AI Has Designed Bacteria-Killing Proteins From Scratch—and They Work
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | New Scientist
“The AI, called ProGen, works in a similar way to AIs that can generate text. ProGen learned how to generate new proteins by learning the grammar of how amino acids combine to form 280 million existing proteins. Instead of the researchers choosing a topic for the AI to write about, they could specify a group of similar proteins for it to focus on. In this case, they chose a group of proteins with antimicrobial activity.”
DIGITAL MEDIA
BuzzFeed to Use ChatGPT Creator OpenAI to Help Create Quizzes and Other Content
Alexandra Bruell | The Wall Street Journal
“BuzzFeed Inc. stated it might depend on ChatGPT creator OpenAI to reinforce its quizzes and personalize some content material for its audiences, changing into the newest digital writer to embrace synthetic intelligence. In a memo to workers despatched Thursday morning, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive Jonah Peretti stated he intends for AI to play a bigger position within the firm’s editorial and enterprise operations this yr.“
Metal Robot Can Melt Its Way Out of Tight Spaces to Escape
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | New Scientist
“A miniature, shape-shifting robot can liquefy itself and reform, allowing it to complete tasks in hard-to-access places and even escape cages. It could eventually be used as a hands-free soldering machine or a tool for extracting swallowed toxic items.”
Don’t Be Sucked in by AI’s Head-Spinning Hype Cycles
Devin Coldewey | TechCrunch
“[AI] certainly can outplay any human at chess or go, and it can predict the structure of protein chains; it can answer any question confidently (if not correctly) and it can do a remarkably good imitation of any artist, living or dead. But it is difficult to tease out which of these things is important, and to whom, and which will be remembered as briefly diverting parlor tricks in 5 or 10 years, like so many innovations we have been told are going to change the world.”
NASA Announces Successful Test of New Propulsion Technology for Treks to Deep Space
Kevin Hurler | Gizmodo
“The rotating detonation rocket engine, or RDRE, generates thrust with detonation, wherein a supersonic exothermic entrance accelerates to provide thrust, a lot the identical means a shockwave travels by way of the ambiance after one thing like TNT explodes. NASA says that this design makes use of much less gasoline and supplies extra thrust than present propulsion methods and that the RDRE may very well be used to energy human landers, in addition to crewed missions to the Moon, Mars, and deep house.“
The Best Use for AI Eye Contact Tech Is Making Movie Stars Look Straight on the Camera
James Vincent | The Verge
“This tech comes with a bunch of interesting questions, of course. Like: is constant unbroken eye contact good or a bit creepy? Are these tools useful for people who don’t naturally like eye contact? …But forget that high-brow trash for now, because here’s the stupidest and best use case of this technology yet: editing movie scenes so actors make eye contact with the camera.”
Researchers Look a Dinosaur in Its Remarkably Preserved Face
Jeanne Timmons | Ars Technica
“Borealopelta markmitchelli found its way back into the sunlight in 2017, millions of years after it had died. This armored dinosaur is so magnificently preserved that we can see what it looked like in life. Almost the entire animal—the skin, the armor that coats its skin, the spikes along its side, most of its body and feet, even its face—survived fossilization. It is, according to Dr. Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a one-in-a-billion find.”
Google, Not OpenAI, Has the Most to Gain From Generative AI
Mark Sullivan | Fast Company
“After spending billions on artificial intelligence R&D and acquisitions, Google finds itself ceding the AI limelight to OpenAI, an upstart that has captured the popular imagination with the public beta of its startlingly conversant chatbot, ChatGPT. Now Google reportedly fears the ChatGPT AI could reinvent search, its cornerstone business. But Google, which declared itself an ‘AI-first’ company in 2017, may yet regain its place in the sun. Its AI investments, which date back to the 2000s, may pay off, and could even power the company’s next quarter century of growth (Google turns 25 this year). Here’s why.”
CRISPR Wants to Feed the World
Jennifer Doudna | Wired
“A substantial amount of the eye surrounding CRISPR has targeted on the medical purposes, and for good cause: The outcomes are promising, and the non-public tales are uplifting, providing hope to many who’ve suffered from long-neglected genetic illnesses. In 2023, as CRISPR strikes into agriculture and local weather, we can have the chance to radically enhance human well being in a holistic means that may higher safeguard our society and allow hundreds of thousands of individuals around the globe to flourish.“
A Watermark for Chatbots Can Expose Text Written by an AI
Melissa Heikkilä | MIT Technology Review
“Hidden patterns purposely buried in AI-generated texts could help identify them as such, allowing us to tell whether the words we’re reading are written by a human or not. These ‘watermarks’ are invisible to the human eye but let computers detect that the text probably comes from an AI system. If embedded in large language models, they could help prevent some of the problems that these models have already caused.”
Earth’s Inner Core: A Shifting, Spinning Mystery’s Latest Twist
Dennis Overbye | The New York Times
“Imagine Earth’s inner core—the dense center of our planet—as a heavy, metal ballerina. This iron-rich dancer is capable of pirouetting at ever-changing speeds. That core may be on the cusp of a big shift. Seismologists reported Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience that after brief but peculiar pauses, the inner core changes how it spins—relative to the motion of Earth’s surface—perhaps once every few decades. And, right now, one such reversal may be underway.”
Image Credit: Robert Linder / Unsplash