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Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business

In Chinese homes, it’s common to put up a portrait of a deceased relative for a few years after the death. Zhang Zewei, founder of a Shanghai-based company called Super Brain, says... Read more »

Deepfakes of the dead are a growing Chinese business

In Chinese homes, it’s common to put up a portrait of a deceased relative for a few years after the death. Zhang Zewei, founder of a Shanghai-based company called Super Brain, says... Read more »

How I learned to stop worrying and love fake meat

“Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis seethed in a... Read more »

The Download: synthetic cow embryos, and AI jobs of the future

About a decade ago, biologists started to observe that stem cells, left alone in a walled plastic container, will spontaneously self-assemble and try to make an embryo. These structures, sometimes called “embryo... Read more »

Scientists are trying to get cows pregnant with synthetic embryos

But bovines may not be far behind. There’s a large assisted-reproduction industry in cattle, with more than a million IVF attempts a year, half of them in North America. Many other beef... Read more »

The Download: the cancer vaccine renaissance, and working towards a decarbonized future

Last week, Moderna and Merck launched a large clinical trial in the UK of a promising new cancer therapy: a personalized vaccine that targets a specific set of mutations found in each... Read more »

Cancer vaccines are having a renaissance

Personalized cancer vaccines like the ones Moderna and BioNTech are developing are tailored to each patient’s particular cancer. The researchers collect a piece of the patient’s tumor and a sample of healthy... Read more »

Why new ethanol aviation fuel tax subsidies aren’t a clear climate win

Corn, like any plant that uses photosynthesis to produce food, sucks up carbon dioxide from the air. But using corn for fuel rather than food also creates pressure to clear more land... Read more »

The Download: Sam Altman on AI’s killer function, and the problem with ethanol

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has a vision for how AI tools will become enmeshed in our daily lives.  During a sit-down chat with MIT Technology Review in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he described... Read more »

Three takeaways about the current state of batteries

We’ve started to see this play out in California. Renewables are able to supply nearly all the grid’s energy demand during the day on sunny days. The problem is just how different... Read more »