and analysis of genetic data [present] a significant risk of diversion to China’s military”. 

Biotechnology has quietly become America’s newest national security concern. From Congress to the intelligence agencies, Washington’s leaders have concluded that control over biotechnologies will be critical not only to the country’s health, but to national security as well.

Biotech tools have made rapid advances of late, enabling new therapies, vaccines, manufacturing techniques — and biosecurity risks. It’s long been recognised that DNA is just a complex type of code, telling cells how to operate. Gene-editing technologies have become more precise and vastly cheaper, making it easier than ever to “reprogramme” organisms. In addition, more powerful computing capabilities have provided new clarity into the meaning of DNA’s “code”.

One use of these capabilities is for manufacturing. For centuries, humans have relied on micro-organisms to produce beer and yoghurt, but with the right reprogramming, bacteria can be made to produce many new types of chemicals. In 2010, Darpa, the Pentagon’s long-range R&D arm, launched a programme called Living Foundries, aiming to synthetically manufacture 1,000 molecules….

Read it all.

This author of Chip War keeping us on our toes re new competition coming down the track. There’s a new US national security obsession — biotech via @FT
https://t.co/tZrtlkHK9r

— George Magnus (@georgemagnus1) March 7, 2023

More than 190 countries have reached a landmark deal for protecting the biodiversity of the world’s oceans, agreeing for the first time on a common framework for establishing new protected areas in international waters.

The treaty, whose text was finalized Saturday night by diplomats at the U.N. headquarters after years of stalled talks, will help safeguard the high seas, which lie beyond national boundaries and make up two-thirds of Earth’s ocean surface. Member states have been trying to agree on the long-awaited treaty for almost 20 years.

Environmental advocacy groups heralded the finalized text — which still needs to be ratified by the United Nations — as a new chapter for Earth’s high seas. Just 1.2 percent of them are currently environmentally protected, exposing the vast array of marine species that teem beneath the surface — from tiny plankton to giant whales — to threats such as pollution, overfishing, shipping and deep-sea mining.

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More than 190 countries have reached a landmark deal for protecting the biodiversity of the world’s oceans, agreeing for the first time on a common framework for establishing new protected areas in international waters.https://t.co/vbfbMP1329

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 5, 2023

In the contest of the century—the U.S. rivalry with China—the deciding factor will be innovation power. Technological advances in the next five to ten years will determine which country gains the upper hand in this world-shaping competition. The challenge for the United States, however, is that government officials are incentivized to avoid risk and focus on the short term, leaving the country to chronically underinvest in the technologies of the future.

If necessity is the mother of invention, war is the midwife of innovation. Speaking to Ukrainians on a visit to Kyiv in the fall of 2022, I heard from many that the first months of the war were the most productive of their lives. The United States’ last truly global war—World War II—led to the widespread adoption of penicillin, a revolution in nuclear technology, and a breakthrough in computer science. Now, the United States must innovate in peacetime, faster than ever before. By failing to do so, it is eroding its ability to deter—and, if necessary, to fight and win—the next war.

The alternative could be disastrous. Hypersonic missiles could leave the United States defenseless, and cyberattacks could cripple the country’s electric grid. Perhaps even more important, the warfare of the future will target individuals in completely new ways: authoritarian states such as China and Russia may be able to collect individual data on Americans’ shopping habits, location, and even DNA profiles, allowing for tailor-made disinformation campaigns and even targeted biological attacks and assassinations. To avert these horrors, the United States needs to make sure it remains ahead of its technological competitors.

The principles that have defined life in the United States—freedom, capitalism, individual effort—were the right ones for the past and remain so for the future. These basic values lie at the foundation of an innovation ecosystem that is still the envy of the world. They have enabled breakthroughs that have transformed everyday life around the world. The United States started the innovation race in pole position, but it cannot rest assured it will remain there. Silicon Valley’s old mantra holds true not just in industry but also in geopolitics: innovate or die.

Read it all (registration).

Eric Schmidt: Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics https://t.co/LP2imSEoSu

— Albert Royo (@AlbertRoyo5) February 28, 2023

It’s been a widely accepted trend in financial circles for nearly two decades. But suddenly, Republicans have launched an assault on a philosophy that says that companies should be concerned with not just profits but also how their businesses affect the environment and society.

