Last March, brain-computing interface expert Tom Oxley sat down to dinner with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to talk about Oxley’s nascent company, Synchron. That meal in Ojai, Calif., ended with something better than dessert: Bezos told Oxley that he wanted to invest in the business. Synchron said Thursday it completed Read more…
Theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma wrote a thought-provoking essay for New Scientist magazine’s Lost in Space-Time newsletter: I was recently reading an old article by string theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf in Quanta Magazine entitled “There are no laws of physics”. You might think it a bit odd for a physicist to Read more…
“A teenage girl’s incurable cancer has been cleared from her body,” reports the BBC, “in the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine….” Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital used “base editing” to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug. Six months Read more…
Lexus is apparently working on a “virtual” manual transmission, reports the Verge, “to find out if the stick shift can survive the electric revolution…” British car enthusiast publication Evo reported this week that Lexus, which now leads Toyota’s high-performance EV efforts, is developing a kind of shifting system that mimics Read more…
This week the Atlantic published its list of “the 10 Most Promising Breakthrough Innovations of 2022.” “We didn’t just get one ‘unheard-of’ cancer breakthrough; we got several in one year….” Is death reversible? It was this year for several pigs (or, at least, for their organs). By pumping an experimental Read more…
Fini le serment au roi au Québec. Glad to see this during my lifetime.
DeepMind’s new artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode was able to “achieve approximately human-level performance” in a programming competition. The findings have been published in the journal Science. AlphaCode’s creators focused on solving those difficult problems. Like the Codex researchers, they started by feeding a large language model many gigabytes of Read more…