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Extinction is a regular part of nature. An estimated 99% of all species that have existed on Earth have gone the way of the dodo, sometimes because a fitter competitor came along or their environment changed (often because of humans) and they couldn’t adapt.

While life can go on relatively unchanged after the extinction of some species, the loss of a keystone species — one that plays a significant role in its environment — can upend an ecosystem.

Now, researchers exploring the idea of “de-extinction” believe that science might be able to intervene and restore the balance.

Small, shelled, and unassuming, chitons have eyes unlike any other creature in the animal kingdom.

Some of these marine mollusks have thousands of bulbous little peepers embedded in their segmented shells, all with lenses made of a mineral called aragonite. Although tiny and primitive, these sensory organs called ocelli are thought to be capable of true vision, distinguishing shapes as well as light.

Other chiton species, however, sport smaller ‘eyespots’ that function more like individual pixels, much like the components of an insect’s or mantis shrimp’s compound eye, forming a visual sensor distributed over the chiton’s shell.

Microsoft Corp. has named Mustafa Suleyman head of its consumer artificial intelligence business, hiring most of the staff from his Inflection AI startup as the software giant seeks to fend off Alphabet Inc.’s Google in the fiercely contested market for AI products.

Suleyman, who co-founded Google’s DeepMind, will report to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and oversee a range of projects, such as integrating an AI Copilot into Windows and adding conversational elements to the Bing search engine. His hiring will put Microsoft’s consumer AI work under one leader for the first time.

Year 2023 😗😁


Famed musician and former Elon Musk boo Claire “Grimes” Boucher wanted a brain-computer interface (BCI) for her birthday — and one of Neuralink’s apparent competitors was happy to comply.

After Grimes tweeted about getting a “non invasive brain computer interface” for her birthday, AJ Keller, the CEO of the startup Neurosity, confirmed in an interview with Insider that his firm had indeed made a custom brain gadget for the “Kill V. Maim” singer.

While a tech company sending a nerdy sci-fi celebrity fan a gadget wouldn’t really be news on its own, the fact that Grimes is the mother to two of Musk’s children and is seemingly on pretty acrimonious terms with the Canadian-South African billionaire, who owns perhaps the most famous and one of the most controversial BCI companies in the world, makes this story incredibly juicy.

Monitoring levels of DNA shed by tumors and circulating in the bloodstream could help doctors accurately assess how gastroesophageal cancers are responding to treatment, and potentially predict future prognosis, suggests a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg–Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.