#150 - TechCongress Applications, Dissolving Plastics, and 6 Years of the Newsletter!
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Impact Update
We can’t believe it, but it’s the 150th edition of our newsletter! That means we’ve been running this for over 6 years, which is absolutely wild to us! 🎉
If you have a few moments, we’d really appreciate your feedback to help us make the newsletter as relevant and useful to you as possible! Tell us what you want to see more or less of, and definitely use the form to let us know if the newsletter has led to anything big in your life!
In the News
270M people in India have been lifted out of extreme poverty over the last decade, even as the benchmark moved to $3/d.
A quarter of all electricity produced in the US came from renewables in Q1 of 2025.
Scientists at Stanford have developed a new method for removing blood clots for stroke victims, and it represents a huge advancement in potential treatments.
Engineers in Japan have invented a new form of biodegradable plastic that dissolves in seawater.
Detecting eDNA (traces of DNA left behind in an environment) can help us track wildlife movement and the courses of invasive species. But it can also be used for surveillance…
A new neural net trained on black hole data can reproduce images of what they look like, and they’re stunning.
Opportunities
Applications for TechCongress are open until July 2nd! “The Congressional Innovation Fellowship places technologists in Congressional offices to provide expertise on technology policy. The fellowship aims to bridge the gap between the tech industry and government, ensuring informed decision-making on issues like cybersecurity, privacy, and emerging technologies. We are recruiting for up to 20 fellows for the January 2026 Fellowship: 10 fellows to serve in Democratic offices and 10 to serve in Republican offices.”
“Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal, Mila brings together researchers specializing in artificial intelligence, and more specifically in machine learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning. Recognized worldwide for its important contributions to the field of deep learning, Mila has particularly distinguished itself in language modeling, machine translation, object recognition and generative models. We are looking for highly motivated interns to work on cutting-edge research projects. This is an exciting opportunity to explore the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. You will be working with state-of-the-art foundational models and the newest AI techniques.” Apply here.
Giving What We Can is looking for a growth marketer to join their team. “Help transform global philanthropy and make a significant impact by joining Giving What We Can (GWWC) as our Growth Marketer. GWWC’s community of over 10,000 pledgers now donate over $50 million together yearly to highly effective charities.”
Cohere has a bunch of internship openings, and they have openings in other departments for full-time roles as well. We like Cohere because they’re one of the few companies that bridges enterprise-grade product development with a serious commitment to safety and security. If you think we should believe otherwise, reply to this email and share your thoughts.
The Alan Turing Institute keeps a network of internship opportunities that are worth checking out. Add yourself to the list to be considered for upcoming openings.
The Institute for Law and AI is a think tank that researches and advises on the legal challenges posed by artificial intelligence. “The Research Scholar (EU law) program is designed to support the career development of AI law & policy researchers and practitioners, while offering an opportunity to do high-impact work.” Apply here.
What We’re Watching
Some of the contributors at Reboot offered their thoughts on the breakup between Musk and Trump. One telling excerpt from jacob sujin kuppermann:
Gone are the days where we — critics, activists, attempted steerers of the course of technology towards more progressive ends — had to point to secret deals and shadowy machinations of the market in order to make our case that techno-capital had a pernicious influence on the broader political systems of this country and this planet. Now, they make the connection in increasingly literal ways.
Using lipid nanoparticles in combination with new mRNA techniques, researchers in Australia are getting HIV to come out of hiding within cells
This piece is a fascinating dive into the world of deep sea exploration.
Harvard is releasing ~250B tokens of text from their libraries for LLM training.
Rest of World shows us what is overlooked in the AI “race” between the US and China.
Quotes We Love
“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
- Lloyd Alexander
That’s all for now! See you in your inbox in another two weeks, and don’t forget to fill out the feedback form! ❤️