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Marc Andreessen says we’re in a ‘freeze-frame moment’ with A.I.—and has advice for young people

Andreessen argues that thanks to A.I., “productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet.”

This week, on the Lex Fridman Podcast, he offered advice to young people who want to stand out in what he describes in this “freeze-frame moment” with A.I.—where tools like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are suddenly available and “everybody is kind of staring at them wondering what to do.”

He noted that we’re now living in a world where vast amounts of information are at our fingertips and, with A.I. tools, “your ability both to learn and to produce” is dramatically higher than in the past. Such tools should allow for more “hyper-productive people” to emerge, he said. For example, there’s no reason authors and musicians couldn’t churn out far more books or songs than was customary in the past.

These Michigan college professors are helping NASA return to the Moon after 5 decades

ALBION, MI — Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan was the last person to step foot on the Moon more than five decades ago. In 2025, someone new will take his place.

The NASA Artemis mission aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, as well as explore more of the lunar surface.

A pair of Albion College professors are participating in the mission’s research into the origins and evolution of the Moon, college officials said.

MiNT protein a fresh target to attack disease

A two-faced protein in a chain that regulates iron and other elements in cells could provide a new target to treat cancer, diabetes and other diseases.

A team of researchers at Rice University, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of North Texas detailed the structure of a protein called mitochondrial inner NEET (MiNT), part of a pathway that stabilizes mitochondria, the organelles that produce energy for cells.

Their report appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Accelerating Drug Discovery With the AI Behind ChatGPT — Screening 100 Million Compounds a Day

Huge libraries of drug compounds may hold potential treatments for a variety of diseases, such as cancer or heart disease. Ideally, scientists would like to experimentally test each of these compounds against all possible targets, but doing that kind of screen is prohibitively time-consuming.

In recent years, researchers have begun using computational methods to screen those libraries in hopes of speeding up drug discovery. However, many of those methods also take a long time, as most of them calculate each target protein’s three-dimensional structure from its amino-acid.

Novel 19-Core Fiber Hits 1.7 Petabits per Second

Researchers in Japan and Australia have developed a new multicore optic fiber able to transmit a record-breaking 1.7 petabits per second, while maintaining compatibility with existing fiber infrastructure. The team–from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia—achieved the feat using a fiber with 19 cores. That’s the largest number of cores packed into a cable with a standard cladding diameter of 0.125 micrometers.

“We believe 19 cores is the highest practical number of cores or spatial channels you can have in standard cladding diameter fiber and still maintain good quality transmission,” says Georg Rademacher, who previously headed the project for NICT but who has recently returned to Germany to take up a directorship in optical communications at the University of Stuttgart.

Most fiber cables for long-distance transmission in use today are single core, single-mode glass fibers (SMF). But SMF is approaching its practical limit as network traffic rapidly increases because of AI, cloud computing, and IoT applications. Many researchers are therefore taking an interest in multicore fiber in conjunction with space-division multiplexing (SDM), a transmission technique for using multiple spatial channels in a cable.

Quitting Smoking After Cancer Diagnosis Reduces Risk of Cardiovascular Events

Recent advances in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and management have resulted in a growing number of cancer survivors. Researchers constantly strive to understand new ways to support cancer survivors and help them lead a healthy and happy life post-treatment. This has led to our understanding that cancer survivors have different healthcare needs than their counterparts with no history of cancer.

One concern facing cancer survivors involves cardiovascular disease (CVD), a general term including conditions that inflict the heart or blood vessels. Many cancer survivors face a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD) than from cancer itself.

Despite the well-known adverse effects of tobacco use associated with both cancer and CVD, about 20% of cancer survivors continue smoking after diagnosis. How smoking cessation impacts CVD risk after cancer diagnosis remains poorly understood. To address this, a team of researchers recently published their study investigating the cardiovascular consequences of quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis in the European Heart Journal.

Meet the robots attending the UN’s ‘AI for Good Global’ summit

Some of the world’s leading human and robot minds are heading to the United Nations.

At a UN summit in Geneva next week, tech luminaries ranging from futurist Ray Kurzweil to DeepMind COO Lila Ibrahim will discuss AI for good. It’s a stellar lineup of speakers, but the real stars in our eyes are the robots.

Over 50 of the beasts — the majority from Europe — will be in attendance. All of them merit places in your dreams and nightmares, but we’ve narrowed the roster down to a list of our 10 favourites.

A surprise chemical find by ALMA may help detect and confirm protoplanets

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the protoplanetary disk around a young star have discovered the most compelling chemical evidence to date of the formation of protoplanets. The discovery will provide astronomers with an alternate method for detecting and characterizing protoplanets when direct observations or imaging are not possible. The results will be published in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

HD 169,142 is a young star located in the constellation Sagittarius that is of significant interest to astronomers due to the presence of its large, dust-and gas-rich circumstellar disk that is viewed nearly face-on. Several candidates have been identified over the last decade, and earlier this year, scientists at the University of Liège and Monash University confirmed that one such candidate—HD 169,142 b—is, in fact, a giant Jupiter-like protoplanet.

The discoveries revealed in a new analysis of archival data from ALMA—an in which the National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a member—may now make it easier for scientists to detect, confirm, and ultimately characterize, protoplanets forming around .

Recruiting Editorial Board Members and Topical Advisory Panel Members for Section “Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Simulation of Combustion and Fire”

We are currently recruiting Editorial Board Members (EBMs) and Topical Advisory Panel Members (TAPMs) for this Section. If you are an active researcher in this field and are passionate about publishing cutting-edge research, please contact us by email at [email protected].

Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A Feature Paper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook for future research directions and describes possible research applications.

Feature papers are submitted upon individual invitation or recommendation by the scientific editors and must receive positive feedback from the reviewers.

Editor’s Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of MDPI journals from around the world. Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly interesting to readers, or important in the respective research area. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal.