a 100M-year-old tiny dino

Crowdsourcing a vaccine.
1M Teslas. A QC toolkit.

March 13, 2020

It's raining iron

Hi there,

This week in data, we've got a $30B acquisition, a tiny dinosaur, and an AI 100 co's latest raise. Check it out below.

THIS WEEK IN DATA

$72M: AI-driven supply chain optimization startup Noodle.ai raised $21M, bringing its total disclosed equity funding to $72M. The company was recently featured in our 2020 cohort of the 100 most promising AI startups in the world. See all 100 winners here.

3.5 hours: The US Food and Drug Administration gave emergency approval to a new coronavirus test. The diagnostic kit is made by Switzerland-based healthcare company Roche and can reportedly return results in 3.5 hours — which the company says is 10x faster than current alternatives.

$30B: UK-based insurance broker Aon is set to acquire rival Willis Towers Watson for $30B. The combined entity would be the largest insurance broker in the world. Find out more about the forces shaping the future of insurance in CB Insights and Willis Towers Watson’s latest insurance tech report.

1M vehicles: Tesla produced its millionth car, according to its CEO Elon Musk. The electric vehicle maker was founded in 2003, but production has recently ramped up as competition intensifies from incumbent automakers like BMW, Volkswagen, Nissan, and more. Learn about the companies and trends shaping the future of the auto space in our report on the race for the electric car.

100 qubits: Google announced a tool kit for developing quantum machine learning applications. The open-source library is initially intended to help design experimental quantum computing algorithms on systems of around 100 qubits (a measure of computation power). We discuss Google’s quantum computing moves in our report on 10 big industries Alphabet could disrupt.

9M computers: Microsoft said that it had taken coordinated action to stop a botnet — a network of malware-infected computers that can be used as a vehicle for cybercrimes, like sending out spam emails — that was 9M computers-strong. From homomorphic encryption to deepfake detection, check out cybersecurity trends and the startups transforming the space in our Cyber Defenders report.

9x: US sales of 5G devices were up almost 9x in the second half of 2019 compared to the first half of the year, according to a report by NPD. Despite the sharp rise, 5G-enabled phones only represented less than 1% of total phone sales in the US last year. 5G is a new connectivity standard that promises faster internet speeds and more reliable connections, but coverage is currently spotty with major carriers around the world still ramping up their networks. We discuss how 5G could help enable the next generation of virtual offices and remote working applications in our 68-page report on 14 tech trends to watch closely in 2020.

4000°F: Researchers found evidence of a planet where it can rain iron, according to a paper published in Nature. The study focused on a planet that orbits very close to its parent star and where atmospheric temperatures are thought to exceed 4000°F — well above iron’s melting point. Measurements of light from the planet’s atmosphere indicated that iron droplets can form in the sky as the metal condenses on the planet’s colder side facing away from the star.

2 grams: A 100M-year-old skull found encased in amber is thought to belong to a tiny dinosaur that may have weighed only 2 grams — less than a US penny. The animal was named by the scientists behind the study as Oculudentavis khaungraae, meaning “eye-teeth bird,” due to the specimen’s large number of teeth and pronounced eye sockets.

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Anand
@asanwal

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One More Thing

Source: Foldit

Scientists are crowdsourcing a vaccine for the coronavirus through an online puzzle game.

Foldit players are challenged to fold proteins into stable shapes, which are scored based on how effectively they could block the coronavirus from binding to human cells. High-scoring results are then evaluated by scientists for real-world use.

More than 2,500 people have tried the coronavirus puzzles so far.

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