This is a meaningless statement. I too can create a tool to generate a list of peptide candidates with minimal effort. It may even be somewhat useful if it based peptide sequences on homology searches or some other relevant biology instead of random string generation. This has been an active area of research for than 20 years. In order for this to be newsworthy. Claude has to be better than what already exists. How many novel candidates does it generate that actually have useful antibiotic properties? Do I have to screen through a list of 100 candidates to find one that actually works? If so, that’s not much better than a BLAST search and it costs a lot more. What is the strain selectivity of the new antibiotic? Is it broad or narrow spectrum? How easy is it to manufacture? Are there any toxic side effects?

Assuming a new antibiotic is actually what’s needed, instead of using one of the many beta-lactams or combination therapies that already exist, generating the candidate is the first and easiest step of a long and expensive process to developing a novel drug.

It should be fairly easy to carve out provisions for exceptional circumstances (ex: bankruptcy proceedings), and is probably common practice already. But I agree the language has an implied target which is not good for getting legislation passed, generally. It should be possible to propose reasonable accommodation for majority circumstances without sounding like a manifesto.

That will run into problems with federal copyright laws and other IP protections. While it sounds just, it is unlikely to get anywhere. More likely is large companies would have to have an end-of-life plan for their product (which they likely do already) that includes considerations for how to keep the game playable after servers are taken offline. It could be as simple as releasing the protocol to enable third parties to host servers. Or, better, designing the game for offline play from the beginning so that the final patch set is just a simple switch.

Regardless of the outcome, however, this really does seem like a pre-eminent example of “first world problems”.

Well, it says in the abstract (and they have further detailed calculations in the paper) that they achieved an average desalination rate of 1.76 kg/m^2/h. So that’s about 1 gallon of water in one hour with 2 m^2 panel. That said, they did their tests using a 9 cm^2 panel, so yields may change significantly on scale up. Not sure if that translates into meaningful cost savings at scale, but it does seem like a significant advance in solar desalination technology. It seems like the paper was focused mostly on salt harvesting, though, rather than desalination. So I expect the real utility to be the combination of the two rather than desalination by itself, if it scales.

Hmm, well your comment made me go and read the paper. It is interesting because they focused on an important part of the DNA storage process, which is deposition and recovery. And yes, there are a few neat innovations, like the tape system, the partitions, and the zeolite encapsulation.

However, the limitation remains DNA reading and writing, which is A) much longer than the deposition process, making gains in the deposition process almost insignificant, and B) requires careful temperature control such that any hopes to do this at room temperature are pretty much moot. It wasn’t the focus of the paper, so it’s not fair to say they glossed over it, but they did bury it in the methods. A few key limitations:
    - They used DNA Fountain to encode the data, which offers a high storage potential, but they also limited it to 100 bp oligos so that the DNA strands would be accessible with current oligo synthesis technology. So for their test, a 50 KB file required 5000 100 bp oligos. The maximum that has been reached using this approach is around 2 MB with 72,000 200 bp oligos. The data densities that they talk about in these papers is a theoretical bits per nucleotide that is extrapolated out to number of nucleotides in a gram of DNA and therefore a theoretical maximum bits per gram of DNA. It is nowhere near a practical reality, though.
    - To synthesize these oligo arrays of 3000 - 5000 oligos per array, they contracted them through Twist. It has been a while since I have worked with Twist, but these oligo pools cost on the order of $1500-$2000 per pool to synthesize, it takes weeks to months, and the failure rate is fairly significant.
    - To read back the oligos they used Illumina sequencing. This is a multiple day process that also costs thousands of dollars in consumables. And for this application the error rate is significant. So instead of taking the raw sequence reads as the data, they mapped the reads to a known reference. Which means they weren’t actually reading the data, just confirming it.

Bottom line: while it is interesting to see people thinking about some of the physical aspects of a DNA storage device, and I like a lot of the ideas they have proposed here, this technology isn’t going anywhere until we have major breakthroughs in DNA synthesis and sequencing capability. And when we do it will have impacts far and wide, beyond just DNA storage.

So, on a medium such as the WWW that has no inherent security and has been plagued by scammers since nearly its inception, a “real estate developer from Las Vegas” is too busy to type https://www.royalcaribbean.com/ and click the phone number at the top of the page, and instead freely gives out his credit card information to an unverified phone number that came up in a Google search, and the reporter from WP thinks this is mostly Google’s fault?

