TLDR 2021-12-14

Nike has acquired NFT studio RTFKT for an undisclosed amount. RTFKT was valued at $33.3 million in May after a seed funding round. The company is behind CloneX, one of the most talked-about NFT project drops of the month. CloneX has seen nearly $65 million in transaction volume since its initial drop less than three weeks ago. RTFKT also collaborates with crypto creators to design physical items that utilize imagery from NFT projects.

Epic Games has released The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, a tech demo with ultra-realistic visuals and open-world environments. The 11-minute video shows off features from UE5 such as World Partition, Nanite, Lumen, MetaHuman Creator, and Chaos. It begins with an introduction from Neo and Trinity and then goes on to show scenes from the game and gameplay footage. The video is available in the article.

Scientists from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have created mini-stomachs from human pluripotent stem cells that can contract and produce acid. The scientists turned stem cells into three primary germ layers and used them to generate stomach tissue with abilities close to regular stomachs. The mini-stomachs were transplanted into mice, where they grew a thousand times larger than they usually would in a cell culture and also developed features that had been lacking. The team aims to be able to transplant organoid tissues into human patients by the end of the decade.

The cutting edge of microscopy is as much art as it is science, with human operators having to make educated guesses about what features they are hoping to analyze. There is still no way to predict functionality from structure. Deep learning could help the field immensely. The technology could help scientists easily identify structures and automate processes, leading to the possibility of developing manufacturing capabilities. Autonomous microscopy will enable more opportunities for scientific discovery, but it will likely be a difficult process.

logo-ls is a modern ls command with icons and Git integrations. It features over 250 icons, True Color support, Git Status integration, near-native speed, and language agnostic binaries. The project attempts to balance speed and aesthetics. Screenshots are available.

Zod is a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library. It requires zero dependencies and will work in Node.js and browsers. With Zod, developers declare a validator once and it will automatically infer the static TypeScript type. A list of tools that are built on top of or that support Zod is available.

Elon Musk has been named Time magazine's 'Person of the Year' for 2021. The title is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk in reshaping life on Earth and possibly life off Earth as well. His space flight company made history in September after launching four private passengers into orbit. SpaceX is also one of the space firms building the lunar landing systems that will carry astronauts to the moon in 2024.

The Crypto Theses is a report that covers key trends, people, companies, and projects to watch across the crypto landscape, with predictions for 2022. It includes sections on Bitcoin, American crypto policy, market infrastructure, NFTs, Web 3, DeFi, DAOs, Ethereum, and more. The report was created by employees of Messari, a crypto market intelligence platform that provides data and research products and services.