Smart Gel.

Swept away.

“If I could only open one thing each morning it would be John Ellis’s News Items newsletter.” — Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.

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1. Tal Feldman and Jonathan Feldman:

We’re nowhere near ready for a world in which artificial intelligence can create a working virus, but we need to be — because that’s the world we’re now living in.

In a remarkable paper released this month, scientists at Stanford University showed that computers can design new viruses that can then be created in the lab. How is that possible? Think of ChatGPT, which learned to write by studying patterns in English. The Stanford team used the same idea on the fundamental building block of life, training “genomic language models” on the DNA of bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria but not humans — to see whether a computer could learn their genetic grammar well enough to write something new.

Turns out it could. The AI created novel viral genomes, which the researchers then built and tested on a harmless strain of E. coli. Many of them worked. Some were even stronger than their natural counterparts, and several succeeded in killing bacteria that had evolved resistance to natural bacteriophages.

The scientists proceeded with appropriate caution. They limited their work to viruses that can’t infect humans and ran experiments under strict safety rules. But the essential fact is hard to ignore: Computers can now invent viable — even potent — viruses. (Sources: washingtonpost.com, arxiv.org, technologyreview.com, et alia)

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2. In a first-of-its-kind experiment, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania brought quantum networking out of the lab and onto commercial fiber-optic cables using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that powers today’s web. Reported in Science, the work shows that fragile quantum signals can run on the same infrastructure that carries everyday online traffic. The team tested their approach on Verizon’s campus fiber-optic network. The Penn team’s tiny “Q-chip” coordinates quantum and classical data and, crucially, speaks the same language as the modern web. That approach could pave the way for a future “quantum internet,” which scientists believe may one day be as transformative as the dawn of the online era. (Sources: doi.org, blog.seas.upenn.edu)

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3. China is making and installing factory robots at a far greater pace than any other country, with the United States a distant third, further strengthening China’s already dominant global role in manufacturing. There were more than two million robots working in Chinese factories last year, according to a report released Thursday by the International Federation of Robotics, a nonprofit trade group for makers of industrial robots. Factories in China installed nearly 300,000 new robots last year, more than the rest of the world combined, the report found. American factories installed 34,000. While Chinese factories have been using more robots, they have also gotten better at making them. (Source: nytimes.com)

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4. Google DeepMind:

Most daily tasks require contextual information and multiple steps to complete, making them notoriously challenging for robots today.

For example, if a robot was asked, “Based on my location, can you sort these objects into the correct compost, recycling and trash bins?” it would need to search for relevant local recycling guidelines on the internet, look at the objects in front of it and figure out how to sort them based on those rules — and then do all the steps needed to completely put them away. So, to help robots complete these types of complex, multi-step tasks, we designed two models that work together in an agentic framework.

Our embodied reasoning model, Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, orchestrates a robot’s activities, like a high-level brain. This model excels at planning and making logical decisions within physical environments. It has state-of-the-art spatial understanding, interacts in natural language, estimates its success and progress, and can natively call tools like Google Search to look for information or use any third-party user-defined functions.