TLDR 2020-12-07

Musk leaving California 🚚, Chinese supersoldiers 🎖️, robot kitchens 🤖

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Big Tech & Startups

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told friends and associates he plans to move to Texas (4 minute read)

Elon Musk has told several of his close friends and associates that he is planning to move to Texas. Musk put his Californian houses on the market and expanded operations in Texas this year. He spends most of his time between Austin and Boca Chica. California has seen an exodus of notable tech names in the last year as companies cut costs and shift to remote work. Musk has frequently complained about California's policies. Moving to Texas, a state with no income tax, could save Musk billions of dollars.

Steve Wozniak is starting another company, 45 years after co-founding Apple with Steve Jobs (2 minute read)

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, is starting a business in the green tech and blockchain space. Efforce is a marketplace for corporate or industrial building owners to have green projects funded. The platform will allow anyone to financially benefit from worldwide energy efficiency projects. WOZX, the company's cryptocurrency token, is trading on HBTC and will launch on Bithumb Global next week. Companies who register their energy upgrade projects on Efforce's site will have the opportunity to receive funding from investors around the world.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

The robot kitchen that will make you dinner – and wash up too (3 minute read)

For £248,000, you can buy a robotic kitchen that can cook restaurant-quality meals and then clean up after itself. The Moley Kitchen robot is currently targeted at enthusiasts, professionals, and early adopters, and the makers anticipate that the pricing will be reduced significantly over time. So far, they have received 1,205 qualified sales inquiries. The robot was developed with the help of Tim Anderson, the winner of the 2011 series of BBC MasterChef. Anderson's actions were captured and translated into digital movements. There will be 30 dishes at launch, with new recipes added every month.

China has done human testing to create biologically enhanced super soldiers, says top U.S. official (3 minute read)

China has conducted human testing on members of the People's Liberation Army, according to a top US intelligence official. Western scientists consider it unethical to manipulate genes to boost the performance of healthy people, but there are indications that Chinese military researchers are starting to explore its potential. On top of the military consequences, tampering with the human genome may have unintended effects.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Rust GPU (GitHub Repo)

Rust GPU is an attempt at making Rust a first-class language and ecosystem for building GPU code. It can currently compile and run simple shaders, but many things, such as loops and switches, aren't supported yet. An example rendering is available in the repository.

ImHex (GitHub Repo)

ImHex is a Hex editor for people who value their eyesight. It features byte patching, patch management, string search, data importing and exporting, a disassembler that supports many architectures, and much more. Screenshots are available in the repository.
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Miscellaneous

A mildly insane idea for disabling the coronavirus (4 minute read)

If the coronavirus's spike protein was destroyed, then it wouldn't be able to infect anything. Our cells have a system for destroying proteins that involves tagging targeted proteins with a special protein called ubiquitin. There are no proteins that can attach ubiquitin to the viral spike protein, so a team at Harvard produced one. The bioengineered protein attaches to the viral spike protein, which then allows the ubiquitin to attach to it. Unfortunately, the bioengineered protein also sticks to proteins essential to the health of normal cells, so the technique isn't viable. However, the technology used to create it could be applied to other cases in the future.

For The First Time, Physicists Have Recorded The Flowing Sound of a 'Perfect' Fluid (4 minute read)

Physicists have recorded sound waves moving through a perfect fluid with the lowest possible viscosity. A link to the sound recording is available in the article. The research can help scientists understand the most extreme conditions in the Universe, for example, the interiors of ultradense neutron stars. The interiors of spinning neutron stars are thought to be perfect fluids, with many oscillation modes in which sound waves propagate through the star. This research can also help scientists better understand superconductivity, and it could lead to the development of materials where electrons can flow in a perfect way.
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