Links for 2022-01-13
A summary of recent machine learning progress by Google: “All of these trends are pointing in the direction of training highly capable general-purpose models that can handle multiple modalities of data and solve thousands or millions of tasks....advances that will ultimately benefit the lives of billions of people with greater impact than ever before.” https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/google-research-themes-from-2021-and.html [tl;dr The singularity is near.]
The Solar System Exists Inside a Giant, Mysterious Void, And We Finally Know Why https://www.sciencealert.com/the-solar-system-floats-in-a-void-now-we-know-how-that-void-triggered-the-formation-of-stars
12 Exciting Engineering Milestones to Look for in 2022 -> An electric aircraft race, a new dark-matter detector, and a permanent Chinese space station await https://spectrum.ieee.org/12-milestones-2022
In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/health/heart-transplant-pig-bennett.html?smid=tw-share
Volitional control of individual neurons in the human brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.079038v1.full
Differential mosquito attraction to humans is associated with skin-derived carboxylic acid levels https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.475088v1
Inside the multibillion-dollar, Silicon Valley-backed effort to reimagine how the world funds (and conducts) science https://endpts.com/inside-the-multibillion-dollar-silicon-valley-backed-effort-to-reimagine-how-the-world-funds-and-conducts-science/
Drone carrying a defibrillator saves its first heart attack patient in Sweden https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/5/22868777/everdrone-drone-defibrillator-health-tech-sweden
Solving the ‘big problems’ via algorithms enhanced by 2D materials https://www.psu.edu/news/materials-research-institute/story/solving-big-problems-algorithms-enhanced-2d-materials/
“Engineers at EPFL have developed a method for reading several qubits – the smallest unit of quantum data – at the same time. Their method paves the way to a new generation of even more powerful quantum computers.” https://actu.epfl.ch/news/making-quantum-computers-even-more-powerful/
“Every Pore on Your Face Is a Walled Garden: A close examination of human skin found that each pore had a single clonal variety of bacteria living inside” [NYT] https://archive.fo/LYmWz
EU Warns Repeat Boosters Could Weaken Immune System https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-11/repeat-booster-shots-risk-overloading-immune-system-ema-says