• How to delete your 23andMe data

    DNA testing service 23andMe has undergone serious upheaval in recent months, creating concerns for the 15 million customers who entrusted the company with their personal biological information. After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March, the company became the center of a bidding war that ended Friday when co-founder Anne Wojcicki said she’d successfully reacquired control through her nonprofit TTAM Research Institute for million.
    The bankruptcy proceedings had sent shockwaves through the genetic testing industry and among privacy advocates, with security experts and lawmakers urging customers to take immediate action to safeguard their data. The company’s interim CEO revealed this week that 1.9 million people, around 15% of 23andMe’s customer base, have already requested their genetic data be deleted from the company’s servers.
    The situation became even more complex last week after more than two dozen states filed lawsuits challenging the sale of customers’ private data, arguing that 23andMe must obtain explicit consent before transferring or selling personal information to any new entity.
    While the company’s policies mean you cannot delete all traces of your genetic data — particularly information that may have already been shared with research partners or stored in backup systems — if you’re one of the 15 million people who shared their DNA with 23andMe, there are still meaningful steps you can take to protect yourself and minimize your exposure.
    How to delete your 23andMe data
    To delete your data from 23andMe, you need to log in to your account and then follow these steps:

    Navigate to the Settings section of your profile.
    Scroll down to the selection labeled 23andMe Data. 
    Click the View option and scroll to the Delete Data section.
    Select the Permanently Delete Data button.

    You will then receive an email from 23andMe with a link that will allow you to confirm your deletion request. 
    You can choose to download a copy of your data before deleting it.
    There is an important caveat, as 23andMe’s privacy policy states that the company and its labs “will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with applicable legal obligations.”
    The policy continues: “23andMe will also retain limited information related to your account and data deletion request, including but not limited to, your email address, account deletion request identifier, communications related to inquiries or complaints and legal agreements for a limited period of time as required by law, contractual obligations, and/or as necessary for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims and for audit and compliance purposes.”
    This essentially means that 23andMe may keep some of your information for an unspecified amount of time. 
    How to destroy your 23andMe test sample and revoke permission for your data to be used for research
    If you previously opted to have your saliva sample and DNA stored by 23andMe, you can change this setting.
    To revoke your permission, go into your 23andMe account settings page and then navigate to Preferences. 
    In addition, if you previously agreed to 23andMe and third-party researchers using your genetic data and sample for research, you can withdraw consent from the Research and Product Consents section in your account settings. 
    While you can reverse that consent, there’s no way for you to delete that information.
    Check in with your family members
    Once you have requested the deletion of your data, it’s important to check in with your family members and encourage them to do the same because it’s not just their DNA that’s at risk of sale — it also affects people they are related to. 
    And while you’re at it, it’s worth checking in with your friends to ensure that all of your loved ones are taking steps to protect their data. 
    This story originally published on March 25 and was updated June 11 with new information.
    #how #delete #your #23andme #data
    How to delete your 23andMe data
    DNA testing service 23andMe has undergone serious upheaval in recent months, creating concerns for the 15 million customers who entrusted the company with their personal biological information. After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March, the company became the center of a bidding war that ended Friday when co-founder Anne Wojcicki said she’d successfully reacquired control through her nonprofit TTAM Research Institute for million. The bankruptcy proceedings had sent shockwaves through the genetic testing industry and among privacy advocates, with security experts and lawmakers urging customers to take immediate action to safeguard their data. The company’s interim CEO revealed this week that 1.9 million people, around 15% of 23andMe’s customer base, have already requested their genetic data be deleted from the company’s servers. The situation became even more complex last week after more than two dozen states filed lawsuits challenging the sale of customers’ private data, arguing that 23andMe must obtain explicit consent before transferring or selling personal information to any new entity. While the company’s policies mean you cannot delete all traces of your genetic data — particularly information that may have already been shared with research partners or stored in backup systems — if you’re one of the 15 million people who shared their DNA with 23andMe, there are still meaningful steps you can take to protect yourself and minimize your exposure. How to delete your 23andMe data To delete your data from 23andMe, you need to log in to your account and then follow these steps: Navigate to the Settings section of your profile. Scroll down to the selection labeled 23andMe Data.  Click the View option and scroll to the Delete Data section. Select the Permanently Delete Data button. You will then receive an email from 23andMe with a link that will allow you to confirm your deletion request.  