Double the Amount of Muscle Mass by Deleting a Gene
***The Real Future Fair is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. Go get some tickets.***
1. Clay Shirky looks into Xiaomi and the state of the Chinese technology industry.
"When WeChat, a Chinese messaging app like WhatsApp, added advertisements to its service, its parent company Tencent charged advertisers 40 yuan (about $6.50) per thousand users an ad reached. Tencent also gave advertisers the opportunity to specify that their ads would only reach people in Shanghai and Beijing, at more than triple the price. Simply being a WeChat user in one of those cities is a good proxy for wealth and splashy spending habits."
+ Excerpt from the book Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream.
2. Scientists genome-edited a super dog to be more muscular and called him Hercules.
"They created a beagle with double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a gene called myostatin. The dogs have 'more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications,' Liangxue Lai, a researcher with the Key Laboratory of Regenerative Biology at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, said in an e-mail."
3. Mapping the Internet's secret cables.
"The information Barford is talking about is the location of the long-haul fiber optic cables that carry Internet data around the country, plus the hubs that transfer data between cables. Like other forms of infrastructure that have been laid by a patchwork of private firms (cell networks, phone lines, even railroads), a comprehensive map of the Internet is hard to come by. Companies like AT&T, Verizon, Windstream, and Level 3 have installed most of the equipment. They tend to keep their infrastructure investments quiet, so that their competitors don’t immediately know what new services they plan to offer or what markets they’re going after."
4. A gorgeous set of collections from Oxford.
"The Bodleian Libraries’ collections are extraordinary and significant—both from a scholarly point of view and as material that has an historic and aesthetic richness that holds value for non-academic users. Each year the Libraries serve more than 65,000 readers, over 40% of them from beyond the University, while its critically-acclaimed exhibitions attract almost 100,000 visitors annually. In an effort to make portions of our collections open to a wide variety of users from around the world for learning, teaching and research, the Bodleian Libraries have been digitizing library content for nearly twenty years. The result is over 120,000 freely available digital objects and at least another 1.5 million images awaiting release."
5. Real-time video manipulation is getting wild.
"From a paper presented at SIGGRAPH Asia by a group from Stanford, a system for tracking the facial expressions from one person and putting them on the face of a second person in real-time. This is crazy."
On Fusion: Meet Paul and Amy Strater. Their son pissed off a hacker. And then it all started happening.
1. recode.com 2. technologyreview.com 3. bostonglobe.com 4. digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk 5. kottke.org
Double the Amount of Muscle Mass by Deleting a Gene