More than $18 trillion is held in investment funds that follow the investing principle known as E.S.G. — shorthand for prioritizing environmental, social and governance factors — a strategy that has been adopted by major corporations around the globe.

Now, Republicans around the country say Wall Street has taken a sharp left turn, attacking what they term “woke capitalism” and dragging businesses, their onetime allies, into the culture wars.

The rancor escalated on Tuesday as Republicans in Congress used their new majority in the House to vote by a margin of 216 to 204 to repeal a Department of Labor rule that allows retirement funds to consider climate change and other factors when choosing companies in which to invest. In the Senate, Republicans are lining up behind a similar effort and have been joined by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia.

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(NYT front page) The Cultural and Partisan Divide
Of Socially Conscious #Investing https://t.co/uLO6W0hcKW #economy #stockmarket #ESG #corporations #ecology #culture #21stc

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 1, 2023

At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, “Paul” appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that would prove effective—and crossing them off one by one. The usual cancer killers were not doing their job.

With nothing to lose, Paul’s doctors enrolled him in a trial set up by the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, where he lives. The university was testing a new matchmaking technology developed by a UK-based company called Exscientia that pairs individual patients with the precise drugs they need, taking into account the subtle biological differences between people.

The researchers took a small sample of tissue from Paul (his real name is not known because his identity was obscured in the trial). They divided the sample, which included both normal cells and cancer cells, into more than a hundred pieces and exposed them to various cocktails of drugs. Then, using robotic automation and computer vision (machine-learning models trained to identify small changes in cells), they watched to see what would happen.

In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.

The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. Some of the medicines didn’t kill Paul’s cancer cells. Others harmed his healthy cells. Paul was too frail to take the drug that came out on top. So he was given the runner-up in the matchmaking process: a cancer drug marketed by the pharma giant Johnson & Johnson that Paul’s doctors had not tried because previous trials had suggested it was not effective at treating his type of cancer.

It worked. Two years on, Paul was in complete remission—his cancer was gone.

Read it all.

On average, it takes more than 10 years and billions of dollars to develop a new drug.

Incorporating AI into the drug development pipeline could help create cheaper pharmaceuticals faster. https://t.co/xYVZFyA5fY

— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) February 15, 2023

The brave new world Aldous Huxley describes in his novel of that title features the “feelies”. In 1932, its year of publication, movies were turning into talkies. Feelies must have seemed a logical, if creepy, extension of that. The book alludes to a film at a local theatre with a love scene on a bearskin rug, in which the sensation of every hair of the bear is reproduced.

The feelies have still not arrived. But people are working on them. In computer games and virtual reality (vr), two heirs to cinema’s role in light entertainment, practitioners of the discipline of haptics are attempting to add a sense of touch to those of vision and hearing, to increase the illusion of immersion in a virtual world. In future, they hope, if you reach out to pluck an apple from a tree in such a paradise, your hand will no longer go through it. You will, rather, be able to feel and grasp the fruit, if not actually eat it. Conversely, if it is a paradise lost you are in, and a baddy hiding behind the apple tree shoots you, you will feel the bullet’s impact.

To experience all this a user will wear haptic clothing. The ambitious talk of whole-body haptic suits, but in the case of the apple, the tree and the gunman haptic gloves and a haptic vest would suffice. Moving a gloved hand creates corresponding movement of a user’s virtual hand, with sensations appropriate to objects “touched” being fed back via devices called haptic actuators, incorporated into the glove. Haptic vests similarly stimulate parts of the upper body.

Read it all.

In computer games and virtual reality (VR), those working on haptics are attempting to add a sense of touch to increase the illusion of immersion in a virtual world https://t.co/KApOqiInVz

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 2, 2023

On a dank Friday night in Oxford, an ambassador from the Vatican addresses a gathering of philosophers. The location is St Luke’s Chapel, its walls crisp and whitewashed, its glass windows stained. The father ponders Aristotle’s insights on the good life.

But for the invocation for audience members to tweet about the event, this might be a scene from the 15th century. Yet the subject matter under discussion could not be more contemporary: robots and what to do about them.