You can choose to download a copy of your data before deleting it. There is an important caveat, as 23andMe’s privacy policy states that the company and its labs “will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with applicable legal obligations.” The policy continues: “23andMe will also retain limited information related to your account and data deletion request, including but not limited to, your email address, account deletion request identifier, communications related to inquiries or complaints and legal agreements for a limited period of time as required by law, contractual obligations, and/or as necessary for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims and for audit and compliance purposes.” This essentially means that 23andMe may keep some of your information for an unspecified amount of time.  How to destroy your 23andMe test sample and revoke permission for your data to be used for research If you previously opted to have your saliva sample and DNA stored by 23andMe, you can change this setting. To revoke your permission, go into your 23andMe account settings page and then navigate to Preferences.  In addition, if you previously agreed to 23andMe and third-party researchers using your genetic data and sample for research, you can withdraw consent from the Research and Product Consents section in your account settings.  While you can reverse that consent, there’s no way for you to delete that information. Check in with your family members Once you have requested the deletion of your data, it’s important to check in with your family members and encourage them to do the same because it’s not just their DNA that’s at risk of sale — it also affects people they are related to.  And while you’re at it, it’s worth checking in with your friends to ensure that all of your loved ones are taking steps to protect their data.  This story originally published on March 25 and was updated June 11 with new information. #how #delete #your #23andme #data
    TECHCRUNCH.COM
    How to delete your 23andMe data
    DNA testing service 23andMe has undergone serious upheaval in recent months, creating concerns for the 15 million customers who entrusted the company with their personal biological information. After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March, the company became the center of a bidding war that ended Friday when co-founder Anne Wojcicki said she’d successfully reacquired control through her nonprofit TTAM Research Institute for $305 million. The bankruptcy proceedings had sent shockwaves through the genetic testing industry and among privacy advocates, with security experts and lawmakers urging customers to take immediate action to safeguard their data. The company’s interim CEO revealed this week that 1.9 million people, around 15% of 23andMe’s customer base, have already requested their genetic data be deleted from the company’s servers. The situation became even more complex last week after more than two dozen states filed lawsuits challenging the sale of customers’ private data, arguing that 23andMe must obtain explicit consent before transferring or selling personal information to any new entity. While the company’s policies mean you cannot delete all traces of your genetic data — particularly information that may have already been shared with research partners or stored in backup systems — if you’re one of the 15 million people who shared their DNA with 23andMe, there are still meaningful steps you can take to protect yourself and minimize your exposure. How to delete your 23andMe data To delete your data from 23andMe, you need to log in to your account and then follow these steps: Navigate to the Settings section of your profile. Scroll down to the selection labeled 23andMe Data.  Click the View option and scroll to the Delete Data section. Select the Permanently Delete Data button. You will then receive an email from 23andMe with a link that will allow you to confirm your deletion request.  You can choose to download a copy of your data before deleting it. There is an important caveat, as 23andMe’s privacy policy states that the company and its labs “will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with applicable legal obligations.” The policy continues: “23andMe will also retain limited information related to your account and data deletion request, including but not limited to, your email address, account deletion request identifier, communications related to inquiries or complaints and legal agreements for a limited period of time as required by law, contractual obligations, and/or as necessary for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims and for audit and compliance purposes.” This essentially means that 23andMe may keep some of your information for an unspecified amount of time.  How to destroy your 23andMe test sample and revoke permission for your data to be used for research If you previously opted to have your saliva sample and DNA stored by 23andMe, you can change this setting. To revoke your permission, go into your 23andMe account settings page and then navigate to Preferences.  In addition, if you previously agreed to 23andMe and third-party researchers using your genetic data and sample for research, you can withdraw consent from the Research and Product Consents section in your account settings.  While you can reverse that consent, there’s no way for you to delete that information. Check in with your family members Once you have requested the deletion of your data, it’s important to check in with your family members and encourage them to do the same because it’s not just their DNA that’s at risk of sale — it also affects people they are related to.  And while you’re at it, it’s worth checking in with your friends to ensure that all of your loved ones are taking steps to protect their data.  This story originally published on March 25 and was updated June 11 with new information.
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  • Decades ago, concrete overtook steel as the predominant structural material for towers worldwide—the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition examines why and how

    “Is that concrete all around, or is it in my head?” asked Ian Hunter in “All the Young Dudes,” the song David Bowie wrote for Mott the Hoople in 1972. Concrete is all around us, and we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around it. It’s one of the indispensable materials of modernity; as we try to decarbonize the built environment, it’s part of the problem, and innovations in its composition may become part of the solution. Understanding its history more clearly, the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition in Manhattan implies, just might help us employ it better.

