TLDR 2022-08-16

Android 13 📱, a16z gives WeWork founder $350M 🏠, Deno integrates NPM 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

WeWork co-founder lines up $350 million A16Z investment for a new billion-dollar real estate venture (2 minute read)

Adam Neumann, the co-founder of WeWork, is working on a new real estate business called Flow. The company recently received $350 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, putting it at a valuation of over $1 billion. Flow aims to provide consistent housing experiences across a chain of branded apartment complexes. It will debut its apartments in 2023.

Android 13 arrives for Pixel phones starting today (3 minute read)

Google released its Android 13 update for Pixel phones early this year. The update will be available for devices from other manufacturers later this year. The update includes features such as the ability to customize app icons, support for spatial audio, message streaming, and an option to limit which photos and videos an app can access. More details about the new features are available in the article.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Young mice show signs of old age after receiving blood from an elder mouse (2 minute read)

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that young mice display characteristics of old mice after just one blood transfusion from an old mouse. The young mice that received old blood became fatigued faster and showed markers for kidney damage and aging of the liver. Tests on human kidney cells with blood taken from individuals between 60 and 70 years of age showed similar results.

Scientists build a magnet in China that is a million times stronger than Earth's magnetic core (2 minute read)

China has launched the world's most powerful magnet for scientific research. The magnet is roughly the size of a coin and it creates a 45.22-Tesla magnetic field. A magnet developed in the US was the world's most powerful magnet ever at 45.5 Teslas, but it was only created as a test and not used for experiments. Innovations in magnet power and size have the potential to revolutionize the energy industry through nuclear fusion applications.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Android 13 changelog (3 hour read)

Android 13 has been described by many as the biggest Android OS update since 2014. It refines the OS's feature set and tweaks the user interface in subtle ways. The update includes many significant behavioral and platform changes and several new platform APIs. This article looks at these changes in detail so developers can prepare their apps.

Big Changes Ahead for Deno (4 minute read)

This article discusses Deno's road map. A vast majority of npm packages will work in Deno within the next three months as the team works on allowing Deno to easily import npm packages. The next release will include the fastest JavaScript web server ever built. Deno will be launching office hours for those employing Deno in a commercial setting.
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Miscellaneous

Unity rejects AppLovin's $20 billion merger offer (2 minute read)

Unity has rejected AppLovin's $20 billion proposal. The game engine company will merge with ironSource, an Israeli mobile app monetization and distribution company. Merging with ironSource will give Unity developers more tools to grow and monetize mobile games. The agreement will see ironSource become a wholly owned subsidiary of Unity. It gives Unity more control over the long run compared to the deal with AppLovin.

Meet Aquanaut: A new deep sea diving robot from NASA (2 minute read)

Aquanaut is a robot designed by NASA and Nauticus Robotics Inc. It features cameras, sensors, and two arms that can be fitted with different tools. Aquanaut was designed to accomplish various tasks underwater. It is targeted at offshore oil, gas, and wind operations. Nauticus has produced two Aquanauts and it plans to build 20 more in the next three years.
Quick Links

TikTok now offers a very basic text-to-image AI generator directly in the app (3 minute read)

TikTok's new AI greenscreen feature allows users to type in a text prompt that the software will then generate as an image.

Engineers saved a baby's life by printing the missing part of her skull (2 minute read)

Sygnis paused all 3D printing projects to save the baby's life and it finished printing the skull in 26 hours.

OxideDB (GitHub Repo)

OxideDB is a translation layer that works as a MongoDB database server while using PostgreSQL's JSON capabilities as the underlying data store.

How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency (9 minute read)

As a real-time chat platform, Discord wants its databases to respond to the high frequency of queries as fast as possible.

Samsung's 55-inch Odyssey Ark: Taking gaming monitors to a whole new dimension (4 minute read)

Samsung's 55-inch Odyssey Ark features a huge quantum mini LED panel with a 1000R curve, great visuals, and surprisingly good sound.

Announcing @BLITZ_JS 2.0 BETA (3 minute read)

Blitz is a full stack toolkit for Next.js that plugs into any Next.js app.
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