Father Paolo Benanti, the speaker, is the Pope’s adviser on artificial intelligence. His urgent message to the assembled boffins, fellows of the newly created Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, is that we are in danger of becoming an “algocracy”, a society ruled by algorithms. “We must recognise how order is made, how power is shifted by these new tools,” Benanti pleads. “What rights do we want to sacrifice in the name of efficiency?”

These questions posed by Benanti are anything but academic. Much of our life, from what books we buy to what news we consume, is already heavily influenced by algorithms. But the past two years have seen a quantum leap in the quality and sophistication of artificial intelligence. We have entered what many experts are now describing as a golden age of AI.

Read it all(subscription).

What does it mean to be human in the age of advanced AI?

I spent some time with the philosophers of Oxford for The Sunday Times Magazine to find out. It involved a lot of wine tasting. https://t.co/znZQTcCOTY

— Josh Glancy (@joshglancy) January 29, 2023

Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) could “kill everyone” and should be regulated like nuclear weapons, experts have warned.

Superhuman algorithms that outperform mankind are on the way and may present just as much threat to humans as we posed to the dodo, researchers from Oxford University told MPs at the Science and Technology Select Committee.

The committee heard how advanced AI could take control of its own programming if it learned to achieve its goals in a different way than originally intended.

Doctoral student Michael Cohen said: “With superhuman AI there is a particular risk that is of a different sort of class, which is, well, it could kill everyone.

“If you imagine training a dog with treats it will learn to pick actions that lead to it getting treats, but if the dog finds the treat cupboard it can get the treats itself without doing what we wanted it to do.

Read it all.

‘Advanced AI could kill everyone’, warn Oxford researchers https://t.co/oBjB2lIFMF

— sarahknapton (@sarahknapton) January 25, 2023

Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.

Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter.

One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.

For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.

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High valuations in Silicon Valley made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly expanded market share. Not anymore, @DavidStreitfeld reports. https://t.co/rHsLe5mXfZ

— NYTimes Tech (@nytimestech) January 24, 2023

In 1904, 180 Americans were trapped by fire in a Pennsylvania coal mine. Two heroes went in to save them, but the rescuers and all but one of the miners perished. Still, that act of heroism touched one of the richest Americans, a man whose steel mills were fired by coal. Andrew Carnegie donated more than $100 million, in today’s money, to recognize heroes in the U.S. and Canada. As we first reported in 2021 — a good deal has changed in 118 years; thousands have been awarded the Carnegie Hero Medal and advances in neuroscience are revealing why some of us may be heroic. We’ll get to the science, but first, meet some of the Carnegie Heroes, including Terryann Thomas.

Terryann Thomas: I remember thinking just almost instantly, “I am not gonna let somebody die.”

Terryann Thomas was a civilian overseeing confiscated property at the headquarters of the Topeka Police Department. In 2015, an agitated man came into the basement property room to demand his bicycle. Thomas turned to find it.

Terryann Thomas: As soon as I turned around and started to walk off, I heard a scream.

Read or watch it it all.

New technological tools often enable fresh scientific discoveries. Take the case of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the 17th-century Dutch amateur scientist and pioneer microscopist, who built at least 25 single-lens microscopes with which he studied fleas, weevils, red blood cells, bacteria and his own spermatozoa, among other things.

In hundreds of letters to the Royal Society and other scientific institutions, van Leeuwenhoek meticulously recorded his observations and discoveries, not always for a receptive readership. But he has since been recognised as the father of microbiology, having helped us understand and fight all manner of diseases.

Centuries later, new technological tools are enabling a global community of biologists and amateur scientists to explore the natural world of sound in richer detail and at greater scale than ever before. Just as microscopes helped humans observe things not visible to the naked eye, so ubiquitous microphones and machine learning models enable us to listen to sounds we cannot otherwise hear. We can eavesdrop on an astonishing soundscape of planetary “conversations” among bats, whales, honey bees, elephants, plants and coral reefs. “Sonics is the new optics,” Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia, tells me.

Billions of dollars are pouring into so-called generative artificial intelligence, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with scores of start-ups being launched to commercialise these foundation models. But in one sense, generative AI is something of a misnomer: these models are mostly used to rehash existing human knowledge in novel combinations rather than to generate anything genuinely new.

