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Your microbiome ages as you do—and that’s a problem

These ecosystems appear to change as we age—and these changes can potentially put us at increased risk of age-related diseases. So how can we best look after them as we get old?... Read more »

How Twitter’s “Teacher Li” became the central hub of China protest information

It’s hard to describe the feeling that came after. It’s like everyone is coming to you and all kinds of information from all over the world is converging toward you and [people... Read more »

Biotech labs are using AI inspired by DALL-E to invent new drugs

Today, two labs separately announced programs that use diffusion models to generate designs for novel proteins with more precision than ever before. Generate Biomedicines, a Boston-based startup, revealed a program called Chroma,... Read more »

The Download: Neuralink updates, and GPT-3 fixes

In defense of plastic (sort of) Plastics have a bad reputation, there’s no denying it. They’re an environmental, climate, and public health disaster. But, simultaneously, they’ve brought down costs across industries and... Read more »

In defense of plastic (sort of)

It will probably take until 2024 for the treaty to be completed, and we don’t know all the details yet, though there’s been talk of production limits, as well as more restrictions... Read more »

Here’s my guess: Neuralink will unveil a vision implant at today’s “show and tell”

That means about 700 phosphenes could make a useful form of vision, even though it’s nothing like natural sight, which is incredibly rich, in color, and travels along a million axons from... Read more »

While everyone waits for GPT-4, OpenAI is still fixing its predecessor

ChatGPT appears to address some of these problems, but it is far from a full fix—as I found when I got to try it out. This suggests that GPT-4 won’t be either.... Read more »

The Download: Twitter’s toxicity, and what China’s protestors want

By Scott Wiener, a California state senator who represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. A mere day after Elon Musk reactivated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account, she tweeted that... Read more »

How chemists are tackling the plastics problem

Rorrer says the researchers are also considering what materials they should use. Cobalt is more common and less expensive than some other catalysts they’ve tried, like ruthenium and platinum, but they are... Read more »

What Shanghai protesters want and fear

You may have seen that nearly three years after the pandemic started, protests have erupted across the country. In Beijing, Shanghai, Urumqi, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, and more cities and towns, hundreds of... Read more »