Bytes: What’s new in tech
Silicon Valley goes nuclear
Tech billionaires’ next big bet is on nuclear fusion, said Jennifer Hiller in The Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Marc Benioff are all investing in startups using technology “to harness the process that powers the sun and stars to deliver almost limitless energy”—without the radioactive waste. “Developers have been riding a wave of momentum” since December, when scientists for the first time achieved more energy in a fusion reaction than was put in with lasers, “a goal known as net gain.” The breakthrough buried some of the doubts that have surrounded fusion technology for three decades, since a so-called cold fusion discovery was debunked. Commercial application of “hot” fusion remains likely years, if not decades, away.
Profs, too, are taking AI shortcuts
Students aren’t the only ones using AI for their college coursework, said Ian Bogost in The Atlantic. Professors are experimenting with it, too. Stephanie Kane, who teaches at George Mason University, said she asked ChatGPT to help her generate ideas “when she began developing a syllabus for a new class.” She preferred AI to crowdsourcing for suggestions on social media because “it doesn’t judge,” so she could “ask any questions I want without being worried about sounding silly.” Other professors have begun letting AI handle their busywork. One professor at the University of Texas has quietly turned to the software to write letters of recommendation. The letters composed by the computer are “quite generic,” but even counting revisions, it “cuts the time involved in writing letters by half.”
Tech’s great management flattening
Middle managers are becoming an endangered species in Silicon Valley, said Hannah Murphy in the Financial Times. “Valued by some as a vital bridge between a company’s bosses and its staff,” middle managers were “hired in droves during the pandemic boom,” when tech companies competed for talent. So many were brought in, though, that they each had fewer direct reports, becoming more like coaches for younger workers or “chiefs of staff” for higher-ups. In the pandemic, middle managers turned to meetings to justify their roles—making their time even less productive. The threat of layoffs has made this dynamic even worse, as middle managers have been “jostling to become involved in decisionmaking to try to look relevant.”
New ecosystem on plastic
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant collection of plastic trash floating in the open ocean, is home to an entirely new ecosystem, reports The Atlantic. Researchers have found that dozens of marine species that usually live by the coast—including sea anemones, Japanese oysters, shrimplike amphipods, and mussels—are now thriving in the deep sea, treating the 600,000 square miles of junk as a kind of archipelago. On over two-thirds of the plastic objects the researchers examined, the interlopers were living side-by-side with creatures that normally inhabit the middle of the ocean, meaning they had created a whole new ecosystem. There was even a new food chain—the coastal sea anemones were eating sea snails, for example—and some of the animals were reproducing. That suggests they are permanent residents of the plastic patchwork, not just passing through. While researchers knew that coastal species could travel on ships or floating debris, it had been assumed that differences in temperature, salinity, and food sources meant they couldn’t settle down in the ocean in the long term. Marine scientist Ceridwen Fraser from the University of Otago, who was not involved in the study, said humans “are creating new types of ecosystems that have potentially never been seen before.”
A vaccine against melanoma
A new type of mRNA vaccine can reduce the risk of recurrence of the skin cancer melanoma, a new study suggests. In a small trial, 100 people who had already had surgery to remove skin cancers were given a personalized vaccine in conjunction with immunotherapy treatment. After two years, only 22.4 percent had had a recurrence of the disease, compared with 40 percent of a control group of 50 patients who were given only the immunotherapy. That equates to an almost 50 percent decrease in risk of relapse, the first time a cancer vaccine has shown that level of benefit, reports
NBCNews.com. “It tells us these vaccines actually work,” says Antoni Ribas from the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the study, “and can turn on an immune response against the patient’s own cancer.” The individualized vaccine is based on the patient’s tumor—doctors identify and target the proteins that are specific to that cancerous growth and no other cells in the body. The drugmakers responsible, Moderna and Merck, are planning trials for other types of tumors, including lung cancer.
Baseball in a warming world
Climate change isn’t just altering our weather patterns and our ecosystems. It’s also making it easier to hit a home run. The more the temperature rises, the lower the density of air, offering less resistance as a ball sails over the field. After examining 114,417 Major League Baseball games over 60 years, researchers found that a temperature rise of just 1 degree Celsius increases the number of homers in a game by 1.9 percent. They calculated that over the past 10 years, about 50 of the home runs recorded each season wouldn’t have happened without global warming—and that if current climate trends continue, that number will rise to 192 a year by 2050 and 467 by 2100. Most affected will be stadiums in colder regions, such as Chicago’s Wrigley Field; least affected will be indoor arenas like Houston’s Minute Maid Park. “Climate change is not just heat waves or hurricanes,” lead author Christopher Callahan, from Dartmouth College, tells NPR.org. “It’s these subtle changes in our leisure activities that are going to start affecting people more and more in ways that we may not realize yet.”