Gene editing is able to cure sickle cell disease, aka thalassemia, in a remarkable application of CRISPR technology. CC-licensed photo by scooterdmu on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Neatly edited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO • The Verge

Alex Heath and Nilay Patel:

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Sam Altman’s surprise move to Microsoft after his shock firing at OpenAI isn’t a done deal. He and co-founder Greg Brockman are still willing to return to OpenAI if the remaining board members who fired him step aside, multiple sources tell The Verge.

The promised mass exodus of virtually every OpenAI employee — including board member and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who led the initial move to depose Altman! — means that there is more pressure on the board than ever, with only two of the three remaining members needing to flip. Altman posted on X that “we are all going to work together some way or other,” which we are told is meant to indicate that the fight continues.

Altman, former president Brockman, and the company’s investors are still trying to find a graceful exit for the board, say multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation. The sources characterized the hiring announcement by Microsoft, which needed to have a resolution to the crisis before the stock market opened on Monday, as a “holding pattern.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment.

After Altman was suddenly fired on Friday, negotiations with the board to potentially bring him back reached a stalemate.

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It’s still all up in the air. At the time of compilation, about 95% of OpenAI’s staff had signed an open letter basically telling the OpenAI board they’re idiots. Among the signatories was Sutskever, which is the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen: signing a letter saying two-days-ago-you is an idiot.

Ben Thompson points out that Microsoft will either acquire OpenAI’s staff, or the company. Big winner: Microsoft. Satya Nadella, its CEO, says the oversight of OpenAI needs to change (perhaps put its biggest investor, in effect Microsoft, on the board?). And an analysis of the boards of not-for-profits (such as OpenAI) says “their governance is generally abysmal”.

Plus (at time of compilation) we still don’t know precisely why Altman was fired.
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Portugal just ran on 100% renewable energy for six days • JOE.co.uk

Joseph Loftus:

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Portugal has reportedly broke a record for energy production after going six days relying entirely on renewable energy.

This apparently includes everything from electrical applianes in home and work, all were running on either wind, hydro, or solar power for six days straight.

Between 4:00AM on 31 October and 9:00AM on 6 November, the nation of ten million relied on only renewable energy, as 1102 GWh was generated.

Hugo Costa, the individual who runs EDP Renewables, the country’s renewable arm of the state utility, said: “The gas plants were there, waiting to dispatch energy, should it be needed. It was not, because the wind was blowing; it was raining a lot. And we were producing with a positive impact to the consumers because the prices have dropped dramatically, almost to zero.”

The news comes as many nations across Europe attempt to hit the Paris Agreement’s climate goals by 2050.

When 2050 finally comes around, nations need not only run via renewable energy for six days, but all year round.

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Not so sure about that last sentence. “Net zero” means what it says: net, not totally, zero.

As a comparison, the UK’s electricity system uses an average of 715GWh per day; Portugal seems to consume about 184GWh per day. In the UK, wind generates about 10-15GW, or 240-360GWh per day. It’s just a question of scaling up.
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Apple plans to equip MacBooks with in-house cellular modems • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

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Apple has reportedly been working on its own modem since 2018, as it seeks to move away from Qualcomm’s component currently used in iPhones. The timeframe for launching the modem has slipped several times and is now expected to be ready around 2026, and Gurman now hears that Apple has plans for the chip appearing in other Apple devices further down the line.

Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that Apple’s custom technology aspirations include integrating an in-house modem into its system-on-a-chip (SoC), which would eventually see the launch of MacBooks with built-in cellular connectivity.

Gurman says Apple will “probably need two or three additional years to get that chip inside cellular versions of the Apple Watch and iPad – and the Mac, once the part is integrated into the company’s system-on-a-chip.”

Apple has explored the possibility of developing MacBooks with cellular connectivity in the past. Indeed, the company reportedly considered launching a MacBook Air with 3G connectivity, but former CEO Steve Jobs said in 2008 that Apple decided against it, since it would take up too much room in the case. An integrated SoC would solve that problem.

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At least Marco Arment and Casey Liss will be happy. (They’ve wanted modems in laptops for ages. Amusingly, in the early days of the internet, laptops did come with modems: it was how you got online.)

Apple won’t have wanted to use Qualcomm’s modems because Qualcomm charges a percentage of the product’s retail price. If Apple only uses Qualcomm’s patents, that’s a lot cheaper.
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The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars • The Conversation

Muhammad Rizwan Azhar and Waqas Uzair:

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Close to half (44%) of all Australian commuter trips are by car – and under 10km. Of Perth’s 4.2 million daily car trips, 2.8 are for distances of less than 2km.

This is common in wealthier countries. In the United States, a staggering 60% of all car trips cover less than 10km.

So what’s the best solution? You might think switching to an electric vehicle is the natural step. In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you – and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport – collectively known as electric micromobility – are cheaper to buy and run.

But it’s more than that: they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.

