This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 26)

Anthropic Wants Its AI Agent to Control Your Computer
Will Knight | Wired
“It took some time for individuals to regulate to the concept of chatbots that appear to have minds of their very own. The following leap into the unknown could contain trusting synthetic intelligence to take over our computer systems, too. Anthropic, a high-flying competitor to OpenAI, introduced [this week] that it has taught its AI mannequin Claude to do a variety of issues on a pc, together with search the net, open functions, and enter textual content utilizing the mouse and keyboard.”

A Neuralink Rival Says Its Eye Implant Restored Vision in Blind People
Emily Mullin | Wired
“For years, that they had been dropping their central imaginative and prescient—what permits individuals to see letters, faces, and particulars clearly. The sunshine-receiving cells of their eyes had been deteriorating, regularly blurring their sight. However after receiving an experimental eye implant as a part of a scientific trial, some examine contributors can now see effectively sufficient to learn from a e book, play playing cards, and fill in a crossword puzzle regardless of being legally blind.”

DNA Has Been Modified to Make It Store Data 350 Times Faster
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | New Scientist
“DNA has been used for years to retailer knowledge, however encoding info into the molecule is painstaking work. Now, researchers have drastically sped it up by mimicking a pure organic course of that drives gene expression. This might result in sturdy, do-it-yourself DNA knowledge storage applied sciences.”

Air Taxis and Other Electric-Powered Aircraft Cleared for Takeoff With Final FAA Rules
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“The FAA says these ‘powered-lift’ automobiles would be the first utterly new class of plane since helicopters have been launched in 1940. These plane shall be used for quite a lot of companies, together with air taxis, cargo supply, and rescue and retrieval operations. The ultimate guidelines revealed as we speak comprise tips for pilot coaching in addition to operational necessities relating to minimal protected altitudes and visibility.”

Cheap Solar Panels Are Changing the World
Zoë Schlanger | The Atlantic
“‘In a single 12 months, in a single know-how, we’re offering as a lot new electrical energy because the entirety of world development the 12 months earlier than,’ Kingsmill Bond, a senior vitality strategist at RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, instructed me. A decade or two in the past, analysts ‘didn’t think about of their wildest goals that photo voltaic by the center of the 2020s would already be supplying all the development of world electrical energy demand,’ he mentioned. But right here we’re.”

GMOs Could Reboot Chestnut Trees
Anya Kamenetz | MIT Know-how Assessment
“The sprouts, no larger than our knees, are samples of seemingly the primary genetically modified bushes to be thought-about for federal regulatory approval as a device for ecological restoration. American Castanea’s founders, and all of the others right here as we speak, hope that the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) would be the first tree species ever introduced again from useful extinction—however, ideally, not the final.”

Here’s What the Regenerative Cities of Tomorrow Could Look Like
Kotaro Okada | Wired
“Wired Japan collaborated with the city design studio For Cities to focus on a number of the world’s greatest sustainable city developments, that are harbingers of what’s to return. From utilizing native supplies and development strategies to restoring ecosystems, these tasks transcend merely making inexperienced areas and supply hints of how cities of the longer term will perform in addition to how they are going to be constructed. Listed below are some locations the place the longer term is now.”

How Wayve’s Driverless Cars Will Meet One of Their Biggest Challenges Yet
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Know-how Assessment
“The transfer to the US shall be a take a look at of Wayve’s know-how, which the corporate claims is extra general-purpose than what lots of its rivals are providing. Wayve’s strategy has attracted large funding—together with a $1 billion funding spherical that broke UK data this Might—and partnerships with Uber and on-line grocery corporations corresponding to Asda and Ocado. However it is going to now go face to face with the heavyweights of the rising autonomous-car business, together with Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla.”

PRIVACY

Two Students Created Face Recognition Glasses. It Wasn’t Hard.
Kashmir Hill | The New York Instances
“Mr. Nguyen and a fellow Harvard scholar, Caine Ardayfio, had constructed glasses used for figuring out strangers in actual time, and had demonstrated them on two ‘actual individuals’ on the subway station, together with Mr. Hoda, whose identify was incorrectly transcribed within the video captions as ‘Vishit.’ Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Ardayfio, who’re each 21 and learning engineering, mentioned in an interview that their system relied on broadly out there applied sciences.”

Google Is Now Watermarking Its AI-Generated Text
Eliza Strickland | IEEE Spectrum
“The system, referred to as SynthID-Textual content, doesn’t compromise ‘the standard, accuracy, creativity, or velocity of the textual content technology,’ says Pushmeet Kohli, vp of analysis at Google DeepMind and a coauthor of the paper. However the researchers acknowledge that their system is much from foolproof, and isn’t but out there to everybody—it’s extra of an indication than a scalable answer.”

Picture Credit score: Sylwia Bartyzel on Unsplash