Weekly Dose of Optimism #180

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Friday from sunny Cape Town, South Africa! Not sure if it’s escaping frozen New York for warmer weather, spending time with family, or the fact that this was another one of the wildest weeks in Dose history, but I am feeling a little extra optimistic this week. By the end of this one, I hope you are too.

When Dan an I started writing this over three years ago, our goal was to make the world more optimistic by sharing all of the incredible progress happening in science and technology each week. That is still the case, and it’s still necessary. People are still pessimistic, and uncertain about what lies on the other side of progress.

Since we started writing, what’s changed is that things are simply moving much faster. There is more to cover each week. We have 7 Extra Doses in this one; each could be one of the top 5, and there are still things we didn’t cover.

So now, there’s an additional goal with the Dose: to keep you up-to-speed with the most important things happening in science and technology in the time it takes you two finish two morning coffees. Don’t doomscroll to keep up, just read the Dose.

Let’s get to it.

Today’s Weekly Dose is brought to you by… the Abundance Institute

My friends at the Abundance Institute are launching “Everyday Abundance,” a new podcast, this spring hosted by best selling authors Virginia Postrel and Charles Mann. I had a fascinating conversation about tissue paper, sneezing, and germs with Virginia and Charles at the Progress Conference in October and I’m pretty exited to listen to the show.

If you join Abundance’s Foundry now, you’ll get access to a salon Zoom with Virginia, early access to the podcast, and 3 months of not boring world free1, on top of all the other benefits of supporting this amazing organization.

Check out the Foundry membership here: Join the Foundry

(1) Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine unlocks a new frontier beyond AlphaFold

Isomorphic Labs

AlphaFold won Demis Hassabis a Nobel Prize for predicting the structure of proteins, which felt like a technological miracle at the time, as captured in The Thinking Game.

This week, Hassabis’ Isomorphic Labs, the Google spinout he CEOs on Tuesdays while also running Google DeepMind, showed that they can now predict how to drug them in ...