Links for 2022-12-21
Inside-out asteroids: A practical method for creating space habitats — “how could they practically build a human-friendly city on a pile of space rubble? By sticking it in a gigantic bag, they decided. A cylinder-shaped bag a fair bit bigger than the asteroid itself, made from a flexible, ultra-light, ultra-strong carbon nanofiber mesh” https://newatlas.com/space/space-habitat-ring-plan/
After AlphaFold: protein-folding contest seeks next big breakthrough https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04438-1
MATCHA : Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09662
Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63859184
"The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited power that was given to federal regulators. … regulators came up with ALARA, the principle that no level of radiation exposure is acceptable if the plant can afford to reduce it further." https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-slow
“Many climate models predict that increased CO2 will impact clouds which would cause much of the predicted warming, since CO2 by itself is not very potent. New research published in Nature makes these models implausible. According to the authors, it makes it improbable that the climate is highly sensitive to CO2 levels.” (via Daniel Lemire) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05364-y
Bacteria From An Olympic Weightlifter Improves Muscle Mass And Physical Function (In Mice) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg1g3K6iyUo
“…the DART impact on the asteroid Dimorphos transferred 3.6x the spacecraft’s momentum to the asteroid, rather than a 1:1 transfer—because so much of the asteroid’s material itself was blasted off into space, acting like a ephemeral rocket booster.” https://twitter.com/SquigglyVolcano/status/1603473744965603375
The state of AI in 2022—and a half decade in review (McKinsey). https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-in-2022-and-a-half-decade-in-review
"replacing a boss who was in the lower 10th percentile of boss quality with one at the 90th percentile is equivalent to increasing his team’s total output by about 11%" https://www.nber.org/papers/w30730
Europeans and recent cognitive evolution https://peterfrost.substack.com/p/europeans-and-recent-cognitive-evolution
"Traditionally we think Erectus only left Africa through the Sinai Peninsula & then the Levant, but then we have to ask ourselves how they got to Spain before reaching the rest of Europe … The most plausible solution is that they crossed at Gibraltar." https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2022-12-15/ty-article/hominins-were-sailing-the-mediterranean-half-a-million-years-ago-study-finds/00000185-1590-dcb5-abe7-dfbe1b5c0000
“So the FBI had taken possession of the Hunter Biden laptop, knew for a fact it was 100% real, and repeatedly lied to Facebook and Twitter, telling them it was Russian disinformation, to get them to censor information they knew to be true, presumably to influence an election.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1604871630613753856.html
Moon's pull causes tides on far side of Earth: why? https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/118460/moons-pull-causes-tides-on-far-side-of-earth-why