Bloomberg (October 6)
“Even after $100 billion, self-driving cars are going nowhere. They were supposed to be the future,” but “the losses get bigger.” Several decades in, there remain few actual self-driving vehicles, mostly “confined to a handful of places in the Sun Belt, because they still can’t handle weather patterns trickier than Partly Cloudy. State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and … left turns.”
Tags: $100 billion, Animals, Construction, Crossing guards, Going nowhere, Left turns, Losses, Self-driving cars, Sun Belt, Traffic cones, Weather
Washington Post (September 1)
DeepMind has expanded its “database of folded proteins to more than 200 million — nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, including those in humans, plants, bacteria, animals and other organisms” and made “them publicly available and free.” The AlphaFold database “does not reveal all of biology’s mysteries, nor is it the only advance needed for drug development or disease fighting. But the views are truly astonishing.”
Tags: Advance, AlphaFold, Animals, Bacteria, Biology, Catalogued, Database, DeepMind, Disease fighting, Drug development, Folded proteins, Free, Humans, Plants, Science
USA Today (October 20)
“Scientists for decades have dreamed of xenotransplantation: using animals to solve the shortage of organs available for human transplant.” This came a step closer with a “groundbreaking operation using a pig’s kidney.” Though the successful transplant into a brain-dead human is only a first step, it may ultimately help reduce the number of deaths, roughly 6,000 annually, of those waitlisted who die before receiving a donor organ.
Tags: Animals, Deaths, Donor, Groundbreaking, Human, Kidney, Operation, Organs, Pig, Scientists, Shortage, Transplant, Xenotransplantation
USA Today (June 2)
“Very rarely do people face a stark human vs. animal choice, as Cincinnati zoo keepers faced…. Perhaps this outpouring for Harambe can translate into more everyday compassion for all animals.” Since Harambe was shot after a 3-year old fell into his enclosure, there has been a widespread outpouring of grief for the gorilla.
Tags: Animals, Cincinnati, Compassion, Gorilla, Grief, Harambe, Human, Zoo
