1. Daily Problems Brilliant.org is currently my site of choice for daily brain teasers.
  2. Six Degrees of Separation at Burning Man by Ziv Epstein, Micah Epstein, Christian Almenar and Mauel Cebrian for Nautilus. How scientists used Burning Man as a testing ground for scalable cooperation. 
  3. The World’s Biggest Chip is Bigger than an iPad and Will Help Train AI by Martin Giles for MIT Technology Review. Cerebras Systems’ new semiconductor has 1.2 trillion transistors, making it 57x bigger than Nvidia’s largest GPU, with 3000x the on-chip memory.
  4. An Analysis of WeChat’s Realtime Image Filtering in Chats by Jeffrey Knockel and Ruohan Xiong at Citizenlab. A technical look at how WeChat applies real-time automatic censorship on images posted in 1on1 and group chats, mainly regarding political events.
  5. Facebook’s Ad Data May Put Millions of Gay People at Risk by Chris Stokel-Walker for New Scientist. Facebook allows ad targeting based on interest in LGBTQ topics – even in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality can be punished with death. 
  6. Your Brain on Metaphors by Michael Chorost. Some evidence supports the idea that our brain takes metaphors quite literally – “Kicking the bucket” activates brain regions associated with motor control, “Having a rough time” connects to texture. However: The more established a metaphor, the less it links to the original connection.
  7. Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech by Nitasha Tiku for Wired. Google’s culture of free thinking has led to innovations like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, but also to an internal clash between of values, ideologies, and political standpoints. 
  8. Beyond Techno-Orientalism: An Interview with Logic Magazine’s Xiaowei R Wang by Josh Feola for Radii China. Western reporting on technological developments in China are often distorted by an “outside-in” perspective. Wang shares how she perceives the media misrepresents events in China. 
  9. Meet the Neuroscientist Shattering the Myth of the Gendered Brain by Genevieve Fox for The Guardian.  How much of our thinking is determined by our sex? Rippon argues that its less the a matter of male and female brains and more one of social conditioning and (therefore) experiences: “Brains reflect the lives they have lived, not just the sex of their owners.”
  10. Inside DeepMind’s Epic Mission to Solve Science’s Trickiest Problem by Greg Williams for Wired. With the increasing availability of genomic data sets, DeepMind is ready to tackle the challenge of protein folding. In a first competition aimed to predict the structure of proteins from sequences of their amino acids, the AlphaFold project was already in the lead.