What may have a bigger scientific and societal impact is “additive AI”, using machine learning to explore specific, newly created data sets — derived, for example, from satellite imagery, genome sequencing, quantum sensing or bio-acoustic recordings — and extend the frontiers of human knowledge. When it comes to sonic data, Bakker even raises the tantalising possibility over the next two decades of interspecies communication as humans use machines to translate and replicate animal sounds, creating a kind of Google Translate for the zoo. “We do not yet possess a dictionary of Sperm Whalish, but we now have the raw ingredients to create one,” Bakker writes in her book The Sounds of Life.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

A sonic revolution triggered by advances in hardware and software lets us eavesdrop on planetary conversations #artificalintelligence

Google Translate for the zoo? How humans might talk to animals https://t.co/jNzwbgcK8a

— Leo Cremonezi (@leocremonezi) January 19, 2023

Glossop Parish Church

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A church community in Glossop spent 2022 turning their churchyard into a wildlife sanctuary, cleaning up the surrounding town, and partnering with global environmental initiatives.

Read more at https://t.co/ufFEolZl2K.

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) January 9, 2023

A new type of blood test can detect a hidden toxin behind Alzheimer’s disease years before a patient shows any symptoms of memory loss or confusion.

If the proof-of-concept can be further tested and scaled, the test could significantly speed up diagnosis, giving millions of patients answers and access to proper care long before their disease progresses.

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) created the novel blood test. It’s designed to pick up on a molecular precursor in the blood that can cause proteins to irregularly fold and clump in the brain, ultimately forming amyloid beta (Aβ) plaques.

Read it all.

New Blood Test Accurately Predicts Alzheimer's Years Ahead of First Symptoms https://t.co/S2sq3eQpFm

— ScienceAlert (@ScienceAlert) December 22, 2022

The eight teenage girls, some as young as 13, made contact with one another on social media and may have never met before. But last Saturday night they gathered in downtown Toronto and after getting into one altercation wound up surrounding and fatally stabbing a man in an apparent attack over a bottle of liquor, the police said.

The killing, near the main transportation nexus in Canada’s largest city, was the latest and one of the most brazen episodes in the region in which people have been randomly targeted by groups of young attackers.

The 59-year-old victim was yet to be identified by the authorities. He had been staying in homeless shelters since the fall, the police said, and on Saturday night he was outside a shelter in the Financial District when the suspects set their eyes on him.

The suspects — including three 13-year-olds, three 14-year-olds and two 16-year-olds — appeared to have stabbed him after attempting to steal a liquor bottle from him, Sgt. Terry Browne of the Toronto Police Service told the CBC on Wednesday. All have been charged with second-degree murder.

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Eight teenage girls, who ranged from 13 to 16 years old, have been charged with murder in the stabbing death of a 59-year-old man in downtown Toronto. Police said the girls connected on social media before meeting up, possibly for the first time. https://t.co/JPs2Vyshci

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) December 22, 2022

Midway through a mission to deliver food at George Mason University in Virginia, the little white robot paused. A throng of students headed its way, blocking its path to its destination. The robot weighed its choices: It could let the students pass, attempt a runaround, or try to barrel through. A few seconds elapsed, a decision was made. Whirring up again, the robot splintered the group as it trundled down the middle.

“Sometimes they’ll come at your legs a bit,” says Alice Christensen, an anthropology major who had just opened the lid of another robotic vehicle, taking out her Subway sandwich. Christensen, 22, often summons the vehicles, made by a start-up called Starship Technologies, to deliver food from a campus restaurant, using an app similar to Grubhub or Uber Eats. She doesn’t mind the fees, typically $2.50 a delivery, though she does get annoyed at the occasionally glitchy app and dozens of Starship vehicles that roam the campus, making hundreds of deliveries a day.

“They’re really convenient when you’re pressed for time, but they can be a nuisance,” she says.

Read it all.

https://t.co/EEEhtvRrc9

— Shehzad Younis (@shehzadyounis) December 23, 2022

At Mattie Richland Baptist Church in Pineview, Georgia, the adults have been back in Sunday school and the kids led a Black history presentation, but the bus that picks up children for their education program will remain idle until January.

