Needle-free covid vaccines are (still) in the works
The vaccine outlined in the recent Nature paper is meant to be inhaled. It is a subunit vaccine, meaning it...
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Now we know what OpenAI’s superalignment team has been up to
OpenAI's approach to the superalignment problem.OPENAI The researchers point out that the problem is hard to study because superhuman machines...
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem
FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it’s fun) continues a streak of discoveries in fundamental...
The Download: what we learned from COP28, and an advance for household robots
1 Google’s AI search tool could upend the internetPublishers in particular fear it could take a sledgehammer to their traffic....
This new system can teach a robot a simple household task within 20 minutes
While other types of AI, such as large language models, are trained on huge repositories of data scraped from the...
The two words that pushed international climate talks into overtime
If you’ve tuned out news from the summit, I don’t really blame you. The quibbles over wording—“urges” vs. “notes” vs....
Vertex will pay tens of millions to license a controversial CRISPR patent
The patent on CRISPR has been the fulcrum off a decade-long legal fight after the Broad Institute, a research center...
The Download: carbon removal concerns, and Yahoo’s China controversy
The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it’s already headed in...
Yahoo’s decades-long China controversy and the responsibility of tech companies
What was particularly astonishing to me was that after all these efforts, the fund still remains incredibly obscure. The total...
Two former Department of Energy staffers warn we’re doing carbon removal all wrong
But a fundamental challenge is that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) isn’t a product that any person or company “needs,” in...
Mapping the micro and macro of biology with spatial omics and AI
With these two technologies developing in tandem, the opportunities for AI-driven biological discoveries from spatial omics are numerous. Looking at...
The Download: Yahoo’s misdeeds in China, and AI Act takeaways
When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for Chinese dissident Xu...
Inside the decades-long fight over Yahoo’s misdeeds in China
In many ways, the situation Yahoo found itself in 20 years ago is the same one today’s biggest tech giants...
Five things you need to know about the EU’s new AI Act
The AI Act was conceived as a landmark bill that would mitigate harm in areas where using AI poses the...
Human brain cells hooked up to a chip can do speech recognition
With Brainoware, Guo aimed to use actual brain cells to send and receive information. When the researchers applied electrical stimulation...
The Download: the EU AI Act is here, and preventing deadly cancer
On Saturday, European Union lawmakers announced they’d finally agreed the terms of the final version of the EU AI Act,...
The best way to prevent this deadly cancer is to remove multiple organs. And I’m about to do it.
These ideas have recently started filtering through to the wider public. Earlier this year, the US-based Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance,...
Why the EU AI Act was so hard to agree on
The latest round of EU negotiations has introduced a two-tier approach in which foundation models are, at least in part,...
5 things we didn’t put on our 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies
We haven’t always been right (RIP, Baxter), but we’ve often been early to spot important areas of progress (we put...
The Download: inside the first CRISPR treatment, and smarter robots
The news: A new robot training model, dubbed “KnowNo,” aims to teach robots to ask for our help when orders...