    Concrete is “the second most used substance in the world, after water,” the museum’s founder/director/curator Carol Willis told AN during a recent visit. For plasticity, versatility, and compressive strength, reinforced concrete is hard to beat, though its performance is more problematic when assessed by the metric of embodied and operational carbon, a consideration the exhibition acknowledges up front. In tall construction, concrete has become nearly hegemonic, yet its central role, contend Willis and co-curator Thomas Leslie, formerly of Foster + Partners and now a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is underrecognized by the public and by mainstream architectural history. The current exhibition aims to change that perception.
    The Skyscraper Museum in Lower Manhattan features an exhibition, The Modern Concrete Skyscraper, which examines the history of material choices in building tall towers.The Modern Concrete Skyscraper examines the history of tall towers’ structural material choices, describing a transition from the early dominance of steel frames to the contemporary condition, in which most large buildings rely on concrete. This change did not happen instantly or for any single reason but through a combination of technical and economic factors, including innovations by various specialists, well-recognized and otherwise; the availability of high-quality limestone deposits near Chicago; and the differential development of materials industries in nations whose architecture grew prominent in recent decades. As supertalls reach ever higher—in the global race for official height rankings by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitatand national, corporate, or professional bragging rights—concrete’s dominance may not be permanent in that sector, given the challenge of pumping the material beyond a certain height.For the moment, however, concrete is ahead of its chief competitors, steel andtimber. Regardless of possible promotional inferences, Willis said, “we did not work with the industry in any way for this exhibition.”

    “The invention of steel and the grid of steel and the skeleton frame is only the first chapter of the history of the skyscraper,” Willis explained. “The second chapter, and the one that we’re in now, is concrete. Surprisingly, no one had ever told that story of the skyscraper today with a continuous narrative.” The exhibition traces the use of concrete back to the ancient Roman combination of aggregate and pozzolana—the chemical formula for which was “largely lost with the fall of the Roman Empire,” though some Byzantine and medieval structures approximated it. From there, the show explores comparable materials’ revival in 18th-century England, the patenting of Portland cement by Leeds builder Joseph Aspdin in 1824, the proof-of-concept concrete house by François Coignet in 1856, and the pivotal development of rebar in the mid-19th century, with overdue attention to Ernest Ransome’s 1903 Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, then the world’s tallest concrete building at 15 stories and arguably the first concrete skyscraper.
    The exhibition includes a timeline that depicts concrete’s origins in Rome to its contemporary use in skyscraper construction.Baker’s lectures, Willis reported, sometimes pose a deceptively simple question: “‘What is a skyscraper?’ In 1974, when the World Trade Center and Sears Tower are just finished, you would say it’s a very tall building that is built of steel, an office building in North America. But if you ask that same question today, the answer is: It’s a building that is mixed-use, constructed of concrete, andin Asia or the Middle East.” The exhibition organizes the history of concrete towers by eras of engineering innovation, devoting special attention to the 19th- and early-20th-century “patent era” of Claude Allen Porter Turnerand Henry Chandlee Turner, Ransome, and François Hennebique. In the postwar era, “concrete comes out onto the surfaceboth a structural material and aesthetic.” Brutalism, perhaps to some observers’ surprise, “does not figure very large in high-rise design,” Willis said, except for Paul Rudolph’s Tracey Towers in the Bronx. The exhibition, however, devotes considerable attention to the work of Pier Luigi Nervi, Bertrand Goldberg, and SOM’s Fazlur Khan, pioneer of the structural tube system in the 1960s and 1970s—followed by the postmodernist 1980s, when concrete could express either engineering values or ornamentation.
    The exhibition highlights a number of concrete towers, including Paul Rudolph’s Tracey Towers in the Bronx.“In the ’90s, there were material advances in engineering analysis and computerization that helped to predict performance, and so buildings can get taller and taller,” Willis said. The current era, if one looks to CTBUH rankings, is dominated by the supertalls seen in Dubai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur, after the Petronas Towers“took the title of world’s tallest building from North America for the first time and traumatized everybody about that.” The previous record holder, Chicago’s SearsTower, comprised steel structural tubes on concrete caissons; with Petronas, headquarters of Malaysia’s national petroleum company of that name, a strong concrete industry was represented but a strong national steel industry was lacking, and as Willis frequently says, form follows finances. In any event, by the ’90s concrete was already becoming the standard material for supertalls, particularly on soft-soiled sites like Shanghai, where its water resistance and compressive strength are well suited to foundation construction. Its plasticity is also well suited to complex forms like the triangular Burj, Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118, andthe even taller Jeddah Tower, designed to “confuse the wind,” shed vortices, and manage wind forces. Posing the same question Louis Kahn asked about the intentions of a brick, Willis said, with concrete “the answer is: anything you want.”

