TLDR 2019-04-24

Luminary, a new platform for podcasts that offers its own original content, has launched at $7.99 a month. Apple Podcasts has been losing market share in the podcast space as more companies move in. While Luminary offers access to hundreds of existing shows, some popular shows such as ‘The Daily’ and ‘Reply All’ will not be available on the platform. The article contains reviews on five of the exclusive shows that Luminary has produced.

Wings, Alphabet’s drone delivery service, has received approval to operate as an airline. The certifications for the delivery company to become an airline were necessary as without them the drones would not be legally able to fly over certain areas and distances. Other drone companies should be able to navigate the application process more easily now that Wings has gained their certifications. Wings will begin operations in rural Virginia within months.

Adversarial examples are patterns that are able to fool AI systems. A team of engineers from Belgium created and printed colorful patterns that were able to successfully fool an AI that detected people. The engineers only had to wear the image and they became essentially invisible to the computer. While these patterns only worked on one specific type of AI, it is possible that other patterns can be found and used to effectively disguise people from other systems.

A gene that is responsible for more efficient DNA repair has been discovered. SIRT6 produces proteins that are able to aid in repairing the inevitable DNA breaks that occur due to age. It was found that mice with more copies of the gene lived longer and aged slower. Longer-living rodents such as naked mole rats and beavers with different versions of the gene produced higher quality gene-repairing proteins. The next step in this research is to study animals with longer life-spans than humans to see if it is possible to prevent age-related diseases in people.

This repository contains a roadmap for people who are looking to become a Go developer in 2019. It gives a general landscape of how one should learn the language and answers the question of ‘what’s next’ if developers are stuck after learning certain skills. The roadmap categorizes skills according to importance, so developers can focus on just the core skills or delve deeper into topics if they wish.

Workers in China are often illegally forced to work long hours. 996.ICU refers to the 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week work schedule which causes workers to end up in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Microsoft and GitHub workers have released a public statement in this repository regarding their support for the 996.ICU movement, which is already being censored by companies like Tencent and Alibaba. People can support the 996.ICU movement by going to the original repository and ‘starring’ it.

Three senior researchers have been dismissed at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. An investigation by the NIH and FBI found that the researchers were colluding with Chinese associates by sharing intellectual property and running ‘shadow laboratories’ abroad. This is part of an ongoing investigation into the theft of US intellectual property, which costs the country between $225 to $600 billion a year. At least three other institutions are being investigated for similar offenses. A report by the US Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property named China as the world’s principal IP infringer.