AI’s penicillin and x-ray moment
Mateo Wong | Atlantic Ocean
“When Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, he designated a fund to reward those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.’ The Nobel Prize has since been awarded to those who discovered penicillin, x-rays, and the structure of DNA, and now to two scientists who laid the foundations of modern artificial intelligence decades ago.”
‘I applied for 2,843 jobs’: The emergence of AI-based job application bots
Jason Cobbler | 404 media
“Before I leave my laptop at the restaurant where I work, I open a terminal window, type one command, and press Enter. The server serves you breakfast and the bot activates, opening a Chrome window and pushing your laptop away while you navigate to LinkedIn. You start scrolling through the job listings and a few of them open.”
It was created without eggs or sperm. Are they human?
Christine V. Brown | Atlantic Ocean
“In recent years, Hanna and other scientists have made remarkable progress in culturing pluripotent stem cells to mimic the structure and function of an actual growing embryo. But even if researchers solve the technical problems, moral questions remain. When is a copy good enough to be equal to the real thing? And more importantly, when should laboratory experiments be treated like human beings, legally and ethically?”
Ian Brooke wants to revolutionize flying as we know it
Ross Pomeroy | Big Think
“Brooke, 34, is the CEO of Astro Mechanica, a Y Combinator-backed startup that invented a new kind of jet engine. It is fundamentally more efficient and versatile than any previous product. … Astro Mechanica claims that turboelectric adaptive engines will deliver enormous efficiency gains across the entire speed range, but especially at supersonic speeds between Mach 1.8 and Mach 3.4.”
The interior of the world’s first commercial space station looks like a luxury hotel.
Carlton Reed | mad
“aluminum for spacecraft The interior is outdated. Wood is clearly what space travelers want. That’s the bet by Vast, the maker of Haven-1, the world’s first commercial space station that will be placed into low-Earth orbit by a SpaceX Falcon rocket next year. The first paying customers are expected to board in 2026, and judging by the final design of the station’s cozy interior just revealed, they’ll feel right at home.”
Kevin Kelly Interview: The Power of ‘Radical Optimism’
Eric Markowitz | Big Think
“Kelly – author, philosopher, co-founder mad Magazine—argues that to truly play the long game and rebuild a better society, we must embrace a simple yet profound way of thinking: optimism. He wrote, ‘Optimism enables us to reach for good and great things that are beyond the power of a single generation.’ He also believes that embracing optimism and a long-term perspective in business can deliver compounding benefits.”
The ‘beautiful chaos’ of the first billion years revealed
Rebecca Boyle | how much
“The galaxy has never been so bright. They could never have gotten that big. Yet there is a strangely large, glowing object that continues to appear in images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Kevin Heinlein(a new tab will open) I am part of a team that uses JWST to find these galaxies. “The brightness, apparent mass, and existence of this galaxy a virtual blink after the Big Bang are among the biggest surprises of the three-year-old mission.”
technology
Tech startup OG says AI changes everything.
Julian Pepitone | IEEE spectrum
“Steve Blank, who currently teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University, is thinking about how artificial intelligence tools are poised to transform his lean startup approach. That is, by accelerating the process of testing hypotheses, developing new products, and creating businesses at the speed of human thought. They can never match.”
Image credit: Marcel Strauss / Unsplash