    The exhibition is front-loaded with scholarly material, presenting eight succinct yet informative wall texts on the timeline of concrete construction. The explanatory material is accompanied by ample photographs as well as structural models on loan from SOM, Pelli Clarke & Partners, and other firms. Some materials are repurposed from the museum’s previous shows, particularly Supertall!and Sky High and the Logic of Luxury. The models allow close examination of the Burj Khalifa, Petronas Towers, Jin Mao Tower, Merdeka 118, and others, including two unbuilt Chicago projects that would have exceeded 2,000 feet: the Miglin-Beitler Skyneedleand 7 South Dearborn. The Burj, Willis noted, was all structure and no facade for a time: When its curtain-wall manufacturer, Schmidlin, went bankrupt in 2006, it “ended up going to 100 stories without having a stitch of glass on it,” temporarily becoming a “1:1 scale model of the structural system up to 100 stories.” Its prominence justifies its appearance here in two models, including one from RWDI’s wind-tunnel studies.
    Eero Saarinen’s only skyscraper, built for CBS in 1965 and also known as “Black Rock,” under construction in New York City.The exhibition opened in March, with plans to stay up at least through October, with accompanying lectures and panels to be announced on the museum’s website. Though the exhibition’s full textual and graphic content is available online, the physical models alone are worth a trip to the Battery Park City headquarters.
    Intriguing questions arise from the exhibition without easy answers, setting the table for lively discussion and debate. One is whether the patenting of innovations like Ransome bar and the Système Hennebique incentivized technological progress or hindered useful technology transfer. Willis speculated, “Did the fact that there were inventions and patents mean that competition was discouraged, that the competition was only in the realm of business, rather than advancing the material?” A critical question is whether research into the chemistry of concrete, including MIT’s 2023 report on the self-healing properties of Roman pozzolana and proliferating claims about “green concrete” using alternatives to Portland cement, can lead to new types of the material with improved durability and lower emissions footprints. This exhibition provides a firm foundation in concrete’s fascinating history, opening space for informed speculation about its future.
    Bill Millard is a regular contributor to AN.
    #decades #ago #concrete #overtook #steel
    Decades ago, concrete overtook steel as the predominant structural material for towers worldwide—the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition examines why and how
    “Is that concrete all around, or is it in my head?” asked Ian Hunter in “All the Young Dudes,” the song David Bowie wrote for Mott the Hoople in 1972. Concrete is all around us, and we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around it. It’s one of the indispensable materials of modernity; as we try to decarbonize the built environment, it’s part of the problem, and innovations in its composition may become part of the solution. Understanding its history more clearly, the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition in Manhattan implies, just might help us employ it better. Concrete is “the second most used substance in the world, after water,” the museum’s founder/director/curator Carol Willis told AN during a recent visit. For plasticity, versatility, and compressive strength, reinforced concrete is hard to beat, though its performance is more problematic when assessed by the metric of embodied and operational carbon, a consideration the exhibition acknowledges up front. In tall construction, concrete has become nearly hegemonic, yet its central role, contend Willis and co-curator Thomas Leslie, formerly of Foster + Partners and now a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is underrecognized by the public and by mainstream architectural history. The current exhibition aims to change that perception. The Skyscraper Museum in Lower Manhattan features an exhibition, The Modern Concrete Skyscraper, which examines the history of material choices in building tall towers.The Modern Concrete Skyscraper examines the history of tall towers’ structural material choices, describing a transition from the early dominance of steel frames to the contemporary condition, in which most large buildings rely on concrete. This change did not happen instantly or for any single reason but through a combination of technical and economic factors, including innovations by various specialists, well-recognized and otherwise; the availability of high-quality limestone deposits near Chicago; and the differential development of materials industries in nations whose architecture grew prominent in recent decades. As supertalls reach ever higher—in the global race for official height rankings by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitatand national, corporate, or professional bragging rights—concrete’s dominance may not be permanent in that sector, given the challenge of pumping the material beyond a certain height.For the moment, however, concrete is ahead of its chief competitors, steel andtimber. Regardless of possible promotional inferences, Willis said, “we did not work with the industry in any way for this exhibition.” “The invention of steel and the grid of steel and the skeleton frame is only the first chapter of the history of the