That is as we speak’s version of The Obtain, our weekday e-newsletter that gives a each day dose of what’s happening on this planet of expertise.
Is faux grass a dangerous thought? The AstroTurf wars are far from over.
In 2001, People put in simply over 7 million sq. meters of artificial turf. By 2024, that quantity was 79 million sq. meters—sufficient to carpet all of Manhattan after which some. The rise worries of us who research microplastics and environmental air pollution.
Whereas the plastic-making business insists that artificial fields are protected if correctly put in, a lot of researchers suppose that isn’t so. Discover out why AstroTurf has ignited heated debates.
—Douglas Predominant
This story is from the subsequent concern of our print journal, packed with tales all about nature. Subscribe now to learn the full factor when it lands on Wednesday, April 22.
Mustafa Suleyman: AI improvement received’t hit a improvement wall anytime quickly—right here’s why
—Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI CEO and Google DeepMind co-founder
The skeptics preserve predicting that AI compute will quickly hit a wall—and preserve getting confirmed unsuitable. To perceive why that is, you want to look at the forces driving the AI explosion.
Three advances are enabling exponential progress: quicker primary calculators, high-bandwidth reminiscence, and applied sciences that flip disparate GPUs into huge supercomputers. The place does all this get us? Learn the total op-ed on the way forward for AI improvement to be taught extra.
Desalination expertise, by the numbers
—Casey Crownhart
After I began digging into desalination expertise for a brand new story, I couldn’t assist however obsess over the numbers.
I knew on some degree that desalination—pulling salt out of seawater to supply recent water—was an more and more vital expertise, particularly in water-stressed areas together with the Center East. However simply how a lot some international locations depend on desalination, and the way large a enterprise it’s, nonetheless stunned me.
Listed here are the extraordinary numbers behind the essential water supply.
This story is from The Spark, our weekly e-newsletter on the tech that might fight the local weather disaster. Enroll to obtain it in your inbox each Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the web to discover you as we speak’s most enjoyable/vital/scary/fascinating tales about expertise.
1 Meta has launched the primary AI mannequin from its Superintelligence Labs
Muse Spark is the firm’s first mannequin in a 12 months. (Reuters $)
+ The closed mannequin brings reasoning capabilities to the Meta AI app. (Engadget)
+ It’s constructed by Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by Alexandr Wang. (TechCrunch)
2 Anthropic has misplaced a bid to pause the Pentagon’s blacklisting
An appeals court docket in Washington, DC denied the request. (CNBC)
+ A California decide had briefly blocked the blacklisting in March. (NPR)
+ The combined rulings go away Anthropic in a authorized limbo. (Wired $)
+ And open doorways for smaller AI rivals. (Reuters $)
3 New proof suggests Adam Again invented Bitcoin
The British cryptographer might be the actual Satoshi Nakamoto. (NYT $)
+ Again denies the claims. (BBC)
+ There’s a darkish aspect to crypto’s permissionless dream. (MIT Expertise Evaluation)
4 Gen Z is cooling on AI
The share feeling indignant about it has risen from 22% to 31% in a 12 months. (Axios)
+ Anti-AI protests are additionally rising. (MIT Expertise Evaluation)
5 Conflict in the Gulf might tilt the cloud race towards China
Huawei is pitching “multi-cloud” resilience to Gulf shoppers. (Remainder of World)
6 Meta has killed a leaderboard of its AI token customers
It confirmed the prime 250 customers. (The Data $)
+ Meta blamed information leaks for the shutdown. (Fortune)
+ It inspired “tokenmaxxing,” a rising phenomenon in Large Tech. (NYT $)
7 Did Artemis II actually inform us something new about house?
Or was it primarily a PR train? (Ars Technica)
8 Israeli assaults have brutally uncovered Lebanon’s digital infrastructure
It’s managing a fashionable disaster with out fashionable expertise. (Wired $)
9 AI fashions might supply mathematicians a widespread language
They hope it will simplify the course of of verifying proofs. (Economist)
10 A “self-doxing’ rave is serving to trans individuals keep protected on-line
It’s amongst a sequence of digital self-defenses. (404 Media)
Quote of the day
“I really feel like something that I’m in has the potential of perhaps getting changed, even in the subsequent few years.”
—Sydney Gill, a freshman at Rice College, tells the New York Occasions why she’s soured on AI.
One Extra Factor
certainly one of two general-purpose detectors on the Giant Hadron Collider.
Inside the hunt for new physics at the world’s largest particle collider
In 2012, information from CERN’s Giant Hadron Collider (LHC) unearthed a particle referred to as the Higgs boson. The invention answered a nagging query: the place do elementary particles, reminiscent of those that make up all of the protons and neutrons in our our bodies, get their mass?
However now particle physicists have reached an deadlock of their quest to find, produce, and research new particles at colliders. Discover out what they’re attempting to do about it.
—Dan Garisto
We can nonetheless have good issues
A spot for consolation, enjoyable and distraction to brighten up your day. (Obtained any concepts? Drop me a line.)
+ Take pleasure in this story of the “joke” sound that by accident outlined 90s rave tradition.
+ Take a nostalgic journey by the web sites of the early 00s.
+ One for animal lovers: sperm whales have teamed up to assist a new child.
+ Right here’s a lengthy overdue reply to an important query: can the world’s largest mousetrap catch a limousine?