We are so fucked.

Uh, no, warming something from -180C to “somewhere above freezing” would actually use a lot of energy, especially if it came in the form of electricity

On the other hand, if only heating is needed and no electricity, that sounds like the perfect application for nuclear. A 100kWe reactor is probably producing around 500kWt, so just disconnect the steam turbines and use the heat directly.

There already is: short-term capital gains are taxed as ordinary income.

I believe you are referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...”>The Day the Earth Stood Stupid, which is the Futurama episode where the Brain spawn attack Earth. Fry is impervious to their attack, ostensibly because he is “special”, which allows him to save the world. One of the best of the series in my opinion.

For those who are interested in looking at the actual data, you can find that here,
https://atvb.apprisor.org/epsA...

(No thanks to Business Insider for not providing a link to even the conference proceedings.)

The finding is very interesting. I think it is clear, despite the small sample size, that there is a clear association between microplastic concentration in plaques and stroke symptoms. What is not known is whether the microplastics are somehow contributing to the disease or are just present in this selection of patients. There is no discussion of comorbidities, for example. There is some speculation. The stroke victims appear to have evidence of higher inflammation levels, but there is no correlation with microplastic concentration.

Overall, I would say very interesting. As usual, more work to be done, however.

Agree on the zoning and permitting hurdles, but the two main drivers of home construction cost are 1) cost of the land, and 2) cost of labor. So it should not be any surprise that a state with one of the highest land resale costs in the country combined with the highest cost of living would also have the highest cost of new construction. It does not help that zoning often enforces low density building, but if it costs $500k just to buy an empty lot (more if you have to buy one with an existing building on it), and then you have to pay $400/sqft for new construction on top, that developers don’t even want to touch a project if there is no possibility to sell for $1.5M+.

No, AlphaFold 2 predicted 200M structures. The distinction is critical. A scientist running homology models on his own probably can’t crank through as many as fast as an automated pipeline, but it is a lot more than 1 per year. Also, the predicted structures are of varying quality and there is significant bias in the classes of proteins represented. So you don’t have some 20,000 structural biologists out of a job, you have 20,000 structural biologists able to focus on the harder and more impactful problems that AlphaFold can’t handle.

It’s an interesting analysis, but too simplistic. University budgets are a lot more complicated than the impression you are giving here. For one, total budget - tuition revenue != state appropriations. To get the actual state revenue you have to look at the audited budget which provides a lot more insight,
https://www.ohio.edu/sites/def...

In 2023, OU received $186M in appropriations from the state, which accounted for 26% of its total revenue and did not include appropriations for capital improvements or federal/state/local grants and contracts. Tuition accounted for 40% of its total revenue. So student tuition revenue was about 1.5x higher than state appropriations revenue.

Unfortunately, these audited budgets don’t go all the way back to 1980, so we can’t make an easy comparison, but we can look at the historical state budgets,
https://www.lsc.ohio.gov/asset...

From this you can see that expenditures toward higher education has decreased as a percentage of total expenditures from 17% to 10% from 1980 to 2023, but the actual expenditure amount has increased from $741M in 1980 to $2.7B in 2023. That amount tracks inflation fairly closely, so the real story here is that state university budgets have vastly outpaced inflation. The logical question then is where, how, and why?

Correct. Google can pay to license iMessage from Apple and deploy it on their own infrastructure. Problem solved.

Ok, that was a bit tongue-and-cheek, but the essential problem here is nobody wants to absorb the cost of an advanced messaging system. The carriers took a long time to agree to a very limited RCS and have been dragging their feet to fully implement it. I’m sure that’s at least partly because they know users will not likely stomach going back to per-message text fees, especially for non-user visible features like E2EE. So Google and Apple have independently developed their own messaging services that run on their own infrastructure, and the cost is amortized by device sales (and advertising fees in the case of Google).

Why should the govt mandate that? Are Android users going to pay for iMessage, or are they just going to be freeloading on Apple’s servers?

Indeed, and unfortunately the summary left out this important blurb from the paper describing this species of fern as an octoploid,

It’s certainly an interesting question and actively debated. You may find the perspective of this recent paper interesting,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...