On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans and trucks.

But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day – about 1% of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

What about electric vehicles, you ask? After all, EVs have been heralded as a silver bullet for car emissions and air pollution in cities, as their tailpipe emissions are zero. If charged with renewable power, they get even greener.

But to see them as an inarguable good is an error. They are cleaner cars, but they are still cars, taking up space on the roads and requiring a lot of electricity to power them.

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Only thing is: what about when it rains?
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AI scam calls: This mom believes fake kidnappers cloned her daughter’s voice • CNN

Faith Karimi:

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Jennifer DeStefano’s phone rang one afternoon as she climbed out of her car outside the dance studio where her younger daughter Aubrey had a rehearsal. The caller showed up as unknown, and she briefly contemplated not picking up.

But her older daughter, 15-year-old Brianna, was away training for a ski race and DeStefano feared it could be a medical emergency. “Hello?” she answered on speaker phone as she locked her car and lugged her purse and laptop bag into the studio.

She was greeted by yelling and sobbing. “Mom! I messed up!” screamed a girl’s voice.

“What did you do?!? What happened?!?” DeStefano asked.

“The voice sounded just like Brie’s, the inflection, everything,” she told CNN recently. “Then, all of a sudden, I heard a man say, ‘Lay down, put your head back.’ I’m thinking she’s being gurnied off the mountain, which is common in skiing. So I started to panic.”

As the cries for help continued in the background, a deep male voice started firing off commands: “Listen here. I have your daughter. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m gonna pop her something so full of drugs. I’m gonna have my way with her then drop her off in Mexico, and you’re never going to see her again.”

DeStefano froze. Then she ran into the dance studio, shaking and screaming for help. She felt like she was suddenly drowning. After a chaotic, rapid-fire series of events that included a $1m ransom demand, a 911 call and a frantic effort to reach Brianna, the “kidnapping” was exposed as a scam. A puzzled Brianna called to tell her mother that she didn’t know what the fuss was about and that everything was fine.

But DeStefano, who lives in Arizona, will never forget those four minutes of terror and confusion – and the eerie sound of that familiar voice. “A mother knows her child,” she said later. “You can hear your child cry across the building, and you know it’s yours.”

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There’s a fair amount of doubt around this story: can AI voice copying really simulate screams, yelling, sobbing? Though free apps can clone a voice in a minute.

Generally, these sorts of calls are becoming common (or less uncommon) in the US, and of course the WhatsApp scams which don’t need voice are all over the place. Take Rob Leathern’s advice: work out a “safe word” for live calls, and a different one for a recording.
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Sickle-cell treatment created with gene editing wins UK approval • The New York Times

Gina Kolata:

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Regulators in Britain [last week] approved the first treatment derived from CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing method. Called Casgevy, the treatment is intended to cure sickle-cell disease and a related condition, beta thalassemia.

The manufacturers, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, based in Boston, and CRISPR Therapeutics, based in Switzerland, say about 2,000 patients in Britain with sickle-cell disease or beta thalassemia are expected to be eligible for the treatment.

The companies anticipate that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will approve Casgevy for sickle-cell patients in the United States in early December. The agency will decide on approval for beta thalassemia next year.

In late December, the FDA is expected to approve another sickle cell gene therapy by Bluebird Bio of Somerville, Mass. That treatment does not rely on gene editing, instead using a method that inserts new DNA into the genome.

Sickle-cell disease is caused by a defective gene that leads to the creation of abnormal hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component in red blood cells. The cells themselves become malformed, causing episodes of extreme pain. About 100,000 Americans, who are mostly Black and Hispanic, are believed to have the illness.

…Casgevy relies on CRISPR to nick the DNA, activating a gene that produces an alternative form of hemoglobin. To receive the sickle-cell treatment, patients in Britain must be at least 12 years old and have experienced repeated episodes of extreme pain.

There is no upper age limit, nor are patients excluded because they have suffered too much organ damage from sickle-cell disease, said Dr. David Altshuler, Vertex’s chief scientific officer.

But the patients must have no other options. Sickle-cell disease can be cured with a bone-marrow transplant, but few patients have compatible donors.

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Expensive, and there’s a (relatively) cheaper alternative – bone marrow transplant – but for that you need donors.
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US is seeking more than $4bn from Binance to end case • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Chris Strohm, Allyson Versprille and Olga Kharif:

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Negotiations between the Justice Department and Binance include the possibility that its founder Changpeng Zhao would face criminal charges in the US under an agreement to resolve the probe into alleged money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Zhao, also known as “CZ,” is residing in the United Arab Emirates, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US, but that doesn’t prevent him from coming voluntarily.

Binance didn’t respond to multiple emails and phone calls seeking comment. The Justice Department declined to comment.

An announcement could come as soon as the end of the month, though the situation remains fluid, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

The BNB cryptocurrency, a token native to Binance and the BNB Chain blockchain that was created by the exchange, rose as much as 8.5% to $266.42 after Bloomberg reported the negotiations.