Sunday school, adult forums and other Christian formation classes, already threatened by declines in worship attendance, have been further challenged since COVID-19 shuttered churches and sent their services online. A study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research said more than half were disrupted in some way. Other research shows religious education for adults has bounced back more than for younger church members.

“For some, it continued without any real major disruptions, and for others, it basically collapsed,” said Scott Thumma, the institute’s director, summing up its 2022 pandemic-related research during an October event at Yale Divinity School. “And the easiest way to make it collapse was to keep religious education for children and youth online. If you kept it online, you probably don’t have a religious education program now.”

The Rev. Scott Zaucha, pastor of St. Ann’s in Woodstock, a mostly white congregation with about 50 attending on Sundays, said its Sunday school had ceased to exist before the pandemic because of its aging congregation. He wondered how to begin it again and learned that online Christian education was not the answer because it seemed like “another thing to try to keep up with” when regular schooling was online.

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“We have a crisis of catechism going on in America right now,” said @UMIChicago CEO Jeffrey Wright, expressing concern for the religious upbringing of the youngest generation. My @RNS story: https://t.co/Ji7MySJBgA

— Adelle Banks (@AMBankstw) December 22, 2022

This was supposed to be the year of returning to the office. The same could be said for 2021, and even the second half of 2020. The office seems to have become a place where we’re always “returning” but never quite “arriving.”

Although office occupancy rates have risen meaningfully, they are still nowhere near pre-pandemic norms in most of the country. In most big cities, offices are still empty more than half the time. Even in Austin, Texas — which has the highest occupancy rate among large cities, according to Kastle Systems badge-in data — workplaces are still much emptier than before the pandemic.

So, what have we learned about hybrid work over the past 12 months?

Hybrid work is the norm. The idea of a tug of war between managers and employees over spending time in the office has been a bit exaggerated. Polls have shown consistently that employees do value some degree of face time and want to be in the office roughly two days a week. Managers would prefer three. For those keeping score at home, that’s a difference of … one day.

“Overwhelmingly, managers are pretty much aligned with employees,” Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom says. The exceptions he has found are people who have “30-plus years of work experience, and have been very successful and have done that all in person … but they are real outliers.” Instead, most bosses are gradually becoming comfortable with managing and evaluating employees they don’t see every day — and not with creepy surveillance software, which Bloom dismisses as “awful.”

Read it all.

Hybrid work is the norm. The idea of a tug of war between managers & employees over spending time in the office has been a bit exaggerated: “Overwhelmingly, managers are pretty much aligned with employees,” Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom says https://t.co/1XHLXCawo6

— Jim Russell (@ProducerCities) December 22, 2022

ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence program captivating Silicon Valley with its sophisticated prose, had its origin three years ago, when technology investor Sam Altman became chief executive of the chatbot’s developer, OpenAI.

Mr. Altman decided at that time to move the OpenAI research lab away from its nonprofit roots and turn to a new strategy, as it raced to build software that could fully mirror the intelligence and capabilities of humans—what AI researchers call “artificial general intelligence.” Mr. Altman, who had built a name as president of famed startup accelerator Y Combinator, would oversee the creation of a new for-profit arm, believing OpenAI needed to become an aggressive fundraiser to meet its founding mission.

Since then, OpenAI has landed deep-pocketed partners like Microsoft Corp., MSFT -1.73%decrease; red down pointing triangle created products that have captured the attention of millions of internet users, and is looking to raise more money. Mr. Altman said the company’s tools could transform technology similar to the invention of the smartphone and tackle broader scientific challenges.

“They are incredibly embryonic right now, but as they develop, the creativity boost and new superpowers we get—none of us will want to go back,” Mr. Altman said in an interview.

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“They are incredibly embryonic right now, but as they develop, the creativity boost and new superpowers we get—none of us will want to go back."https://t.co/4ISkgw4kCB

— Andrew Restuccia (@AndrewRestuccia) December 19, 2022

Elaborately engineered immune cells can not only recognize cancer cells, but also evade defences that tumours use to fend off attacks, researchers have found.

Two studies published today in Science1,2 build on the success of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cancer therapies, which use genetically altered T cells to seek out tumours and mark them for destruction. These treatments have the potential to lead to long-lasting remission, but are not successful for everyone, and have so far been effective against only a small number of cancers.

