The Download: climate heroes, and a new way to track diseases
Yatish Turakhia, then a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz’s Genomics Institute, helped develop a software tool called UShER to track these covid variants by placing them, within minutes of each new sample’s submission, on a family tree of all known SARS-CoV-2 genomes.
The tool, which has been accessible online since 2021, now records more than 15 million viral sequences, and allows scientists to surveil the virus in real time on a global scale. Now, Turakhia has started using it to track other diseases—with promising results. Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
Yatish Turakhia is one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 for 2023. Read the full list of this year’s honorees, including those making a difference in robotics, computing, biotech, climate and energy, and AI.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Tech leaders agree AI needs government regulation
But no one’s quite sure what those rules should look like. (WP $)
+ Yesterday’s US Senate session was a veritable who’s-who of tech titans. (WSJ $)
+ Elon Musk is in favor of a ‘regulatory structure,’ he told reporters. (Bloomberg $)
