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Comment by ccity88 | Hacker News Reader

So just of the top of my head, things that have made mainstream news in the past ~week;

- A Small molecule oral cancer drug kills 100% of solid tumors across 70 evaluated cancer types - LK-99, potentially the first ever room temperature ambient pressure superconductor (unverified as of yet)

Things are looking up

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Don't forget growing teeth:

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/08/05/a-drug-that-makes-t...

odontogenesis is very fascinating... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_tooth_development

even after reading a bunch of articles about many aspects, the cell organisation to produce mineral rods support as scaffold for mineral/enamel surface layers is .. really something

Had teeth growing in petri dishes a while ago; I wonder what happened to those…

That story has been around for at least a decade now.

2011 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110330101038.h...

2017 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/damaged-teeth-reg...

Growing teeth likely would improve peoples lives more than anything else mentioned.

Also need a way do deal with receding gums that doesn't involve hellraiser inspired grafting, sticking, or pinholes.

Rapamycin apparently helps with gun recession

What about the record high ocean temperatures and antartic ice loss?

Measurement errors of course...\s

you win some you lose some

Now we can replace the ice with blood vessels.

At this rate of change anything twenty years out is essentially impossible to estimate.

There are commercial companies working on Fusion power. We may have electrified everything by then, we may have painted the dessert white or we may be totally doomed.

if the super conductor thing fans out we might not even need to wait for fusion to go mainstream to electrify everything. That tech could take 10,000x the efficiency of batteries.

robots building robots installing solar panels.

They forgot to add the “for humans” postfix.

Are you talking about the City of Hope discovery: AOH1996 inhibitor of PCNA?

What's this cancer drug you're discussing?

It's like that every week tbh, you forgot the alzheimer cure (in mice models) and the new revolutionary battery (that we will never hear about again)

> the new revolutionary battery (that we will never hear about again

Which is a cute thing to say if you're totally ignorant of the substantial progress being made, in fundamental research and manufacturing methods, of batteries and energy storage systems every week.

More and more, I'm starting to believe that we are witnessing one of two phenomena. Either we're observing an emergence, in which humanity is making quantum leaps in scientific advancement, or indeed, some form of intelligence is subtly guiding us toward solutions for humanity's most pressing problems.

Why would you believe that an intelligence is pushing humanity that way?

For instance, LK-99 was discovered in 1999. Why would an intelligence who pushed someone to make this tell them to study it for decades and to patent it before they made a publication?

Used to be a brilliant mind could learn all there was known about science. Now its too much, and our minds have a hard time grasping what millions of minds working on a million problems for untold hours can accomplish.

imagine if ai basically ended human labor we all had universal basic income and everyone was essentially advised to become an artist or scientist to essentially work on elevating our knowledge. imagine if every starving kid or adult in 3rd world countries were scientists.

I mean with AI we might not need all those brains on problems but it couldn't hurt to have that large of a scientifically educated body .

Or the alternative: after several years of media coverage almost exclusively being about either the pandemic effects, covid, layoffs, or wars; we've gone "back to normal" by relying on these revolutionary studies/concepts that struggle to ever make it to full availability for clickbait.

yes, some form of intelligence is leading this. it's not aliens or God though, just artificial intelligence grown in a lab.

I don't think those are your only two possibilities. The much more mundane answer is just that this isn't really that different from most years. There's usually a couple of seemingly "big" breakthroughs every year. It's just that the past few years have had most of them overshadowed by negative clickbait news even moreso than normal.

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