Tech
The Download: discovering proteins, and Pakistan’s climate crisis
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
An AI that can design new proteins could help unlock new cures and materials
What’s happened?: A new AI tool could help researchers discover previously unknown proteins and design entirely new ones. When harnessed, it could help unlock the development of more efficient vaccines, speed up research into cures for cancer, or lead to completely new materials.
How it works: ProteinMPNN, developed by a group of researchers from the University of Washington, offers scientists a tool that will complement DeepMind’s AlphaFold tool’s ability to predict the shapes of all proteins known to science. ProteinMPNN will help researchers with the inverse problem. If they already have an exact protein structure in mind, it will help them find the amino acid sequence that folds into that shape.
Why it matters: Proteins are fundamental to life, and understanding their shape is vital to working with them. Traditionally researchers engineer proteins by tweaking those that occur in nature, but ProteinMPNN will open an entire new universe of possible proteins for researchers to design from scratch. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
Read more:
+ DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science. And it’s giving the data away for free, which could spur new scientific discoveries. Read the full story.
+ This is the reason Demis Hassabis started DeepMind. AlphaFold has changed how researchers work and set DeepMind on a new course. Read the full story.
“Fingerprints” of climate change are clear in Pakistan’s devastating floods
What we know: Climate change very likely intensified the South Asian monsoon that flooded Pakistan in recent weeks, killing more than 1,000 people and destroying nearly 2 million homes. That’s according to a new analysis by World Weather Attribution, a network of scientists who use climate models, weather observations, and other tools to determine whether global warming increased the likelihood or severity of recent extreme weather events.
What we don’t know: Precisely how big a role climate change played isn’t clear. Using climate models to pinpoint global warming’s role in amplifying the full monsoon season has proved tricky, due to some combination of the wide variability in heavy rainfall patterns over long periods, natural processes at work that the models may not fully capture, and the weather quirks of the territory. And the country’s weather is likely to become even more extreme. Read the full story.
—James Temple
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Uber appears to have been hacked by a teenager
An 18-year old is claiming to be behind the cybersecurity breach, which compromised the company’s internal systems. (NYT $)
+ Meanwhile, its services are working normally for customers. (Bloomberg $)
2 An AI used medical notes to teach itself to spot disease on chest x-rays
Teaching AI models to read existing reports could save researchers from having to manually label the data. (MIT Technology Review)
3 The US government’s vast database of travelers’ data is growing rapidly
Data from phones and other devices is kept for 15 years. (WP $)
4 The White House wants Congress to drop social media’s immunity
Tech companies are protected by Section 230, which means they’re not held legally liable for content posts by their users. (Reuters)
+ Here’s why it’s worth saving. (MIT Technology Review)
+ We need clearer guidelines for what constitutes harmful online content. (The Information $)
+ Senators are asking Big Tech better questions these days. (Slate $)
5 Millions of people in India have geotagged their homes
The move, which was part of the country’s Independence Day celebrations, has privacy advocates rattled. (Rest of World)
6 Organic molecules have been found in rocks on Mars
They could prove that life may have thrived there. (Wired $)
+ The microbes may have lived in briny lakes. (Motherboard)
+ The best places to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system. (MIT Technology Review)
7 The most sophisticated AI systems can baffle even their creators
Which is kind of the point of deep learning. (The Atlantic $)
8 Inside the wild world of leg lengthening
More and more men are willing to have their legs broken to make them appear taller—for a price. (GQ)
+ Bionic limbs could be more widely available within a decade, too. (Neo.Life)
9 TikTok is the new Google
Why trust a restaurant’s website when TikTok shows you what their food actually looks like? (NYT $)
10 The race to slow down aging
Tinkering with a person’s epigenetic age is one place to start. (Neo.Life)
+ Aging clocks aim to predict how long you’ll live. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“Facebook is kind of extinct.”
—Natasha Hunt Lee, 25, explains why Gen Z is embracing new digital ways of inviting friends to parties beyond the social network to the New York Times.
The big story
Two sick children and a $1.5 million bill: One family’s race for a gene therapy cure
October 2018
Jennie and Gary Landsman launched an online appeal to save their sons on Thanksgiving of 2017. In a moving video, the pair describe how their two sons, Benny, then 18 months, and Josh, four months—both have a fatal genetic brain disorder called Canavan disease. It’s ultra rare—so rare, in fact, that there is no reliable understanding of how many children are born with it. Relatively few researchers study Canavan, and no drugs are approved to treat it.
The Landsmans refused to accept the doctors’ advice to make their sons comfortable until they died. Instead, they learned: there may be a way to fix the genetic error in the boys’ brains. But the family would have to pay for it themselves. And it would be expensive.
The Landsmans had discovered gene therapy, technology that uses viruses to add healthy genes to cells with defective ones. The technology’s medical logic is especially irresistible for parents of children with the rarest diseases on earth, because it suggests the ultimate bug fix. The problem is: who will pay? Read the full story.
—Antonio Regalado
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ If you enjoyed the smash TV hit The White Lotus, The Resort should be right up your alley.
+ Why following your gut isn’t necessarily the path to happiness.
+ Seeing as we’re heading into fall, here’s some of the best horror films on Netflix right now.
+ I didn’t know it was possible to make butter even more delicious, but turns out you can!
+ This Roman coins collection is pretty amazing.
My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in the mail and seeing all my college-bound friends plan out their classes and dorm decor, I got cold feet. Every time I mentioned my plans, I was met with questions like “But what about school?” and “MIT is cool with this?”
Yeah. MIT totally is. Postponing your MIT start date is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
COURTESY PHOTO
Now, having finished my first year of classes, I’m really grateful that I stuck with my decision to delay MIT, as I realized that having a full year of unstructured time is a gift. I could let my creative juices run. Pick up hobbies for fun. Do cool things like work at an AI startup and teach myself how to create latte art. My favorite part of the year, however, was backpacking across Europe. I traveled through Austria, Slovakia, Russia, Spain, France, the UK, Greece, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.
Moreover, despite my fear that I’d be losing a valuable year, traveling turned out to be the most productive thing I could have done with my time. I got to explore different cultures, meet new people from all over the world, and gain unique perspectives that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. My travels throughout Europe allowed me to leave my comfort zone and expand my understanding of the greater human experience.
“In Iceland there’s less focus on hustle culture, and this relaxed approach to work-life balance ends up fostering creativity. This was a wild revelation to a bunch of MIT students.”
When I became a full-time student last fall, I realized that StartLabs, the premier undergraduate entrepreneurship club on campus, gives MIT undergrads a similar opportunity to expand their horizons and experience new things. I immediately signed up. At StartLabs, we host fireside chats and ideathons throughout the year. But our flagship event is our annual TechTrek over spring break. In previous years, StartLabs has gone on TechTrek trips to Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. On these fully funded trips, StartLabs members have visited and collaborated with industry leaders, incubators, startups, and academic institutions. They take these treks both to connect with the global startup sphere and to build closer relationships within the club itself.
Most important, however, the process of organizing the TechTrek is itself an expedited introduction to entrepreneurship. The trip is entirely planned by StartLabs members; we figure out travel logistics, find sponsors, and then discover ways to optimize our funding.
COURTESY PHOTO
In organizing this year’s trip to Iceland, we had to learn how to delegate roles to all the planners and how to maintain morale when making this trip a reality seemed to be an impossible task. We woke up extra early to take 6 a.m. calls with Icelandic founders and sponsors. We came up with options for different levels of sponsorship, used pattern recognition to deduce the email addresses of hundreds of potential contacts at organizations we wanted to visit, and all got scrappy with utilizing our LinkedIn connections.
