My reading of this is that they asked the system to redesign the PCB that was used in the i.MX 8M reference system-on-module. It looks like they take a parts list, a PCB shape, and a rough floorplan and pass that to their tool, which spits out a PCB design.
I could actually see myself using this tool, as someone who trained as an EE and still likes to tinker with electronics. It would be fun to just assemble a parts list and a rough layout and then receive a working electronic device a few weeks later with minimal work.
Hi, believe it or not, I have actually done what the authors were attempting. I used saliva rather than blood as a source of DNA and extracted it using a Qiagen kit.
My Nanopore flow cell had nearly every pore working from the start. So I would say that is not normal. Maybe it was stored incorrectly.
Do you have a write up somewhere? If not, it would be amazing if you wrote one!
I was planning on doing a similar thing (also with saliva) once I finished moving in and had a bit more time after conferences. (But, of course, I’d have to go through and actually figure out all of the mechanics and so on.)
Thanks for the kind words! I have not written it up but would like to. A word of warning: by trying to get into sequencing, I eventually burned through ~20k USD of student loans (still unpaid) with little to show. Nanopore sequencing also requires some specialized equipment (at least a micro centrifuge and micropipette and possibly more) which is not cheap.
For sure, I think it’d be fun to show it can be done under 5k or so, which would be close ish. Can probably get older equipment from university surplus, but yeah, these are the “things that need to get figured out” :)
Adding on: Claude also gave me the following line which was necessary to get the model weights to download from HF. This might be obvious for anyone familiar with HF but it helped me so sharing here!
I think the real story here might be the line below:
"Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year"
Seems a bit suspicious, no? What methodology change led to this result? How can a university that was previously not as well-regarded become the #3 in the country overnight?
Durham is the oxbridge reject university, and it’s a standard opener during freshers week to ask which college rejected them. Me, Corpus Christi Oxford reject, Durham alumnus.
What has seemingly happened here is that oxbridge have ramped up their intake of overseas students, who pay a vast sum compared to a U.K. student, thus pushing more U.K. talent to Durham, as you’ll always preferentially give the place to the kid paying six figures rather than the one on a state bursary.
Yes, and then when oxbridge reject you, you take your second choice, Durham. At any rate that’s how it worked 25 years ago, I think it’s much the same now.
My recollection from thirty years ago was a lot of people that were aiming for Oxford would have Durham as their backup plan. It's been hovering around there for a while although not so much in the the world tech people care about, for which Warwick and Imperial circle Cambridge far more closely.
There's a stereotype, possibly unfair but somewhat amusing, that Durham attracts some people who are less clever/bright than they and their families believe, who failed to get into Oxbridge despite expensive private education, personal tutors, every other privilege under the sun. Sometimes known as "rahs" possibly? ;
What's the provenance of this "30 places year-on-year" assertion anyways? (TFA won't load on my end.)
The Times filed Durham 7th @ 859 in FY24[1], 5th @ 898 in FY25[2]. They're now 3rd @ 906 for the current FY.
P.S. Chuckling at the perception that a university which ranked top 10 for at least the past decade being characterized as "not as well-regarded"...strikes me as indefensibly elitist.
> Durham University improved by 30 places year-on-year in its students’ evaluation of teaching quality, which was the main driver in securing its third place in the overall university league table
Which isn't quite the same as 30 places in ranking as OP suggests, however I agree with their point that moving 30 places on that metric could be fairly suspicious.
For example - when I was at university in the UK we got a speech telling us basically that we were going to get sent a survey from the times, and the higher we ranked the university, the higher the universities ranking would be, and that would make our degree more valuable. If the main reason they jumped from 7th to 3rd could be a metric that is potentially 'influence-able' by the university, it could be more of a change in comms-strategy than actual university quality.
The US culls 350 million male chicks per year, per this article. Wikipedia says billions of male chicks are culled worldwide, which seems plausible when accounting for EU, China, India, SA, SEA etc. The citation on Wikipedia looks legit to me as well.
Edit: Wikipedia does indeed cite several different figures, including a "billions" number which does not seem plausible. Thanks monster_truck for pointing this out, and apologies for my misunderstanding!
Male chicks are not feed nor raised but rather fed into a device quite similar to a wood chipper shortly áfter birth. You can read more about it here [1] or find some quite graphic videos on YouTube. This is addressed in the article:
"In polling, only 10% of Americans correctly identify that male chicks in the egg industry are killed shortly after hatching. A plurality mistakenly believe these chicks are raised for meat, and another 10% even think that male chickens can lay eggs. Most people are surprised, and often disturbed, to learn the truth: in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year, typically by methods such as maceration (being ground up alive)."
There was also that time when a milk company wrote the names of the cows who produced the milk on the cartons and some feminist complained that all the names were female.
One of the Minecraft mods makes you actually do the video game equivalent (thus not over the correct time period) of how we actually get milk. Instead of just right click on any cow with a bucket (like vanilla Minecraft) that mod requires you to find a boy cow and a girl cow, ensure they're both happy (well fed, no nearby predators etc.), and after a short period nature takes its course and you get a baby cow. Next, steal the baby cow, you can kill it for food or just move it to somewhere mum can't reach it. She's recently given birth so her body will make milk but now there's no baby to drink it, so you can steal the milk.
I think 10% of people probably just say things for their own internal amusement. I have to think there's some overlap with the people who draw penises or write or write "jokes" in bathroom stalls.
