💡 Warp News #272
🖥️ AI usage has less environmental impact than claimed. 🏆 French fusion facility breaks world record. 👩⚕️ New cancer vaccine shows promising results.
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💡 Can we all become Nathan Myhrvolds?
I'm in Seattle right now and yesterday I visited Nathan Myhrvold. He has a dizzying number of interests and accomplishments.
He was Microsoft's first chief technology officer and founded Microsoft Research, founded the invention firm Intellectual Ventures, and has authored cookbooks on the science of food. He conducts research on dinosaurs, asteroids, and climate science, takes professional-quality photographs of wildlife and landscapes, and develops advanced nuclear technology.
A true polymath.
Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I believe we can all become Nathan Myhrvolds to some extent, if we use AI to gain new abilities and enhance those we already have. Not that everyone can immediately obtain 900 patents or earn a Grande Diplôme from the École de Cuisine La Varenne in Burgundy, as Nathan Myhrvold did. That requires extraordinary dedication. But AI makes it easier for us to acquire both breadth and depth in our skills.
More about Nathan Myhrvold in my upcoming book and later here on Warp News.
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
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🆙 Warp Levels - an idea to level up humanity
From the archive, due to travel.
Humanity is doing the high jump without a bar. We have no goal. With Warp Levels, we determine what the next level for humanity should contain, so we can level up and make progress faster.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
👩⚕️ New cancer vaccine shows promising results against pancreatic cancer
Patients who received a personalized cancer vaccine and developed an immune response lived longer without relapse. The T-cells created by the vaccine remained in the body for about 3 years and continued to fight cancer cells.
🏆 French fusion facility breaks world record for longest plasma duration
CEA's machine maintained plasma for over 22 minutes, meaning they kept the extremely hot, charged gas stable using magnetic fields This was 25 percent longer than the previous record. The plasma needs to be stable for several minutes to generate fusion energy.
🦠 Researchers gain free access to 100 million cancer cells to accelerate drug development
The dataset maps 60,000 drug-cell interactions across 50 cancer cell lines, enabling faster and more accurate development of new cancer drugs. Researchers can now for the first time study both natural cell states and how cells respond to 1,200 different drug treatments.
🤖 Generative AI gives robots new "brain" that understands the world
Google DeepMind has integrated its multimodal language model Gemini 2.0 into robots, giving them an advanced AI brain that can understand and interact with the physical world. This enable robots to perform tasks they were never trained for by understanding everyday instructions in natural language.
🍹 New study shows that Ozempic reduces alcohol consumption
Patients who received semaglutide reduced their alcohol consumption by 30 percent, compared to 2 percent for the placebo group. Nearly 40 percent of participants who received semaglutide had no heavy drinking days during the second month of the study.
🖥️ AI usage has less environmental impact than claimed
A ChatGPT query uses only 3 watt-hours of energy, equivalent to watching TV for 3 minutes or uploading 30 pictures to social media. Water consumption for AI is low—data centers use only 500 ml of water per 300 queries, while producing a single hamburger requires over 600 gallons of water.
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