Claudio Buttice

For decades, agriculture has tried to find new ways to strike a balance between the necessity of protecting crops from pests and the environmental and ecosystem damage caused by pesticides. Traditional chemical pesticides often end up damaging many other species beyond those they specifically target, leading to unintended damage to human and animal health. This scattershot approach may finally have a solution as testing begins on a highly targeted strategy: RNA-based pesticides.

When it comes to technology, the human mind knows no boundaries when it comes to creative solutions to traditional problems. Storing data is no different, and over time, many different solutions have been engineered to pack more and more data in smaller and more portable items. Today’s technology is advancing, and now we are used to choosing between a desktop hard drive, a portable hard drive, a USB stick — having said goodbye to CD-Rs and floppy disks (remember them?).

One of the most pressing issues of modern media is the terrifying prospect of saying something that could offend someone, some category, some protected group, or just something. The process of sacrificing any form of freedom in communication is also slowly creeping into machines. Generative AI is steering towards a neutered language where many words and even concepts are entirely cut out from any conversation.