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The Download: ancient DNA, and offshore wind

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The Download: ancient DNA, and offshore wind


This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

DNA that was frozen for two million years has been sequenced

What’s happened: After an eight-year effort to recover DNA from Greenland’s frozen interior, researchers say they’ve managed to sequence gene fragments from ancient fish, plants, and even a mastodon that lived 2 million years ago. It’s the oldest DNA ever recovered.

How they did it: The researchers examined genetic material that was left behind by dozens of species and washed into sediment layers long ago. The DNA was preserved by freezing temperatures and bound to clay and quartz, which also slows down the process of degradation.

Why it matters: The genetic findings, which paint a picture of an era when Greenland was covered with flowering plants and cedar trees, could provide clues to how ecosystems adapted to warmer climates in the past. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

The wild new technology coming to offshore wind power

Wind power is one of the world’s fastest-growing renewable energy sources, and soon its reach might expand even further. This week, California is auctioning sites off its coast that could house the first floating wind turbines in the US. 

There are already a few demonstration projects around the world for floating offshore wind turbines, but the technology is entering a new phase, with more governments setting goals for installations and larger projects entering the planning and permitting stages. California could be a major testing ground for the technology. But what it would take to actually happen, and what will California’s auction mean for wind power globally? Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

Casey’s story is from The Spark, her weekly newsletter covering energy and climate change. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Sam Bankman-Fried is reportedly being investigated by US prosecutors 
The inquiry wants to determine whether he manipulated the market for two cryptocurrencies. (NYT $)
+ The FTX founder has made his fair share of enemies lately. (Vox)
+ Facebook is asking lawmakers to go easy on crypto, please. (Motherboard)
+ An underground community in Lebanon is mining crypto in neglected dams. (Rest of World)

2 Apple is finally encrypting most of iCloud 
It will protect data from both hackers and law enforcement. (WSJ $)
+ The company has dropped its plans to scan iCloud Photos for potential child abuse. (Wired $)
+ Government agencies are unlikely to welcome Advanced Data Protection. (WP $)
 
3 Ukraine is revolutionizing sea warfare with naval drones
The uncrewed boats are targeting enemy ships. (Economist $)
+ Russian disinformation is demonizing Ukrainian refugees. (WP $)
 
4 China has agreed to US inspections of its tech businesses
In a bid to avoid being placed on a trade blacklist. (FT $)
 
5 How France’s privacy darling turned cyber snooper
Eric Leandri used to be a staunch defender of digital privacy. Now, he runs a cybersurveillance firm. (Politico)

6 Scammers are scamming each other
And a surprising number of them are complaining about it online. (Wired $)
+ The 1,000 Chinese SpaceX engineers who never existed. (MIT Technology Review)
 
7 Working out the internet’s carbon footprint is surprisingly difficult 
We’re using more energy, but it’s hard to compare certain activities. (The Conversation)
 
8 The trouble with being “chronically online”
It’s mostly a lot of people getting het up over nothing. (Vox)
+ Even the fanciest influencers are feeling the cost-of-living pinch. (Wired $)
 
9 The simple magic of Christmas shopping in real life
Online may be more convenient, but algorithms are unlikely to delight you with an unexpected find. (The Atlantic $)

10 How to prepare for a giant asteroid strike
The Asteroid Launcher simulator provides a fascinating look at what could happen—but hopefully won’t. (Motherboard)
+ How to stay safe from a solar flare. (Insider $)
+ Watch the moment NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed into an asteroid. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“It’s not a good look. It’s yet another unspoken sign of disrespect. There is no discussion. Just like, beds showed up.”

—A disgruntled Twitter employee tells Forbes about beds mysteriously appearing in the company’s offices without any warning, presumably to enable staff to pull crazy hours.

The big story

Is your brain a computer?

It’s an analogy that goes back to the dawn of the computer era: ever since we discovered that machines could solve problems by manipulating symbols, we’ve wondered if the brain might work in a similar fashion.

Alan Turing, for example, asked what it would take for a machine to “think” back in 1950, wondering that if machines could think like human brains, it was only natural to wonder if brains might work like machines.

Today, experts are divided. We asked them to tell us why they think we should—or shouldn’t—think of the brain as being “like a computer.” Although everyone agrees that our biological brains create our conscious minds, they’re split on the question of what role, if any, is played by information processing—the crucial similarity that brains and computers are alleged to share. Read the full story.

—Dan Falk

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ How ‘goblin mode’ became the word of the year.
+ 2022 has been A Year, but at least the memes were good.
+ Yeardley Smith, aka the voice of Lisa Simpson, has been on a real journey.
+ Netflix has a ton of secret codes to shake up your recommendations. What’re you waiting for?
+ Here’s why what we think we know about the brain at 25 years old probably isn’t true at all.



Tech

The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush

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The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush


The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania. 

Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.

Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.

A changing way of life

The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.

Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.

One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.

Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.

The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan


Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.

Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost. 

But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation

—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures

The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI


A strategic imperative

Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.

According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.

Mapping out a generative AI pathway

One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.

The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.

Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.

All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.

The benefits of third-party experience

Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).

Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”

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