To bolster the power of CAR-T therapies, researchers have further engineered the cells to contain switches that allow control over when and where the cells are active. The hacked cells produce a protein that stimulates T cells, to counteract immunosuppressive signals that are often released by tumours.

Both studies are a tour de force in T-cell engineering and highlight the direction that researchers want to push CAR-T-cell therapy, says systems immunologist Grégoire Altan-Bonnet at the US National Cancer Institute. “We know a lot of the parts, now it’s being able to put them together and explore,” he says. “If we engineer the system well, we can really put the tumours into checkmate.”

Read it all.

Cancer Treatments Boosted By Immune Cell Hacking #Immunology #Cancer #Oncology #Treatment #1 #37 https://t.co/sE2qLUzfmY

— George Obeid (@_Georgeobeid) December 16, 2022

Thanks to a research team at the University of Michigan, there is now a promising new technique to recycle PVC.

The team at the University of Michigan led by Danielle Fagnani and Anne McNeil has discovered a way to use a component of the PVC that previously made recycling incredibly difficult by improving the method’s efficiency. The components that make PVC so difficult to recycle are the various additives it can contain called plasticizers. Plasticizers are compounds added in the production process to make PVC more flexible and durable. Fagnani stated in a recent interview, “PVC usually contains a lot of plasticizers, which contaminate everything in the recycling stream and are usually very toxic. It also releases hydrochloric acid really rapidly with some heat.”

The most detrimental of the plasticizers are phthalates, which are highly toxic to humans and known to negatively impact our hormonal systems. When plastics are recycled by adding heat, the phthalates leach out. The method discovered by Fagnani and her team uses the toxic phthalates to decrease the energy input required and make the process more efficient overall.

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Researchers have found a way to recycle PVC — one of the most environmentally problematic forms of plastic.

This is a big deal because PVC is the third most produced plastic in the world. https://t.co/YiiDHZw2id

— GOOD (@good) December 14, 2022

Splitting water using electrolysis is relatively straightforward, and is already done in some hydrogen-generating facilities with access to a conventional water supply. The process, which takes place in an electrolyser, electrically separates hydrogen from oxygen and allows the hydrogen to be siphoned off. But with seawater this is more complicated because salt and other impurities can effectively destroy the electrolyser.

One option is to desalinate and purify seawater before processing it — but in some settings that can add cost. Another option is to treat the electrolyser components chemically to avoid corrosion, but that is viewed as impractical.

Now Heping Xie at Shenzhen University and Zongping Shao at Nanjing Tech University have come up with a workaround. They kept the electrolyser separate from the seawater with a waterproof, breathable membrane. A bit like a sieve, the membrane keeps anything other than pure water vapour from entering the electrolyser. As the water vapour is drawn in and converted to hydrogen, more is pulled in from the seawater to take its place. It is, they reported recently in the journal Nature, a self-sustaining system.

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Chinese researchers claim to have produced hydrogen by splitting seawater without the need to desalinate or purify it first, according to a report in Chemistry World magazine https://t.co/g4Q7HdGBex

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) December 14, 2022

The Biden administration took a public stand last year against the abuse of spyware to target human rights activists, dissidents and journalists: It blacklisted the most notorious maker of the hacking tools, the Israeli firm NSO Group.

But the global industry for commercial spyware — which allows governments to invade mobile phones and vacuum up data — continues to boom. Even the U.S. government is using it.

The Drug Enforcement Administration is secretly deploying spyware from a different Israeli firm, according to five people familiar with the agency’s operations, in the first confirmed use of commercial spyware by the federal government.

At the same time, the use of spyware continues to proliferate around the world, with new firms — which employ former Israeli cyberintelligence veterans, some of whom worked for NSO — stepping in to fill the void left by the blacklisting. With this next generation of firms, technology that once was in the hands of a small number of nations is now ubiquitous — transforming the landscape of government spying.

