TLDR 2021-03-22

New EV 🚗, airport for flying cars 🚁, prehistoric shark stingray 🦈

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Big Tech & Startups

Sidekick Browser wants to be a productivity-honed ‘work OS’ on Chromium (7 minute read)

Sidekick Browser is taking aim at the productivity market by adding a productivity-focused layer on top of Chromium to create a 'work OS'. It features in-browser apps, restorable browsing sessions, a cross-app search function, AI-based tab suspension, and more. Sidekick comes with its own privacy tech, and the company promises to never sell user data. Chrome extensions are supported.

This tiny car beat Tesla’s Model 3 in January and February (2 minute read)

The Hong Guang Mini EV outsold Tesla's Model 3 in January and February. The vehicle gets roughly 106 miles per charge, reaching a top speed of about 62 miles per hour. It can seat four people, and the rear seats fold down for more storage space. An image of the vehicle is available in the article.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Researchers Successfully Store ‘Data’ Inside DNA of Living Bacteria (2 minute read)

Researchers from Columbia University have successfully stored DNA inside of living bacteria by using CRISPR. The team recently encoded 72 bits of data into a population of bacteria cells, establishing a direct digital-to-biological data storage framework. DNA-encoded data lasts longer in living organisms and the information can even be passed onto the following generations.

World’s First Airport For Flying Cars And Drones Opens This Year (3 minute read)

Urban Air Port will build its first Air-One transport hub for autonomous delivery drones and electric flying cars in Coventry, UK. The facility will launch later this year and support delivery drone and air taxi technology, and it will eventually transport cargo and people across cities. Urban Air Port aims to install over 200 similar sites worldwide by 2025.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

CHIRP (GitHub Repo)

The CISA Hunt and Incident Response Program (CHIRP) is a forensic collection tool written in Python. It queries hosts for Indicators of Compromise and outputs the data in a JSON format for further analysis without modifying any system data.

GPT Neo (GitHub Repo)

GPT Neo is an implementation of model parallel GPT2 & GPT3-like models. It can scale up to and above GPT3 sizes using the mesh-tensorflow library. Pretrained models are available.
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Miscellaneous

Prehistoric "eagle shark" combined traits of sharks and rays (2 minute read)

Aquilolamna milarcae, also known as the eagle shark, was the ancestor of both the whale shark and the manta ray. The 93 million-year-old remains of the ancient shark were unearthed in Mexico in 2012. It was recently determined to be a new species. The specimen was likely an adolescent. It was 1.65 meters long, with a 1.9-meter wingspan. A 3-minute video that shows images of the shark and its fossils is available in the article.

“Expert” hackers used 11 0-days to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users (3 minute read)

Google researchers have discovered a team of advanced hackers who have exploited at least 11 0-day vulnerabilities over nine months. The hackers used compromised websites to infect fully patched devices running Windows, iOS, and Android. Google security researchers described the group as 'highly sophisticated'. While people should still keep their software updated and avoid suspicious websites, neither of those things would have helped the victims hacked by this group.
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