skyscraper,” Willis explained. “The second chapter, and the one that we’re in now, is concrete. Surprisingly, no one had ever told that story of the skyscraper today with a continuous narrative.” The exhibition traces the use of concrete back to the ancient Roman combination of aggregate and pozzolana—the chemical formula for which was “largely lost with the fall of the Roman Empire,” though some Byzantine and medieval structures approximated it. From there, the show explores comparable materials’ revival in 18th-century England, the patenting of Portland cement by Leeds builder Joseph Aspdin in 1824, the proof-of-concept concrete house by François Coignet in 1856, and the pivotal development of rebar in the mid-19th century, with overdue attention to Ernest Ransome’s 1903 Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, then the world’s tallest concrete building at 15 stories and arguably the first concrete skyscraper. The exhibition includes a timeline that depicts concrete’s origins in Rome to its contemporary use in skyscraper construction.Baker’s lectures, Willis reported, sometimes pose a deceptively simple question: “‘What is a skyscraper?’ In 1974, when the World Trade Center and Sears Tower are just finished, you would say it’s a very tall building that is built of steel, an office building in North America. But if you ask that same question today, the answer is: It’s a building that is mixed-use, constructed of concrete, andin Asia or the Middle East.” The exhibition organizes the history of concrete towers by eras of engineering innovation, devoting special attention to the 19th- and early-20th-century “patent era” of Claude Allen Porter Turnerand Henry Chandlee Turner, Ransome, and François Hennebique. In the postwar era, “concrete comes out onto the surfaceboth a structural material and aesthetic.” Brutalism, perhaps to some observers’ surprise, “does not figure very large in high-rise design,” Willis said, except for Paul Rudolph’s Tracey Towers in the Bronx. The exhibition, however, devotes considerable attention to the work of Pier Luigi Nervi, Bertrand Goldberg, and SOM’s Fazlur Khan, pioneer of the structural tube system in the 1960s and 1970s—followed by the postmodernist 1980s, when concrete could express either engineering values or ornamentation. The exhibition highlights a number of concrete towers, including Paul Rudolph’s Tracey Towers in the Bronx.“In the ’90s, there were material advances in engineering analysis and computerization that helped to predict performance, and so buildings can get taller and taller,” Willis said. The current era, if one looks to CTBUH rankings, is dominated by the supertalls seen in Dubai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur, after the Petronas Towers“took the title of world’s tallest building from North America for the first time and traumatized everybody about that.” The previous record holder, Chicago’s SearsTower, comprised steel structural tubes on concrete caissons; with Petronas, headquarters of Malaysia’s national petroleum company of that name, a strong concrete industry was represented but a strong national steel industry was lacking, and as Willis frequently says, form follows finances. In any event, by the ’90s concrete was already becoming the standard material for supertalls, particularly on soft-soiled sites like Shanghai, where its water resistance and compressive strength are well suited to foundation construction. Its plasticity is also well suited to complex forms like the triangular Burj, Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118, andthe even taller Jeddah Tower, designed to “confuse the wind,” shed vortices, and manage wind forces. Posing the same question Louis Kahn asked about the intentions of a brick, Willis said, with concrete “the answer is: anything you want.” The exhibition is front-loaded with scholarly material, presenting eight succinct yet informative wall texts on the timeline of concrete construction. The explanatory material is accompanied by ample photographs as well as structural models on loan from SOM, Pelli Clarke & Partners, and other firms. Some materials are repurposed from the museum’s previous shows, particularly Supertall!and Sky High and the Logic of Luxury. The models allow close examination of the Burj Khalifa, Petronas Towers, Jin Mao Tower, Merdeka 118, and others, including two unbuilt Chicago projects that would have exceeded 2,000 feet: the Miglin-Beitler Skyneedleand 7 South Dearborn. The Burj, Willis noted, was all structure and no facade for a time: When its curtain-wall manufacturer, Schmidlin, went bankrupt in 2006, it “ended up going to 100 stories without having a stitch of glass on it,” temporarily becoming a “1:1 scale model of the structural system up to 100 stories.” Its prominence justifies its appearance here in two models, including one from RWDI’s wind-tunnel studies. Eero Saarinen’s only skyscraper, built for CBS in 1965 and also known as “Black Rock,” under construction in New York City.The exhibition opened in March, with plans to stay up at least through October, with accompanying lectures and panels to be announced on the museum’s website. Though the exhibition’s full textual and graphic content is available online, the physical models alone are worth a trip to the Battery Park City headquarters. Intriguing questions arise from the exhibition without easy answers, setting the table for lively discussion and debate. One is whether the patenting of innovations like Ransome bar and the Système Hennebique incentivized technological progress or hindered useful technology transfer. Willis speculated, “Did the fact that there were inventions and patents mean that competition was discouraged, that the competition was only in the realm of business, rather than advancing the material?” A critical question is whether research into the chemistry of concrete, including MIT’s 2023 report on the self-healing properties of Roman pozzolana and proliferating claims about “green concrete” using alternatives to Portland cement, can lead to new types of the material with improved durability and lower emissions footprints. This exhibition provides a firm foundation in concrete’s fascinating history, opening space for informed speculation about its future. Bill Millard is a regular contributor to AN. #decades #ago #concrete #overtook #steel
