#112 - Sodium-ion Batteries, Fusion Energy, and XKCD!
Hi everyone, and welcome to the Impact Labs Newsletter! If you like what you see and know others who would be interested in subscribing, send them this email and they can join the fam by signing up here! 😀
Impact Update
Applications for The Impact Fellowship have officially closed, but if you’re signed up for this newsletter, you’ll be notified when they open up for next year! We were so impressed by all the incredible applications we received, and we hope to see many of you irl at The Impact Summit next summer, so stay tuned!
In the News
🪨 DeepMind discovered 2.2 million new crystal structures without mining a single rock.
☀️ The world’s largest, operational fusion reactor was just inaugurated in Naka, Japan. It’s an engineering marvel.
💰 The newest data from Gapminder show how extreme poverty has continued to fall despite the pandemic. In 2002, 26% of the global population lived on less than $2.15 per day. Now that number is 8.3% despite the absolute number of people in the world increasing. Still a long way to go, but incredible progress.
Opportunities
A brief meta-note about the opportunities we curate:
We find jobs, fellowships, volunteer opportunities, and more through a variety of online sources and inbound messages from folks in our community who ask us to amplify their work and/or job openings. If you have an opportunity you’d like to showcase, please get in touch with us at hello@impactlabs.io. Also, going forward, we’re going to stop editing the blurbs so that they’re written in 3rd person and we’ll just use quotes to signify when the descriptions are coming from the organizations themselves.
“The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a software engineer to join our Future Audiences effort, reporting to product engineering management. Future Audiences is the Wikimedia Foundation’s effort to investigate opportunities for spreading and sustaining free knowledge in a rapidly changing Internet (e.g., AI assistants, social video apps, and more). As a Future Audiences engineer, you will be responsible for collaborating with product managers, data analysts, and machine learning engineers to deploy these types of software experiments across a variety of platforms.” Apply here.
“Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple, effective, and accessible to all. Since 2013, federal, state, and local government agencies have trusted Nava to build transformative digital services to help people access public benefits. Meeting our mission is an opportunity to restore trust between people and public institutions. We focus on populations that are the least protected because the stakes are higher.” They’re looking for a developer evangelist.
We’ve had speakers join us from Nava at our various events over the years and we can vouch that they are indeed excellent people who deserve to work with wonderful folks like you!
Carbon Direct is looking for full stack SWE. “At Carbon Direct, we dedicate our scientific, software, and business expertise to empower organizations around the world to take climate action. We are a purpose-driven carbon management firm dedicated to helping organizations around the world reach their climate goals. We make carbon science accessible and actionable with our end-to-end platform.”
Calling all Bay Area EAs! Fiddler is looking for an ML observability engineer. “At Fiddler, we understand the implications of AI and the impact that it has on human lives. Our company was born with the mission of building trust into AI. With the rise of the internet, trust in AI has been degraded by a plethora of issues like spam, fraudulent transactions, hate speech, and online abuse. Fiddler enables organizations to get ahead of these issues by building trustworthy, transparent, and explainable AI solutions.”
What We’re Watching
All you wanted to know about self-driving trucks and why they’re not everywhere yet.
New power construction in India is a whopping 88% renewable for 2023. Great progress!
In more green good news, check out this recent breakthrough in sodium-ion battery tech, putting it on par with lithium-ion. If scalable, this could represent a massive change in the battery industry and for our planet, since sodium is a lot more abundant and less pollutive than lithium.
XKCD finally launched a YouTube channel and it’s GREAT so far!
Quotes We Love
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.”
-Barack Obama
That’s all for now! See you in your inbox in 4 weeks, since we’ll be taking a week off for the holidays! ❄️