This field is a branch of medicine that uses living cells and cell materials to research and then produce
pharmaceutical and diagnosing products. These products help treat and prevent
diseases.
Marine biotechnology provides substantial social benefits. It encompasses those efforts that involve marine
bioresources, either as the source or the target of
biotechnological applications. In many cases this means that the living organisms which are used to develop products or services are derived from
marine sources.
Large natural-language processing (NLP) computer models that learn to write and speak are a big step toward
artificial intelligence that can better understand and interact with the world. GPT-3 is by far the largest—and most literate—to date. Trained on the text of thousands of books and most of the internet,
GPT-3 can mimic human-written text with uncanny—and at times bizarre—realism, making it the most impressive language model yet produced
using
machine learning.
But GPT-3 does not understand what it is writing, so sometimes the results are garbled and nonsensical. It takes an enormous amount of computation power, data, and money to train, creating a large
carbon footprint and restricting the development of similar models to those labs with extraordinary resources. And since it is trained on text from the internet, which is filled with
misinformation and prejudice, it often produces similarly biased passages.
Will Douglas Heaven shows off a sample of GPT-3’s clever writing and explains why some are ambivalent about
its achievements.
Technology companies have proven to be poor stewards of our personal data.
Our information has been leaked, hacked, and sold and resold more times than most of us can count. Maybe the problem is not with us, but with the model of privacy
to which we have long adhered — one in which we, as individuals, are primarily responsible for managing and protecting our own privacy.
Data trusts offer one alternative approach that some governments are starting to explore. A data trust is a legal entity that collects and manages people’s personal data on their behalf. Though the structure and function of these trusts
are still being defined, and many questions remain, data trusts are notable for offering a potential solution to long-standing problems in privacy and security.
Anouk Ruhaak describes the powerful potential of this model and a few early examples that show its promise.
Hydrogen has always been an intriguing possible replacement for fossil fuels. It burns cleanly, emitting no carbon dioxide;
it's energy dense, so it is a good way to store power from on-and-off renewable sources; and you can make liquid synthetic fuels that are drop-in replacements for
gasoline or diesel. But most hydrogen up to now has been made from natural gas;
the process is dirty and energy intensive.
The rapidly dropping cost of solar and wind power means green hydrogen is now cheap enough to be practical. Simply zap water with electricity,
and you can create hydrogen. Europe is leading the way, beginning to build the needed infrastructure.
Peter Fairley argues that such projects are just a first step to an envisioned
global network of electrolysis plants that run on
solar and wind power, churning out
clean hydrogen.
As the coronavirus began to spread around the world, it felt at first as if digital contact tracing might help us.
Smartphone apps could use GPS or Bluetooth to create a log of people who had recently crossed paths. If one
of them later tested positive for COVID, that
person could enter the result into the app, and it would alert others who might have been exposed.
But digital contact tracing largely failed to make much impact on the virus’s spread. Apple and
Google quickly pushed out features like exposure notifications to many smartphones, but public health officials struggled to persuade residents to use them. The lessons we learn from this pandemic could not only help us prepare for the next pandemic but also carry over to other areas
of health care.
Lindsay Muscato explores why digital contact tracing failed to slow Covid-19 and offers
ways we can do better next time.
Electric vehicles (EV) come with a tough sales pitch; they are relatively expensive, and you can drive them only a few hundred miles before they need to recharge—which takes far longer than stopping for gas.
All these drawbacks have to do with the limitations of lithium-ion batteries. A well-funded Silicon Valley startup now says it has a battery that will make electric vehicles far more palatable for the
mass consumer.
It is called a lithium-metal battery and is being developed by QuantumScape. According to early test results, the battery could boost the range of an (EV) by 80% and can be rapidly recharged.
The startup has a deal with Volkswagen (VW), which says it will be selling EVs with the new type of battery by 2025. The battery is still just a prototype that’s much smaller
than one needed for an automobile. But if QuantumScape and others working
on lithium-metal batteries succeed, it could finally make EVs attractive to millions of consumers.
James Temple describes how a lithium-metal battery works, and why scientists are so excited by recent
results.
The two most effective vaccines against the coronavirus are based on messenger RNA, a technology that has been in the works for 20 years. When the covid-19 pandemic began last January, scientists at several biotech companies were quick to turn to mRNA as a way to create potential vaccines; in late December 2020, at a time when more than 1.5 million had died from Covid-19 / worldwide, the vaccines were approved in the United States,
marking the beginning of the end of the pandemic.
We all use the "Global Positioning System" (GPS) every day; it has transformed our lives and many of our businesses. But while today’s GPS is accurate to within 5 to 10 meters, new hyper-accurate
positioning technologies have accuracies within a few centimeters or millimeters. That is opening up new possibilities, from landslide warnings to delivery robots and self-driving cars that can safely navigate streets.
China’s BeiDou (Big Dipper) global navigation system was completed in June 2020 and is part of what’s making all this possible. It
provides positioning accuracy of 1.5 to two meters to anyone in the world. Using ground-based augmentation, it can get down to millimeter-level
accuracy. Meanwhile, GPS, which has been around since the early 1990s, is getting an upgrade: four new satellites for GPS III launched in November 2020 and more are expected in orbit by 2023. Ling Xin reports on how the greatly increased accuracy of these systems is already proving useful.