    WWW.ARCHPAPER.COM
    Decades ago, concrete overtook steel as the predominant structural material for towers worldwide—the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition examines why and how
    “Is that concrete all around, or is it in my head?” asked Ian Hunter in “All the Young Dudes,” the song David Bowie wrote for Mott the Hoople in 1972. Concrete is all around us, and we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around it. It’s one of the indispensable materials of modernity; as we try to decarbonize the built environment, it’s part of the problem, and innovations in its composition may become part of the solution. Understanding its history more clearly, the Skyscraper Museum’s new exhibition in Manhattan implies, just might help us employ it better. Concrete is “the second most used substance in the world, after water,” the museum’s founder/director/curator Carol Willis told AN during a recent visit. For plasticity, versatility, and compressive strength, reinforced concrete is hard to beat, though its performance is more problematic when assessed by the metric of embodied and operational carbon, a consideration the exhibition acknowledges up front. In tall construction, concrete has become nearly hegemonic, yet its central role, contend Willis and co-curator Thomas Leslie, formerly of Foster + Partners and now a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is underrecognized by the public and by mainstream architectural history. The current exhibition aims to change that perception. The Skyscraper Museum in Lower Manhattan features an exhibition, The Modern Concrete Skyscraper, which examines the history of material choices in building tall towers. (Courtesy the Skyscraper Museum) The Modern Concrete Skyscraper examines the history of tall towers’ structural material choices, describing a transition from the early dominance of steel frames to the contemporary condition, in which most large buildings rely on concrete. This change did not happen instantly or for any single reason but through a combination of technical and economic factors, including innovations by various specialists, well-recognized and otherwise; the availability of high-quality limestone deposits near Chicago; and the differential development of materials industries in nations whose architecture grew prominent in recent decades. As supertalls reach ever higher—in the global race for official height rankings by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) and national, corporate, or professional bragging rights—concrete’s dominance may not be permanent in that sector, given the challenge of pumping the material beyond a certain height. (The 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa, formerly Burj Dubai, uses concrete up to 1,987 and steel above that point; Willis quotes SOM’s William Baker describing it as “the tallest steel building with a concrete foundation of 156 stories.”) For the moment, however, concrete is ahead of its chief competitors, steel and (on a smaller scale) timber. Regardless of possible promotional inferences, Willis said, “we did not work with the industry in any way for this exhibition.” “The invention of steel and the grid of steel and the skeleton frame is only the first chapter of the history of the skyscraper,” Willis explained. “The second chapter, and the one that we’re in now, is concrete. Surprisingly, no one had ever told that story of the skyscraper today with a continuous narrative.” The exhibition traces the use of concrete back to the ancient Roman combination of aggregate and pozzolana—the chemical formula for which was “largely lost with the fall of the Roman Empire,” though some Byzantine and medieval structures approximated it. From there, the show explores comparable materials’ revival in 18th-century England, the patenting of Portland cement by Leeds builder Joseph Aspdin in 1824, the proof-of-concept concrete house by François Coignet in 1856, and the pivotal development of rebar in the mid-19th century, with overdue attention to Ernest Ransome’s 1903 Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, then the world’s tallest concrete building at 15 stories and arguably the first concrete skyscraper. The exhibition includes a timeline that depicts concrete’s origins in Rome to its contemporary use in skyscraper construction. (Courtesy the Skyscraper Museum) Baker’s lectures, Willis reported, sometimes pose a deceptively simple question: “‘What is a skyscraper?’ In 1974, when the World Trade Center and Sears Tower are just finished, you would say it’s a very tall building that is built of steel, an office building in North America. But if you ask that same question today, the answer is: It’s a building that is mixed-use, constructed of concrete, and [located] in Asia or the Middle East.” The exhibition organizes the history of concrete towers by eras of engineering innovation, devoting special attention to the 19th- and early-20th-century “patent era” of Claude Allen Porter Turner (pioneer in flat-slab flooring and mushroom columns) and Henry Chandlee Turner (founder of Turner Construction), Ransome (who patented twisted-iron rebar), and François Hennebique (known for the re-inforced concrete system exemplified by Liverpool’s Royal Liver Building, the world’s tallest concrete office building when completed in 1911). In the postwar era, “concrete comes out onto the surface [as] both a structural material and aesthetic.” Brutalism, perhaps to some observers’ surprise, “does not figure very large in high-rise design,” Willis said, except for Paul Rudolph’s Tracey Towers in the Bronx. The exhibition, however, devotes considerable attention to the work of Pier Luigi Nervi, Bertrand Goldberg (particularly Marina City), and SOM’s Fazlur Khan, pioneer of the structural tube system in the 1960s and 1970s—followed by the postmodernist 1980s, when concrete could express either engineering values or ornamentation. The exhibition highlights a number of concrete towers, including Paul Rudolph’s Tracey Towers in the Bronx. (Courtesy the Skyscraper Museum) “In the ’90s, there were material advances in engineering analysis and computerization that helped to predict performance, and so buildings can get taller and taller,” Willis said. The current era, if one looks to CTBUH rankings, is dominated by the supertalls seen in Dubai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur, after the Petronas Towers (1998) “took the title of world’s tallest building from North America for the first time and traumatized everybody about that.” The previous record holder, Chicago’s Sears (now Willis) Tower, comprised steel structural tubes on concrete caissons; with Petronas, headquarters of Malaysia’s national petroleum company of that name, a strong concrete industry was represented but a strong national steel industry was lacking, and as Willis frequently says, form follows finances. In any event, by the ’90s concrete was already becoming the standard material for supertalls, particularly on soft-soiled sites like Shanghai, where its water resistance and compressive strength are well suited to foundation construction. Its plasticity is also well suited to complex forms like the triangular Burj, Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118, and (if eventually completed) the even taller Jeddah Tower, designed to “confuse the wind,” shed vortices, and manage wind forces. Posing the same question Louis Kahn asked about the intentions of a brick, Willis said, with concrete “the answer is: anything you want.” The exhibition is front-loaded with scholarly material, presenting eight succinct yet informative wall texts on the timeline of concrete construction. The explanatory material is accompanied by ample photographs as well as structural models on loan from SOM, Pelli Clarke & Partners, and other firms. Some materials are repurposed from the museum’s previous shows, particularly Supertall! (2011–12) and Sky High and the Logic of Luxury (2013–14). The models allow close examination of the Burj Khalifa, Petronas Towers, Jin Mao Tower, Merdeka 118, and others, including two unbuilt Chicago projects that would have exceeded 2,000 feet: the Miglin-Beitler Skyneedle (Cesar Pelli/Thornton Tomasetti) and 7 South Dearborn (SOM). The Burj, Willis noted, was all structure and no facade for a time: When its curtain-wall manufacturer, Schmidlin, went bankrupt in 2006, it “ended up going to 100 stories without having a stitch of glass on it,” temporarily becoming a “1:1 scale model of the structural system up to 100 stories.” Its prominence justifies its appearance here in two models, including one from RWDI’s wind-tunnel studies. Eero Saarinen’s only skyscraper, built for CBS in 1965 and also known as “Black Rock,” under construction in New York City. (Courtesy Eero Saarinen Collection, Manuscripts, and Archives, Yale University Library) The exhibition opened in March, with plans to stay up at least through October (Willis prefers to keep the date flexible), with accompanying lectures and panels to be announced on the museum’s website (skyscraper.org). Though the exhibition’s full textual and graphic content is available online, the physical models alone are worth a trip to the Battery Park City headquarters. Intriguing questions arise from the exhibition without easy answers, setting the table for lively discussion and debate. One is whether the patenting of innovations like Ransome bar and the Système Hennebique incentivized technological progress or hindered useful technology transfer. Willis speculated, “Did the fact that there were inventions and patents mean that competition was discouraged, that the competition was only in the realm of business, rather than advancing the material?” A critical question is whether research into the chemistry of concrete, including MIT’s 2023 report on the self-healing properties of Roman pozzolana and proliferating claims about “green concrete” using alternatives to Portland cement, can lead to new types of the material with improved durability and lower emissions footprints. This exhibition provides a firm foundation in concrete’s fascinating history, opening space for informed speculation about its future. Bill Millard is a regular contributor to AN.
