Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology
By Rhiannon Williams • 11.30.23
Hello! Today: why the University of California is turning its back on carbon offsets. Plus: how a new tool from Google DeepMind could radically speed up the discovery of new materials, and a hefty financial prize is up for grabs for the team of researchers who can restore some of the functions we lose as we age.
The University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets—and thinks you should, too
In the fall of 2018, the University of California tasked a team of researchers with identifying projects from which it could confidently purchase carbon offsets that would reliably cancel out greenhouse gas emissions across its campuses. They found next to nothing.
The findings helped prompt the entire university system to radically rethink its sustainability plans. Now the researchers are sharing the lessons they learned over the course of the project, in the hopes of helping other universities and organizations consider what role, if any, offsets should play in sustainability strategies, MIT Technology Review can report.
Google DeepMind's new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials
The news: Google DeepMind has created a tool that uses deep learning to dramatically speed up the process of discovering new materials. The technology, which is called graphical networks for material exploration (GNoME), has already been used to predict structures for 2.2 million new materials, of which more than 700 have gone on to be created and tested in the lab.
Why it matters: From EV batteries to solar cells to microchips, new materials can supercharge technological breakthroughs. But discovering them usually takes months or even years of trial-and-error research. Thanks to GNoME, the number of known stable materials has grown almost tenfold, to 421,000. Read the full story.
—June Kim
The X Prize is taking aim at aging with a new $101 million award
Money can't buy happiness, but X Prize founder Peter Diamandis hopes it might be able to buy better health. The X Prize Foundation, which funds global competitions to spark development of breakthrough technologies, has announced a new $101 million prize—the largest yet—to address the mental and physical decline that comes with aging.
The winners will have to prove by 2030 that their intervention can turn back the clock in older adults by at least a decade in three key areas: cognition, immunity, and muscle function. Its organizers are hoping the large prize will convince hundreds or even thousands of teams to compete. Read the full story.
The ugly truth of today's healthcare landscape is that both clinicians and patients are feeling negative effects from the complicated technology that much of the industry relies on. athenahealth is developing intuitive, easy-to-use solutions that help create a better experience for healthcare staff and their patients while also improving financial performance.
Keep the focus on your patients, not on your paperwork. Learn more.
The must-reads
I've combed the internet to find you today's most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Ilya Sutskever is leaving the OpenAI board But the chief scientist is staying at the firm—for now. (Bloomberg $) + Microsoft has been added as a non voting member of the board. (NYT $) + Sam Altman says he initially felt furious after being asked to return to the company. (The Verge) + Inside the mind of OpenAI's chief scientist. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Elon Musk isn't playing nice with X's worried advertisers In fact, he went on a foul-mouthed rant railing against them. (CNBC) + Disney boss Bob Iger was a target of Musk's ire. (WP $) + Musk just can't help himself. (Slate $)
3 Next year is going to be even hotter 🌡️ Thanks, in part, to the El Niño weather phenomenon. (FT $) + Methane is due to be a hot topic at COP28. (Economist $) + Climate action is gaining momentum. So are the disasters. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Google has agreed to pay Canadian news outlets $100 million a year It's a rare win for publishers in their fight to get Big Tech to pay for content. (Motherboard) + Supporters say it's the first step towards creating a sustainable news ecosystem. (BBC)
5 India is determined to clean up the Ganges river The sacred waterway is incredibly polluted. Cleaning it up is both a holy and a scientific mission. (Wired $) + El Paso was "drought-proof." Climate change is pushing its limits. (MIT Technology Review)
6 US border control is planning to trial Palmer Luckey's AI surveillance The autonomous towers track objects even in the coldest conditions. (404 Media)
7 Inside one man's mission to track America's gun violence No one federal agency charts it, so Dan Kois has stepped up to fill the void. (Bloomberg $)
8 Please don't follow TikTok's dating advice It's bleak at best, outrageously sexist at worst. (Vox) + Here's how the net's newest matchmakers help you find love. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Cutting virtual grass is deeply satisfying Just ask the video games fans transfixed by maintaining their lawns. (The Guardian)
10 What Spotify Unwrapped tells us about ourselves Wherever we go, there we are listening to something embarrassing. (WSJ $) + Are you a vampire or a shapeshifter this year? (Wired $) + Please, no more memes. (NY Mag $)
Quote of the day
"It's a deafening cacophony of broken records."
—Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, despairs at the extreme climate conditions the world has weathered over the past year, New Scientist reports.
The big story
Meetings suck. Can we make them more fun?
September 2021
Since the pandemic made working remotely commonplace, workers have complained about getting "Zoomed out" or dealing with "Zoom fatigue."
No wonder that other tech companies wonder how they could reinvent meetings too, especially since it doesn't seem as if remote work is going anywhere soon. But to take Zoom's crown they'll need to get creative, and come up with ways to keep employees from feeling burned out by endless video calls. Read the full story.
—Tanya Basu
We can still have nice things
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