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The Download: the dream of cryonics, and enhanced rats

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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.

Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died

When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China in 2016, he was traveling there to guide China’s first forays into cryonics, or freezing corpses for reanimation.

Drake had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a small nonprofit that had managed to become the longtime leader in cryonics, freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976.

The foundation, and cryonics in general, had long survived outside of mainstream acceptance. But it’s the recent involvement of Yinfeng that signals something of a new era for cryonics.

With impressive financial resources, government support, and scientific staff, it’s one of a handful of new labs focused on expanding the consumer appeal of cryonics and trying anew to bring credibility to the long-disputed theory of human reanimation. Still, the field remains rooted in faith rather than any real evidence that it works. Read the full story.

—Laurie Clarke

This piece is from our forthcoming mortality-themed issue, available from 26 October. If you want to read it when it comes out, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for as little as $80 a year.

Are rats with human brain cells still just rats?

This week, my colleague Jessica Hamzelou wrote about a fascinating experiment that involved implanting human brain cells into rats’ brains. The brain cells from both species were able to form connections and work together. The human cells became part of the rats’ brains.

A few months after they’d been implanted, the human cells made up around a sixth of the rats’ brains and appeared to have a role in controlling the animals’ behavior. Which invites the tricky question: Are these animals still 100% rat? Read the full story.

Jessica’s story is from The Checkup, her weekly newsletter exploring all things biotech and health. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

ClimateTech 2022

This week MIT Technology Review held its inaugural ClimateTech conference on technology solutions for climate change—a big thank you to everyone who attended in-person or online! 

If you missed it, you can catch up with all the biggest news and announcements via our live blog covering day one and day two of the conference.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 China is preparing for its historic Communist party congress 
A third term for president Xi Jinping is a near-certainty. (Economist $)
+ The congress is an opportunity for Xi to reassert his control. (FT $)
+ All 2,3000 senior party members will attend the meeting. (The Guardian)
+ Douying, Tiktok’s Chinese sister app, is silencing Cantonese speakers. (Rest of World)

2 Not everyone in California can afford electric vehicles
They’re expensive, and the state’s push towards EVs risks overlooking lower earners. (The Guardian)
+ Even the US secretary of transportation acknowledges the obstacles. (Recode)
+ The US only has 6,000 fast charging stations for EVs. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Turkey has passed a flawed “disinformation bill” ahead of its elections
Which, handily enough, restricts criticisms of its President Erdoğan. (FT $) 
+ The European Parliament has accused Big Tech of secretive lobbying. (Bloomberg $)

4 Food is getting more expensive
Supply issues and higher gas prices are just some of the reasons why. (Vox)
+ The rising cost of food has contributed to those sky-high inflation figures. (New Yorker $)

5 An AI is planning to run for election in Denmark
The Synthetic Party, which is led by an AI, claims to represent the values of “non-voting Danes.” (Motherboard)

6 Gamers are the perfect target for cybercriminals
Younger players are particularly vulnerable to fraudsters’ advances. (NYT $)

7 Ads on Netflix are arriving next month
The company desperately wants to attract new customers, following months of users canceling their subscriptions. (WSJ $)

8 Intense heat therapy isn’t just for elite athletes ☀
Carefully controlled exposure to heat could prevent cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, too. (Neo.Life)

9 Your restaurant server hates your menu hacks 
And apps are making it easier than ever to order elaborate concoctions anonymously. (Eater)

10 There aren’t legs in the metaverse after all 🦵
Hard to believe, I know, but Meta misled us. (Kotaku)
+ Meta is desperately trying to make the metaverse happen. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“There will often be one or two people running around like crazy, or doing something like creating a massive cartoon of a cat.”

—Antti Innanen, chief executive of Dot, a Finnish legal design consultancy, explains the pitfalls of trying to hold people’s attention while giving seminars in the metaverse to the Financial Times.

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.)

+ Hey, that’s not how the next line of the song goes!
+ The one and only Patti Smith is releasing a book next month—and it’s inspired by, err, Instagram.
+ This sunlit waterfall is straight out of House of the Dragon.
+ If you ever find yourself in London, it’s only right you indulge in a bit of pub grub.
+ We tend to gravitate towards the familiar when something’s coming to an end, and that’s okay.



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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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