Welcome to Lux Recommends #267, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars: “The Perseverance rover’s Mars Helicopter (Ingenuity) will take off, navigate, and land on Mars without human intervention” — Sam
World’s Oldest DNA Unlocks Lineage of Ice Age Mammoths: “Genetic material taken from carcasses that were preserved in Siberian permafrost reveals a prehistoric species” — Shaq
Welcome to Lux Recommends #266, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record: “Our climate models could be missing something big.” — Sam
Saving the Butterfly Forest: “Environmental destruction and violence threaten one of the world’s most extraordinary insect migrations.” — Deena
The Rise of Molecular Glues — Adam G
Dinosaur-Killing Impact Came From Edge Of Solar System, New Theory Suggests — Deena
Welcome to Lux Recommends #265, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system? “The CDC ordered software that was meant to manage the vaccine rollout. Instead, it has been plagued by problems and abandoned by most states.” — Deena
Scientists Have Taught Spinach to Send Emails and it Could Warn Us About Climate Change— Bilal
We’re living in a golden age of sample return missions: “A spate of new missions this decade…
By Peter Hébert
Want to hear a mind-blowing fact? How about this: there are at least twice as many buildings in the world as websites.
Within those buildings there are often multiple rooms, spaces, floors, and sections. And virtually all of those buildings are stuck in the past. They have not been digitized, making it time consuming and costly to manage them in an online world.
But that’s changing quickly, accelerated by today’s announcement that Matterport plans to go public on the NASDAQ through a business combination with Gores Holdings VI, Inc. [NASDAQ: GHVI]. The deal will provide for $640…
Welcome to Lux Recommends #264, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? “In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.” — Sam
How, Why and When Clean Agriculture Will Take Over the World — Deena
Ordering the Heavens: Hevelius’s Revolutionary 17th-Century Star Catalog and the First Moon Map: “How a visionary manuscript, completed by the first female…
Welcome to Lux Recommends #263, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens? “An eminent astrophysicist argues that signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life have appeared in our skies. What’s the evidence for his extraordinary claim?” — Sam
Managing the Unintended Consequences of Your Innovations — Cameron
Upgraded Robot Brains: How Custom Chips Could Speed Up Bot Reaction Time, Per New Research: “Think of robots as ninjas with a lag” — Deena
Welcome to Lux Recommends #262, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
AIs that read sentences are now catching coronavirus mutations: “NLP algorithms designed for words and sentences can also be used to interpret genetic changes in viruses — speeding up lab work to spot new variants.” — Deena
Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines — Zavain
‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds: “Authors…
Welcome to Lux Recommends #261, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
How Much Did Grandmothers Influence Human Evolution? “Scientists debate the evolutionary benefits of menopause” — Deena
The joys of being an absolute beginner — for life: “The phrase ‘adult beginner’ can sound patronising. It implies you are learning something you should have mastered as a child. But learning is not just for the young” — Deena
How We Discovered the Number Zero: “Zero as a concept was something that…
Welcome to Lux Recommends #260, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
How to Make Artificial Intelligence More Democratic: “A new type of learning model uses far less data than conventional AIs, allowing researchers with limited resources to contribute” — Deena
Do Dogs Really Make Us Happier? “New research shows that the psychological benefits of dog ownership are real — and especially valuable during the pandemic.” — Adam K
Will My Popcorn Explode? “The odds that all of your popcorn kernels…
Welcome to Lux Recommends #259, a longer-than-usual New Year’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
Well-Employed in Pandemic Times: Landscaping Goats: “The animals are hired to clear land because of their insatiable hunger for weeds. And they don’t have to honor lockdowns.” — Deena
A singular mind: Roger Penrose on his Nobel Prize — Sam
COVID-19 virus enters the brain, research strongly suggests: “A new study shows how spike protein crosses the blood-brain barrier” — Deena
