Wall Street Journal | Conservation & Biodiversity
“Scientists like Enochs are working overtime to engineer more climate-resistant corals. They are creating booster shots to keep them alive, deploying in vitro fertilization to make larvae grow faster, and importing coral species from around the Caribbean to breed with those in Florida.”
From Wall Street Journal.
“For its long-running Madden NFL series, EA developers travel the country to make three-dimensional scans of professional players. But that wasn’t financially or logistically feasible for ‘EA Sports College Football 25.’
There are about six times as many players in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision as there are in the National Football League. In addition, colleges don’t set their rosters until the late spring and they often change significantly, as some players go pro and others matriculate.
To release the college-football game this month, EA relied on artificial-intelligence technology it began developing about four years ago…
EA collected photos of the athletes’ heads from their schools and then used its AI to create their videogame doppelgängers in seconds. The technology isn’t generative AI that creates new images such as OpenAI’s Dall-E, but rather a kind that takes data from photos and creates full 3-D avatars.”
From Wall Street Journal.
Curiosities | Science & Technology
“One of my favorite parts of winter changing to spring is when the grass begins to grow and it’s time for the first cut of the season. However, when it takes about two and a half hours to mow all of my lawn, it quickly becomes a big time drain with a busy family. But when I tested my first robot lawn mower, the Husqvarna Automower 430XH, nearly two years ago — I gained the power to control time.
OK, I don’t really control time, but the robot lawn mower takes on one of my biggest weekly chores and gives my family and me more time together. While the Husqvarna Automower 430XH opened my eyes to what a robot mower can offer in terms of getting time back, I’ve since tested more advanced autonomous models.
The result? A beautifully manicured — not just cut — lawn and even more time to spend on summer fun. With important new features such as GPS guidance.”
From CNET
“Quitting time has been shifting earlier throughout the week, and it’s especially early on Friday, according to an analysis of sign-off times from some 75,000 workers at 816 companies by the workplace analytics firm ActivTrak.
Friday sign-off times have moved up from around 5 p.m. at the start of 2021 to around 4 p.m. now. Monday-Thursday sign-offs have also shifted earlier, to around 5 p.m. on average.”
From Axios.
Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”
So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:
Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.