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Over 10 weeks & reporting in 5 countries, @MarkMazzettiNYT @ronenbergman & I pieced together crucial elements of the new global arms race for offensive spyware, marketed by companies owned by former Israeli military intelligence officers. A #thread https://t.co/fUzi2Rg8rC

— Matina Stevis-Gridneff (@MatinaStevis) December 9, 2022

The Economic Innovation Group report is the most detailed effort yet to steer that selection, by trying to balance the needs of left-behind areas with their potential for an economic rebirth. It measures that potential using data on regions’ industrial composition and economic complexity, along with two key human ingredients for innovation: the number of working-age science and technology graduates and the number of patent authors in an area.

To measure need, the report looks at the share of a region’s prime-age adults who are not employed or are looking for work, two measures of so-called “brain drain” — the flight of college graduates from an area — and the distance from a “superstar” city like New York or Chicago.

The top 10 cities on the list are a mix between higher potential (like Phoenix and Salt Lake City) and higher need (like a pair of Ohio cities, Toledo and Akron). Many are college towns, Mr. Fikri noted, that are not quite large enough to have yet sustained a thriving industrial sector that grows out of scientific research.

Greenville, S.C., tops the list with a score balanced almost evenly between potential and need, followed by Provo, Utah, and Tucson, Ariz.

The report’s researchers say their data suggests policymakers could — and should — spread the hubs across various areas with different bases of technological expertise and differing levels of need, in hopes of maximizing both the advancements and the regional economic gains they produce.

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Innovation Hubs Aim to Lift Distressed Areas. Congress Just Has to Fund Them https://t.co/b5pSZTkNjb "20 newly created research centers could revitalize struggling economies and accelerate new technologies" #RiseOfRest @InnovateEconomy pic.twitter.com/r22B8zYErk

— Steve Case (@SteveCase) December 5, 2022

Most U.S. adults – including a solid majority of Christians and large numbers of people who identify with other religious traditions – consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

But the survey also finds that highly religious Americans (those who say they pray each day, regularly attend religious services and consider religion very important in their lives) are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about warming temperatures around the globe.

The survey reveals several reasons why religious Americans tend to be less concerned about climate change. First and foremost is politics: The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion. Highly religious Americans are more inclined than others to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and Republicans tend to be much less likely than Democrats to believe that human activity (such as burning fossil fuels) is warming the Earth or to consider climate change a serious problem.

Religious Americans who express little or no concern about climate change also give a variety of other explanations for their views, including that there are much bigger problems in the world today, that God is in control of the climate, and that they do not believe the climate actually is changing. In addition, many religious Americans voice concerns about the potential consequences of environmental regulations, such as a loss of individual freedoms, fewer jobs or higher energy prices.

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Most adults (including Christians) consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it. But our new survey also finds that highly religious Americans are less likely to express concern about warming temperatures around the globe. 🧵https://t.co/3zazVaEwYl

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) November 17, 2022

Solar panels could be installed on the roof of York Minster for the first time in a bid to tackle rising energy bills.

The cathedral’s gas and electricity costs are expected to triple next year, a Minster spokesperson said.

Plans to install 199 solar panels on the roof of the South Quire Aisle have been submitted to York Council.

Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell said the Minster was “committed to taking a lead on addressing the climate emergency.”

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York Minster plan for solar panels as energy bills triple https://t.co/aZYphcKpO7

— BBC Science News (@BBCScienceNews) November 18, 2022

In the remaining days of the COP27 climate summit in Egypt, nearly 200 nations are rushing to seek deals that keep climate goals alive.

If they fall short, it will likely disappoint but not surprise much of the world’s population that is already unhappy with efforts to safeguard the environment.

In 66 out of 123 countries that Gallup surveyed in 2021 and 2022, less than half of people report being satisfied with their country’s efforts to preserve the environment.

This list includes many, but not all, of the world’s cumulative top emitters of carbon dioxide, which is linked to global warming. For example, while less than half of adults in one of the biggest emitters — the U.S. — are satisfied with their country’s efforts to preserve the environment, strong majorities in other big emitters such as China (89%) and India (78%) are satisfied.

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48% of Americans who are satisfied with the country's efforts to preserve the environment in 2022 is more characteristic of the relatively lower satisfaction levels since the U.S. first agreed to join the Paris Agreement in 2015. https://t.co/C1Rapv1Ke6 pic.twitter.com/OrbT7IgPYL

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) November 17, 2022