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Incredible if a cryptocurrency exchange happened to have that sort of money lying around that actually belongs to it. However this is only the DoJ – the SEC filed suit in June alleging mishandling of customer funds, misleading investors and breaking securities rules. The DoJ complaint is about money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations. None of it is what you’d call minor.
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Global warming on track for 2.9ºC as greenhouse gases keep rising, UN says • FT

Kenza Bryan and Steven Bernard:

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The world is on track for a temperature rise of up to 2.9ºC above pre-industrial levels, a report by the UN environment programme has found, even assuming countries stick to their Paris agreement climate pledges.

UN chief António Guterres said that keeping the Paris goal of limiting the rise to ideally 1.5ºC and well below 2ºC would require “tearing out the poisoned root of the climate crisis: fossil fuels.”

“Otherwise, we’re simply inflating the lifeboats while breaking the oars,” he added. The world has already warmed by at least 1.1ºC.

Coming ahead of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 10 days, the latest UN report estimated the size of the gap between the emissions trajectory implied by climate pledges and the one needed to limit warming,

The level of greenhouse gas emissions stood at a new peak of 57.4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the UN emissions gap report noted, after rising 1.2% from 2021 to 2022.

Guterres referred to this “gap” as a “canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives, and broken records.”

Emissions cuts of 14bn tonnes or 28% are needed by 2030 to keep within 2ºC of warming, and a more ambitious reduction of more than 40% or 22bn tonnes is needed for the 1.5ºC threshold to be realistic.

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This is what we need a time machine for: to take us back so that we can get things on the right track much earlier. More wind farms, more nuclear power plants.
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Patrick Vallance contradicts Rishi Sunak’s evidence to Covid inquiry • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

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Rishi Sunak would almost certainly have known scientists were worried about his “eat out to help out” scheme during the pandemic, Sir Patrick Vallance has said, directly contradicting the prime minister’s evidence to the Covid inquiry.

In potentially damaging testimony, Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, said he would be “very surprised” if Sunak, then chancellor, had not learned about objections to his plan to help the hospitality industry.

Sunak had written to the inquiry saying he “[did] not recall any concerns about the scheme” being raised in ministerial meetings despite growing concerns that the discount plan could fuel the spread of the virus.

An extract from Vallance’s contemporaneous diary, in July 2020, provided evidence that Sunak also sought to push back against the scientists’ advice. In one economics-based meeting, Sunak said “it’s all about handling the scientists, not handling the virus”, the entry said.

Vallance said: “There were definitely periods when it was clear that the unwelcome advice we were giving was, as expected, not beloved, and that meant we had to work doubly hard to make sure that the science evidence and advice was being properly heard.”

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Philip Ball, a science writer, wrote a thread on this, beginning: “I can’t see how Eat Out To Help Out can’t now become a major scandal. Here was a scheme imposed by Sunak with zero scientific consultation, and which in Vallance’s words utterly reversed the public-health messaging: from “Keep distant from those outside your family” to “We’ll pay you to spend hours in an enclosed space with people you don’t know.” Sunak, he suggests, misled the inquiry over this.
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The cassette-tape revolution • The New Yorker

Jon Michaud:

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The compact audiocassette (to give it its full name) was conceived by Lou Ottens, the head of product development at the Dutch electronics company Phillips. One day, in the early nineteen-sixties, frustrated after “fiddling with that damn reel-to-reel” (as a colleague later recalled), an exasperated Ottens told his design team to create a version of their reel-to-reel tape that was small and portable, with the spools of tape contained inside a case. He wanted it to fit in a pocket and imagined it would be used by journalists and nature lovers (the latter to record birds and other outdoor sounds). Phillips introduced its new cassette system in 1963 and the immediate response was underwhelming. Before long, however, imitations of their compact cassette player began cropping up across the globe, most frequently in Japan.

Ottens then made a decision that helped boost the format. To promote standardization of the cassette, Phillips waived royalties, allowing anyone to license the design for free as long as they adhered to the company’s quality-control standards. This avoided the kind of schism that videotape would face during the VHS-Betamax war and insured that the Phillips cassette would be the dominant design. By the end of the sixties, eighty-five different manufacturers were producing cassette players, with sales of 2.5 million units. By 1983, cassettes were outselling LPs.

The ascent of the cassette caused a major freak-out among record-company executives. Nearly anyone who has ever bought vinyl will be familiar with the cassette-and-crossbones image that was for many years printed on record sleeves, accompanied by the dire warning: “Home taping is killing music.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the recording industry sought, futilely, to make the duplication of music on cassette tapes illegal. Other proposals included a compensatory tax on blank tapes.

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Journalists and nature lovers! Inventors never know how their inventions will really be used. And strange how the same responses come to any new technology: suppress it, tax it, etc.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified