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Category: futurism – Page 376

Exploiting Differences in Heme Biosynthesis between Bacterial Species to Screen for Novel Antimicrobials

Read now ➡️ by Laurie K. Jackson, et al.

Featured on the cover of Volume 12, Issue 7 (July 2022).

The article 👉

The issue 👉 https://t.ly/ROd3e

The final three steps of heme biogenesis exhibit notable differences between di-and mono-derm bacteria. The former employs the protoporphyrin-dependent (PPD) pathway, while the latter utilizes the more recently uncovered coproporphyrin-dependent (CPD) pathway. In order to devise a rapid screen for potential inhibitors that differentiate the two pathways, the genes associated with the protoporphyrin pathway in an Escherichia coli YFP strain were replaced with those for the CPD pathway from Staphylococcus aureus (SA) through a sliding modular gene replacement recombineering strategy to generate the E. coli strain Sa-CPD-YFP. Potential inhibitors that differentially target the pathways were identified by screening compound libraries against the YFP-producing Sa-CPD-YFP strain in comparison to a CFP-producing E. coli strain.

Exclusive: Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, on his hopes and fears for the future of AI

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, spent a good part of the summer on a weeks-long outreach tour, glad-handing politicians and speaking to packed auditoriums around the world. But Sutskever is much less of a public figure, and he doesn’t give a lot of interviews.

He is deliberate and methodical when he talks. There are long pauses when he thinks about what he wants to say and how to say it, turning questions over like puzzles he needs to solve. He does not seem interested in talking about himself. “I lead a very simple life,” he says. “I go to work; then I go home. I don’t do much else. There are a lot of social activities one could engage in, lots of events one could go to. Which I don’t.”

But when we talk about AI, and the epochal risks and rewards he sees down the line, vistas open up: “It’s going to be monumental, earth-shattering. There will be a before and an after.”

Project Silica — Storing Data in Glass

Data that needs to be stored long-term is growing exponentially. Existing storage technologies have a limited lifetime, and regular data migration is needed, resulting in high cost. Project Silica designs a long-term storage system specifically for the cloud, using quartz glass.

Read the blog at https://aka.ms/AA6faho.
Learn more about the project at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/project-silic…-in-glass/

Forecasting the future of artificial intelligence with machine learning-based link prediction in an exponentially growing knowledge network

The number of publications in artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasing exponentially and staying on top of progress in the field is a challenging task. Krenn and colleagues model the evolution of the growing AI literature as a semantic network and use it to benchmark several machine learning methods that can predict promising research directions in AI.

Automattic is acquiring Texts and betting big on the future of messaging

‘Open source communication is a fundamental human right,’ Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says, and he’s buying a platform to help pull it off.

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a number of other popular web properties, just made a different kind of acquisition: it’s buying Texts, a universal messaging app, for $50 million.

Texts is an app for all your messaging apps. You can use it to log in to WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, iMessage, and more and see and respond to all your messages in one place. (Beeper is another app doing similar things.) The app also offers some additional features like AI-generated responses and summaries, but its primary… More.

A less chaotic chat app is coming to a device near you.

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