The main segment of today's show is what is known in the industry as a huge bummer. Liberty University is facing a lawsuit filed by 12 women who allege that they were sexually assaulted, and that their assault was handled horribly by the University. They also allege that Liberty's code of conduct made it more likely that they would be assaulted. It's grim, but it's a necessary story to cover and Andrew has the full legal breakdown for us. In our first segment, we hear from some people who are on the ground at the Texas legislature.
Beaudette cut his teeth in the days of AOL chat rooms, then became an early Wikipedian. More recently he worked at Reddit, where his team of ten professional community managers supported 300 million monthly unique visitors. Before his recent promotion to VP, Beaudette was on the Trust and Safety team at Stack Overflow.
For more detail on his experience, check out his LinkedIn here.
California is in the middle of a terrible drought. The rivers are running low, and most of its farmers are getting very little water this year from the state's reservoirs and canals. And yet, farming is going on as usual.
NPR food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles explains how farmers have been using wells and underground aquifers to water their crops. But that's all set to change. California is about to put dramatic limits on the amount of water farmers can pump from their wells, and people have some pretty strong feelings about it.
A data leak reveals thousands of potential targets of digital surveillance using software from Israeli firm NSO Group. Targets include reporters, activists, and allegedly some leading government officials. Julian Sanchez and Patrick Eddington comment.
The City of Chicago’s brand new ‘Strategic Plan for Transportation'’ aims to transform mobility and access “...in the wake of the pandemic, economic, and racial justice…”
It's still unclear who is responsible for planning and funding the assassination of Haiti's president Jovenel Moïse earlier this month. But violence and unrest in the country has been ramping up for months.
The United Nations says that over the last six weeks nearly 15,000 people have been forced from their homes in Port-au-Prince. NPR's Jason Beaubien reported the story of one family who fled in early June.
Moïse's death left a power vacuum that's been filled by Interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry, a 71-year-old neurosurgeon. NPR International Correspondent Carrie Kahn has been tracking his attempt to rebuild the Haitian government.
And Jean Eddy Saint Paul, a professor at Brooklyn College, explains why the turmoil in Haiti has been decades in the making.
Mehdi Hasan joins Jon Favreau to discuss Joe Biden’s town hall in Cincinnati, the Republican intra-party battle over vaccines and the 1/6 commission, and Tom Brady’s devastating takedown of Donald Trump. Then, Equis Research co-founder Stephanie Valencia talks to Jon about immigration and other issues on the minds of Latino voters.
On this episode of “The Breakdown,” host NLW dissects a highly-anticipated discussion between Cathie Wood, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk at yesterday’s “The B Word” conference, including:
Wood’s predictions of deflation rather than inflation
Dorsey’s unwavering belief in bitcoin as the internet’s native money
Musk reveals he, Tesla, and SpaceX all hold bitcoin
Wood, one of the earliest Wall Street investors to get into crypto, has been through enough market cycles to have a nuanced understanding of the space. She revived one of her long-standing themes of Bitcoin’s rules-based monetary policy, especially relevant now as central banks operate on unbounded monetary policy. She also touched on recent inflationary concerns, specifically ARK’s belief that deflationary concerns are likely to emerge in the long-term.
Twitter and Square CEO Dorsey has been a consistent ally to Bitcoin. Dorsey highlighted a few of his projects dedicated to a more decentralized future, including Square’s upcoming self-custody hardware wallet and Bluesky, a project to develop an open and decentralized social media platform.
The controversial Musk's contributions to the discussion garnered mixed reactions from the community. Most notably was his admission that outside of Tesla and SpaceX shares, bitcoin is his biggest investment. Additionally, his now-famous statement “I pump but I don’t dump” was backed by his revelation that SpaceX, in addition to Tesla, held BTC. He affirmed the three have never sold their BTC holdings.
While Wood recruits institutional investors and Dorsey builds tools to improve the space, what is Musk’s role in helping or hindering Bitcoin?
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NYDIG, the institutional-grade platform for Bitcoin, is making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, to offer Bitcoin. Learn more at NYDIG.com/NLW.
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The Breakdown is written, produced by and features NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Adam B. Levine is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsor is “Razor Red” by Sam Barsh. Image credit: Screenshot from The B Word, modified by CoinDesk.
Back in November it was announced that an AI company called DeepMind had essentially cracked the problem of protein folding – that is they had managed to successfully predict the 3D structures of complex biochemical molecules by only knowing the 2D sequence of amino acids from which they are made.
They are not the only team to use machine learning to approach the vast amounts of data involved. But last week, they released the source code and methodology behind their so called AlphaFold2 tool. Today, they are publishing via a paper in the journal Nature, a simply huge database of predicted structures including most of the human proteome and 20 other model species such as yes, mice. The possibilities for any biochemists are very exciting.
As DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis tells Roland Pease, they partnered with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory to make over 350,000 protein predictions available to researchers around the world free of charge and open sourced. Dr Benjamin Perry of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative told us how it may help in the search for urgently needed drugs for difficult diseases such as Chagas disease. Prof John McGeehan of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at Portsmouth University in the UK is on the search for enzymes that might be used to digest otherwise pollutant plastics. He received results (that would have taken years using more traditional methods) back from the AlphaFold team in just a couple of days.
Prof Julia Gog of Cambridge University is a biomathematician who has been modelling Covid epidemiology and behaviour. In a recent paper in Royal Society Open Science, she and colleagues wonder whether the vaccination strategy of jabbing the most vulnerable in a population first, rather than the most gregarious or mobile, is necessarily the optimal way to protect them. Should nations still at an early stage in vaccine rollout consider her model?
And did you know that elephants can hear things up to a kilometre away through their feet? And that sometimes they communicate by bellowing and rumbling such the ground shakes? Dr Beth Mortimer of Oxford University has been planting seismic detectors in savannah in Kenya to see if they can tap into the elephant messaging network, to possibly help conservationists track their movements.
Image: Protein folding
Credit: Nicolas_/iStock/Getty Images
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producers: Alex Mansfield and Samara Linton
How animals make us smarter – we thought you might like to hear our brand new episode. It’s about a robotic arm inspired by an elephant’s trunk.
For more, search for 30 Animals That Made Us Smarter wherever you get your podcasts.
#30Animals
