What’s new in tech
Searching for ‘electronic fingerprints’
Police are increasingly issuing search warrants to obtain Google location and search data, said Julia Love and Davey Alba in Bloomberg Businessweek. Google says it received a record 60,472 search warrants in the U.S. last year, more than double the number in 2019, and it provides at least some information about 80 percent of the time. The warrants “turn up only devices that have Location History enabled,” covering about one-third of Google users. Apple says that it’s unable, technically, to provide the kind of data that law enforcement gets from Google, which can include “a detailed inventory of whose personal devices were present at a given time and place.” Police liken the value of the data to “an electronic fingerprint,” but “officers frequently have to rummage through Google data on people who have nothing to do with a crime.”
OpenAI teams with iPhone design guru
OpenAI wants to build “the iPhone of artificial intelligence” with help from SoftBank and Apple’s former design mastermind, said Matthew Garrahan in the Financial Times. “Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief, has tapped Jony Ive’s company, LoveFrom, which the designer founded when he left Apple in 2019, to develop the ChatGPT creator’s first consumer device.” Ive famously worked alongside Steve Jobs in crafting the first iPhone as well as numerous other Apple devices. “Altman and Ive have held brainstorming sessions about what a new consumer product centered on OpenAI’s technology would look like,” whether it would be a smartphone, a wearable headset, or something entirely different. Japanese technology mega-investor SoftBank may “invest more than $1 billion in the venture.”
ChatGPT’s latest trick
ChatGPT can now interpret images, said Reece Rogers in Wired. With OpenAI’s latest update to the popular chatbot (available only to paying subscribers at first), users can upload images to the ChatGPT app or website, and the artificial intelligence will analyze what it “sees.” From the mobile app, the chatbot was able to recognize San Francisco landmarks and “label many of the objects in my apartment: from an orchid plant and international coins to a stray charging cable.” However, it did “mislabel my daily multivitamin as a pill for treating erectile dysfunction.” OpenAI says that it has restricted “the chatbot’s ability to answer questions that identify humans,” including celebrities.
New hope for heart transplants
Last year, surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center transplanted a pig’s heart into a human for the first time, only to see the patient die two months later. Now the same team has performed the procedure for a second time, reports Wired, and though it is still early days, the recipient appears to be recovering well. “Nobody knows from this point forward,” patient Lawrence Faucette, a 58-year-old Navy veteran who had been facing nearcertain death from heart failure, said before the operation. “At least now I have hope and I have a chance.” The pig donors in both transplants were the product of the same genetic modification, with edits to some of the genes responsible for immune rejection. Doctors still aren’t entirely sure why the first patient died, but at autopsy they discovered traces of a pig virus in his blood. Ahead of Faucette’s transplant, they developed a much more sensitive test to detect any viruses that might be lurking in the pig heart. Faucette is also receiving a new antibody therapy, not yet approved but in clinical trials, to block immune rejection. Progress in animal-human transplants would be lifesaving for the more than 100,000 Americans who need donor organs—the vast majority waiting for kidneys, but also livers, hearts, and lungs.
Does fast food make you sad?
Ultra-processed foods—such as chips, candy, pizza, and even packaged bread— may be linked to depression, a new study shows. Harvard researchers examined the eating habits and health outcomes of more than 31,000 women between ages 42 and 62, none of whom had depression symptoms when the study began. They found that those who ate nine servings of ultra-processed foods a day were 50 percent more likely to become depressed than those who ate no more than four daily servings. The link was particularly strong for foods and drinks containing artificial sweeteners, such as diet soda—although there was no way to determine whether the fast-food diet was a cause of the depression or a symptom of it. “We don’t have a lot of energy when we are feeling depressed,” Susan Albers, a clinical psychologist not involved in the new study, tells NBCNews .com, “and it’s easy to reach for those foods when we are low-energy and don’t have motivation to cook.” Still, the findings add to a growing body of evidence that the gut microbiome, which is influenced by diet, has significant effects on mental health.
Carbon on Europa
The huge subterranean ocean of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, appears to contain carbon, a vital component for life. Scientists knew there was carbon dioxide on Europa’s surface, but they weren’t sure whether it had come from external sources, such as meteorites, or from within the moon itself. The new finding, based on images relayed from the James Webb Space Telescope, suggests it is from the moon. “We’re carbon-based life,” NASA planetary scientist Geronimo Villanueva tells NPR.org. “Understanding the chemistry of Europa’s ocean will help us determine whether it’s hostile to life as we know it, or if it might be a good place for life.” Of course, “good” is a relative term: Europa is not particularly hospitable. Sunlight is about 25 times fainter there than at Earth, and the moon’s surface temperature is minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit. The gravitational pull from Jupiter is so strong that the tides can rip apart the thick ice crust, 15 miles deep, that covers Europa’s ocean. But it does have all of the fundamental elements necessary for life, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.