And as any good entrepreneur must, we had to learn how to be lean and maximize our resources. To stretch our food budget, we planned all our incubator and company visits around lunchtime in hopes of getting fed, played human Tetris as we fit 16 people into a six-person Airbnb, and emailed grocery stores to get their nearly expired foods for a discount. We even made a deal with the local bus company to give us free tickets in exchange for a story post on our Instagram account.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.
QWERTY keyboards are inefficient as many Chinese characters share the same latinized spelling. As a result, many switch to smart, localized keyboard apps to save time and frustration. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones.
But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Why we should all be rooting for boring AI
Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced it is setting up a Generative AI Task Force, aimed at “analyzing and integrating” AI tools such as large language models across the department. It hopes they could improve intelligence and operational planning.
But those might not be the right use cases, writes our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkila. Generative AI tools, such as language models, are glitchy and unpredictable, and they make things up. They also have massive security vulnerabilities, privacy problems, and deeply ingrained biases.
Applying these technologies in high-stakes settings could lead to deadly accidents where it’s unclear who or what should be held responsible, or even why the problem occurred. The DoD’s best bet is to apply generative AI to more mundane things like Excel, email, or word processing. Read the full story.
This story is from The Algorithm, Melissa’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past
To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules.
By analyzing those cores, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years. Now, a new European-led initiative hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. But that impressive feat is still only the first step. Once they’ve done that, they’ll have to figure out how they’re going to extract the air from the ice. Read the full story.
—Christian Elliott
This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine, set to go live tomorrow. Subscribe today for as low as $8/month to ensure you receive full access to the new Ethics issue and in-depth stories on experimental drugs, AI assisted warfare, microfinance, and more.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How AI got dragged into the culture wars
Fears about ‘woke’ AI fundamentally misunderstand how it works. Yet they’re gaining traction. (The Guardian)
+ Why it’s impossible to build an unbiased AI language model. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Researchers are racing to understand a new coronavirus variant
It’s unlikely to be cause for concern, but it shows this virus still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. (Nature)
+ Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand. (MIT Technology Review)
+ Why we can’t afford to stop monitoring it. (Ars Technica)
3 How Hilary became such a monster storm
Much of it is down to unusually hot sea surface temperatures. (Wired $)
+ The era of simultaneous climate disasters is here to stay. (Axios)
+ People are donning cooling vests so they can work through the heat. (Wired $)
4 Brain privacy is set to become important
Scientists are getting better at decoding our brain data. It’s surely only a matter of time before others want a peek. (The Atlantic $)
+ How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How Nvidia built such a big competitive advantage in AI chips
Today it accounts for 70% of all AI chip sales—and an even greater share for training generative models. (NYT $)
+ The chips it’s selling to China are less effective due to US export controls. (Ars Technica)
+ These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Inside the complex world of dissociative identity disorder on TikTok
Reducing stigma is great, but doctors fear people are self-diagnosing or even imitating the disorder. (The Verge)
7 What TikTok might have to give up to keep operating in the US
This shows just how hollow the authorities’ purported data-collection concerns really are. (Forbes)
8 Soldiers in Ukraine are playing World of Tanks on their phones
It’s eerily similar to the war they are themselves fighting, but they say it helps them to dissociate from the horror. (NYT $)
9 Conspiracy theorists are sharing mad ideas on what causes wildfires
But it’s all just a convoluted way to try to avoid having to tackle climate change. (Slate $)
10 Christie’s accidentally leaked the location of tons of valuable art 
Seemingly thanks to the metadata that often automatically attaches to smartphone photos. (WP $)
Quote of the day
“Is it going to take people dying for something to move forward?”
—An anonymous air traffic controller warns that staffing shortages in their industry, plus other factors, are starting to threaten passenger safety, the New York Times reports.
The big story
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present
October 2022
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Watch Andrew Scott’s electrifying reading of the 1965 commencement address ‘Choose One of Five’ by Edith Sampson.
+ Here’s how Metallica makes sure its live performances ROCK. ($)
+ Cannot deal with this utterly ludicrous wooden vehicle.
+ Learn about a weird and wonderful new instrument called a harpejji.
