A medical exam yields, at first, an educated guess.

Take a patient whose X-ray shows signs of Covid pneumonia, for instance—a radiologist might flag that possibility for the attending physician. Now imagine that X-ray goes on to be used as a training tool to help with future diagnoses for other patients.

• Without additional data—like a Covid lab-test result, a genomic sequence, or a down-the-line update on how that patient ultimately fared—the X-ray is of limited use.
• Since it’s not tied to an outcome, it doesn’t offer a complete picture. There’s no way to know if the identified signals actually correspond to Covid pneumonia.

Enter...Nightingale Open Science, a new research resource that wants to make those educated guesses smarter by making high-quality, outcomes-based datasets widely available for researchers building AI tools for health care.

• Skip to our full profile of Nightingale here, or keep reading for a brief summary.

The group allows anyone conducting nonprofit research to access 40 terabytes of medical data for free—a resource that could shed light on medical mysteries and promote earlier diagnoses of high-risk conditions.

• Nightingale’s records span persistent medical issues, like sudden cardiac death, cancer metastasis, and maternal mortality, and have been collected from patients in the US and Taiwan before being vetted and de-identified.
• Currently, most similar datasets are kept for internal use only in medical institutions or at tech companies developing health products, Obermeyer said.

“A particular strength of [this] data collection at this scale—in terms of volume but also in terms of time—is that it has a bird’s-eye view of what happened to the patients,” Dr. Howard Chen, chief imaging informatics officer at Cleveland Clinic, which is not involved with Nightingale, told us. He added, “You’re using a historical record, and then going back to use that historical record as the future of the scan. So I know what really happened to the patient.”

The nonprofit debuted in December with $6 million in funding with Schmidt Futures, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s philanthropic organization, as a key backer.

• Its founders, Ziad Obermeyer and Sendhil Mullainathan, are both professors and researchers specializing in machine learning and medicine.

In practice: Several hundreds” of researchers have already signed up for access, according to Nightingale, from institutions like Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Cornell, and the University of Chicago.

Google has also expressed interest in the dataset, Obermeyer said, but the company told us it “is not ready to comment on specifics for a potential partnership with Nightingale.” For-profit use is forbidden under Nightingale’s terms of use.

Click here to read the full profile of Nightingale’s new resource.—HF

The sun may be suspended in a far-off corner of our galaxy, some 91 million miles away, but on Wednesday, humans moved one step closer to mimicking its power on Earth.

Scientists at the Joint European Torus, a nuclear-fusion experiment based in the UK, announced on Wednesday that they had more than doubled the record for sustained nuclear-fusion time in December.

• JET’s tokamak produced 59 megajoules of energy over a “fusion pulse” for five seconds, compared to the previous record of 21.7 megajoules for about four seconds, set in 1997.

Even before this milestone, the commercial fusion industry was growing fast—there are at least 35 companies working on fusion worldwide, per the Fusion Industry Association. And late last year, the funding record for a fusion company was broken first by Helion, which raised $500 million in November, and then again by CFS, which raised $1.8 billion in December.

Looking ahead…JET’s breakthrough wasn’t enough to achieve nuclear fusion’s holy grail—generating more power than is used to fuel the reaction. But, according to Nature, it does provide hope for ITER, a $22 billion follow-up project slated for 2025, which will use the same approach to try and produce net power. ITER, based in France, is the world’s largest fusion reactor and a product of collaboration between 35 countries.

• Some of those well-capitalized private fusion companies are also jockeying to be first to demonstrate net power: Helion wants to do so in 2024, while CFS is shooting for 2025.

But net-power demonstrations—a potential next step for fusion after this achievement—are just another waypoint on the journey to commercially deployed nuclear-fusion energy. Some experts think it will take two or three decades for fusion to make it to the grid.

Click here to view on-site.—DM

The Algorithmic Accountability Act is back—and better than ever, according to the US lawmakers behind it.

Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Yvette Clarke first introduced the bill in 2019, as a way to hold companies accountable for “flawed computer algorithms that result in inaccurate, unfair, biased, or discriminatory decisions impacting Americans.” Nearly three years later, they’ve introduced a new version, after consulting experts and advocacy groups about improvements.

If passed, it would be among the first federal regulations for algorithms in the US, though we’ve seen some oversight at state and city levels around specific AI use cases. The EU is also considering a comprehensive Artificial Intelligence Act.

What’s inside

The bill would require companies to conduct impact assessments for algorithmic decision-making systems.

Those assessments would include, among other measures, a section on the manual process the algorithmic system is replacing and why it’s necessary, a description of the privacy risks and potential downstream negative impacts on consumers’ safety and security, an evaluation to see if the system treats consumers differently according to race, sex, gender, age, disability, religion, and more.

• The bill would also add 50 to 75 FTC staff members and establish a Bureau of Technology to enforce the new legislation.

Who’s affected: Any company that deploys an automated system to make “critical decisions”—e.g., affecting a consumer’s access to or cost of education, employment, utilities, family planning, financial services, healthcare, housing, legal services, and more.

• For the bill to apply, a company needs to be using identifying info (think: name, address, phone number, biometrics, etc.), have 1+ million consumers, and generate either $50+ million in average annual gross receipts or have $250+ million in annual equity value.

Big picture: Some experts believe 2022 is the year we’ll see concrete AI policy take shape. It’s unclear whether the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022 will receive enough votes to move forward, but it does have more co-sponsors and industry support than its former iteration.

Click here to read the full story.—HF

Stat: SpaceX lost up to 40 of its 49 recently launched Starlink satellites due to a solar storm. In dollar terms, that’s ~$100 million of damage.

Quote: “A century-plus of experience in building internal-combustion cars doesn’t necessarily mean squat. Not when automobiles are being digitized and revolutionized, and new generations of drivers aren’t always impressed by old names and ways.”—Lawrence Ulrich reviewing the Lucid Air in the New York Times

Read: Breaking down one company’s translation-focused AI-for-choosing-AI.

Somehow, we manage: Even when it’s figuring out how to manage a displaced workforce in a pandemic. To see what’s been working, workplace-management platform Robin talked to hundreds of managers, VPs, and execs about how they’ve adapted and how the employee experience can improve going forward. Get Robin’s 2021 Workplace Landscape Report here.*

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Alfa Romeo is getting into NFTs.
• A major crypto company that previously sued Forbes and two of its writers, alleging defamation, has now invested $200 million in it.
• A new autonomous vehicle startup claims it can produce self-driving cars without lidar, rader, or cameras.
• There’s a startup focused on mitigating cow burps with seaweed.

In case you didn’t get enough emerging tech reading in during the week, here are three pieces to tide you over this weekend:

• Preparing for quantum hackers, who could eventually break the internet as we know it. (Nature)
• Climate scientists are reaching the limits of what is physically possible to compute with existing supercomputers. (Wall Street Journal)
• Is the electric air-taxi space a bubble? (IEEE Spectrum)

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Breaking down an AI-for-translation middleman
• Bill Gates’s climate fund mobilizes $1.5 billion to make climate tech less expensive
• The rise of digital health in five charts