Say hello to our new podcast Mission Control Center
Because we know how busy you are, we are launching a podcast version of the newsletter from Mission Control Center, so that you can listen to it while you work.
Every week, our editor Miquel Morales will walk you through the
most relevant tech news and share all sorts of career development advice.
We’ll soon be having interviews with experts in all areas of IT, so make sure to follow us every week!
AI cracks half-century-old problem
After having proven
its worth with programs capable of beating humans at various games, the
artificial intelligence group DeepMind has reached a major scientific
milestone.
The group’s latest program, AlphaFold, has finally solved a
problem that had kept researchers baffled for 50 years: predicting how proteins
fold into 3D shapes.
Protein folding patterns, which are unique to each protein and
extremely complex, could until now only be unravelled through years-long lab
work. It took AlphaFold just a few weeks to learn how to predict folding with
greater accuracy than humans.
The breakthrough paves the way for the design of more powerful drugs and vaccines to fight diseases, as well as for the production of more nutritious crops.
The key technologies for 2021
A new global IEEE
survey of CTOs and CIOs reveals the top technologies and challenges for
organisations in the upcoming year.
While overcoming the effects of the pandemic remains the biggest
concern amongst technology leaders, AI and machine learning are cited as the
game-changing tech trends for 202. Next-gen 5G solutions and IoT follow close
behind.
Manufacturing, healthcare, financial services and education are
expected to be the industries in which technology will play a more pivotal
role.
One positive finding is that an overwhelming majority of IT leaders (92%) believe their company is now more prepared to respond to a catastrophic and sudden event like a natural disaster or a data breach.
Mac minis are coming to AWS
Amazon Web Services
kickstarted its yearly re:Invent conference with a big revelation: the company
is bringing macOS to the AWS cloud.
AWS will be making available Mac mini instances for developers
to create apps directly on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
It is a significant announcement for devs, who now can run Xcode
and Swift tools in the cloud without having to maintain and patch custom-built
Mac machines.
However, the Mac minis being currently deployed in AWS data centres are still sporting previous-generation Intel chips. The company will be rolling out the new Apple-silicon machines early next year.
