Hi there!
Hope you’ve been having a pleasant week thus far. We know Slack sure did with all the attention they’re getting from Salesforce.
We’ve got some great reads for you this week, so lets jump right in.
Predicting the 3D structure of a protein after it undergoes folding has been a 50-year-old enigma in Computational Biology. One of the reasons behind this is because the number of ways a protein could theoretically fold before settling into its final 3D structure is astronomical. Yet proteins fold spontaneously all the time in nature. DeepMind claims to have now solved this using its AI AphaFold. There are some critics of the actual achievement. Protein Folding prediction can have a major impact on our understanding of diseases like cancer and curing them. Here’s MIT’s Technology Review talking about it.
If you’ve ever watched ‘Back to the Future’ then you are definitely acquainted with the famous “self-lacing” shoe created by Nike for the movie. Almost 40 years later, Nike took on the task of turning this concept into reality. Read more about the secret underground lab where Nike developed these futuristic shoes.
Turn Signal is a Blog by designer Casper Kessels where he specifically writes about the design of Cars their internal interfaces, aesthetic choices etc. You will find pieces on comparatives between a modern Merc and an all electric Lucid, Waymo’s use of Design to establish trust among others.
Linda Zhang, who writes at productlessons.xyz shares her thoughts around the fundamental fallacies around asking customers what they think about your product idea. She further drills into propagated absolutisms like “the consumer doesn’t know/knows what she wants” and concepts centred around preliminary research to test your hypothesis. Is it wise to ask your friend for her honest advice on an idea you are excited about And take that feedback at face value? Maybe not, Linda argues.
Engineering student Carvey Ehren Maigue wins his first ever James Dyson Award in the global sustainability category for his AuReus system, in which waste crops are turned into solar panels.
The World bank looked at World Development Indicators in 2020. In this specific case, public health amid the pandemic of 2020 across different nations and socioeconomic classes. All this packaged in some highly informative data visualisations.
Teams in Google Design working on Maps discuss in detail the minimalistic approach of a new colour system that brought down Maps’ 700 colours to a 25 tone palette. Counter-intuitively this minimalism resulted in better representations, higher accessibility and more aligned to Google’s brand.
From our own Canvs editorial, our designers talk about content as the secret sauce in any product and a few things to keep in mind while devising your product’s content.
Check out this fantastically simple article covering some fairly high level usability issues that Tesla deals with in order to make the Model 3 more usable, desirable and ultimately, supremely safe.
A newly surfaced Microsoft patent filing describes a system for deriving and predicting “overall quality scores” for meetings using data such as body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and number of people in the meeting.
SpaceX may attempt the next test flight of its super-heavy launch vehicle Starship prototype rocket as early as Wednesday, CEO Elon Musk shared on Twitter. The flight will be the company’s most ambitious test of Starship yet (estimated chances of success being 1/3 apparently), as SpaceX is aiming to reach about 15km altitude followed by a stable landing around the launch site with Starship prototype Serial Number 8, or SN8.
And that’s the lot. Thanks for checking out what we had to share with you this week. Catch up with you next Wednesday!
