Downloading: climate heroes and a new way to track diseases

Yatish Turakhia, then a postdoctoral fellow at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, helped develop a software tool called UShER to track these covid variants by placing them, within minutes of each new sample being submitted, on a tree genealogy of all known SARS-CoV-2 genomes. .

The tool, accessible online since 2021, now records more than 15 million viral sequences, and allows scientists to monitor the virus in real time on a global scale. Today, Turakhia has started using it to track other diseases, with promising results. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

Yatish Turakhia is one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Under 35 Innovators for 2023. Read the full list of this year’s winnersincluding those making a difference in robotics, computing, biotechnology, climate and energy, and AI.

Essential readings

I’ve scoured the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Tech Leaders Agree AI Needs Government Regulation
But no one really knows what these rules should look like. (WP$)
+ Yesterday’s session of the US Senate was a veritable who’s who of tech titans. (WSJ$)
+ Elon Musk favors a “regulatory structure,” he told reporters. (Bloomberg$)