#144 - Crop Yields, MATS Summer Cohort, and Super Fast EV Charging!
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In the News
🌾 Cereal yields have tripled in the last 60 years.
☀️ We’re on track to build 700GW of new solar installations around the globe.
🧬 Beam Therapeutics focuses on monogenic disorders, and their new study confirmed that they can fix the spelling errors in our DNA.
💉 New mRNA vaccines are being developed for cancer.
🌊 Some subsea cables can now sense perturbations and detect distortions or sabotage attempts.
Opportunities
If you’re at all interested in AI safety and alignment research, you should definitely check out MATS and consider applying. Many members of the Impact Labs community have gone through their program and they can attest that it’s unique and rewarding. Apply here by April 18th for their summer cohort.
“DataKind is looking for a values-driven Machine Learning Engineer who is ready to make a major impact on student graduation rates by building and maintaining machine learning pipelines to help us deliver on our next decade of data science solutions for positive social impact. If you’re a problem-solver eager to embrace challenges as opportunities, you’re a strong collaborator who delights in creating the infrastructure to enable data science, and you are a detail-oriented machine learning engineer committed to advancing equity, we want to bring you on board!”
The Gates Foundation is looking for program coordinators for their vaccine development initiative. “Our Global Health division harnesses advances in science and technology to save lives in poor countries. We focus on the health problems that have a major impact in developing countries but get too little attention and funding. Where tools exist, we support sustainable ways to improve their delivery. Where they don’t, we invest in research and development of new interventions, such as vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics.” The position is full-time and Seattle-based.
The Clinton Health Access Initiative is seeking a technical advisor for their malaria vector control program, based in Cambodia. “Countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) have committed to eliminating malaria. To achieve this, countries need to rapidly detect and effectively treat infections, to identify and aggressively target areas where malaria transmission persists, and to coordinate efforts closely to ensure movements of people and parasites do not jeopardize success. CHAI is supporting malaria programs in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Papua New Guinea to strengthen surveillance systems, devise targeted and evidence-based plans, successfully implement these plans, scale-up case management and vector control interventions in high-risk and hard-to-reach populations, and coordinate activities regionally.”
What We’re Watching
A startup in Boston just produced 1 ton of steel using only electricity for heat - that represents a big milestone.
In other energy milestone news, BYD announced charge speeds of up to 2km per second for their new chargers and vehicles. That’s huge.
Way to go Australia for subsidizing reproductive health drugs and procedures (like IVF) for hundreds of thousands of women and saving thousands of dollars for women with endometriosis.
The ripple effects of Trump’s rhetoric on immigration has tech workers rethinking their futures.
Quotes We Love
“It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.”
- Seneca
That’s all for now! See you in your inbox in another two weeks! ❤️