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  • 23andMe’s Former CEO Pushes Purchase Price Nearly $50 Million Higher

    23andMe has a path to a higher purchase price than the million offered by biotech giant Regeneron after the genetic-testing company’s former chief executive pushed a bankruptcy court to reopen its sale process.
    #23andmes #former #ceo #pushes #purchase
    23andMe’s Former CEO Pushes Purchase Price Nearly $50 Million Higher
    23andMe has a path to a higher purchase price than the million offered by biotech giant Regeneron after the genetic-testing company’s former chief executive pushed a bankruptcy court to reopen its sale process. #23andmes #former #ceo #pushes #purchase
    WWW.WSJ.COM
    23andMe’s Former CEO Pushes Purchase Price Nearly $50 Million Higher
    23andMe has a path to a higher purchase price than the $256 million offered by biotech giant Regeneron after the genetic-testing company’s former chief executive pushed a bankruptcy court to reopen its sale process.
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  • AI Startup Backed by Microsoft Revealed to Be 700 Indian Employees Pretending to Be Chatbots

    A Microsoft-backed AI startup that relied on hundreds of human workers posing as chatbots has collapsed into bankruptcy amid fraud allegations.
    ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP via Getty Images
    A once-hyped AI startup backed by Microsoft has filed for bankruptcy after it was revealed that its so-called artificial intelligence was actually hundreds of human workers in India pretending to be chatbots.Builder.ai, a London-based company previously valued at billion, marketed its platform as an AI-powered solution that made building apps as simple as ordering pizza. Its virtual assistant, "Natasha," was supposed to generate software using artificial intelligence.In reality, nearly 700 engineers in India were manually coding customer requests behind the scenes, the Times of India reported.The ruse began to collapse in May when lender Viola Credit seized million from the company's accounts, uncovering that Builder.ai had inflated its 2024 revenue projections by 300%. An audit revealed the company generated just million in revenue, far below the million it claimed to investors.A Wall Street Journal report from 2019 had already questioned Builder.ai's AI claims, and a former executive sued the company that same year for allegedly misleading investors and overstating its technical capabilities.Despite that, the company raised over million from big names including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority. Builder.ai's collapse has triggered a federal investigation in the U.S., with prosecutors in New York requesting financial documents and customer records.Founder Sachin Dev Duggal stepped down earlier this year and was replaced by Manpreet Ratia, who reportedly uncovered the company's internal misrepresentations.The company now owes millions to Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing costs and has laid off around 1,000 employees. On LinkedIn, the company announced its entry into insolvency proceedings, citing "historic challenges and past decisions" that strained its finances.The fallout is seen as one of the biggest failures of the post-ChatGPT AI investment boom and has renewed scrutiny of "AI washing"—the trend of rebranding manual services as artificial intelligence to secure funding.© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
    #startup #backed #microsoft #revealed #indian
    AI Startup Backed by Microsoft Revealed to Be 700 Indian Employees Pretending to Be Chatbots
    A Microsoft-backed AI startup that relied on hundreds of human workers posing as chatbots has collapsed into bankruptcy amid fraud allegations. ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP via Getty Images A once-hyped AI startup backed by Microsoft has filed for bankruptcy after it was revealed that its so-called artificial intelligence was actually hundreds of human workers in India pretending to be chatbots.Builder.ai, a London-based company previously valued at billion, marketed its platform as an AI-powered solution that made building apps as simple as ordering pizza. Its virtual assistant, "Natasha," was supposed to generate software using artificial intelligence.In reality, nearly 700 engineers in India were manually coding customer requests behind the scenes, the Times of India reported.The ruse began to collapse in May when lender Viola Credit seized million from the company's accounts, uncovering that Builder.ai had inflated its 2024 revenue projections by 300%. An audit revealed the company generated just million in revenue, far below the million it claimed to investors.A Wall Street Journal report from 2019 had already questioned Builder.ai's AI claims, and a former executive sued the company that same year for allegedly misleading investors and overstating its technical capabilities.Despite that, the company raised over million from big names including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority. Builder.ai's collapse has triggered a federal investigation in the U.S., with prosecutors in New York requesting financial documents and customer records.Founder Sachin Dev Duggal stepped down earlier this year and was replaced by Manpreet Ratia, who reportedly uncovered the company's internal misrepresentations.The company now owes millions to Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing costs and has laid off around 1,000 employees. On LinkedIn, the company announced its entry into insolvency proceedings, citing "historic challenges and past decisions" that strained its finances.The fallout is seen as one of the biggest failures of the post-ChatGPT AI investment boom and has renewed scrutiny of "AI washing"—the trend of rebranding manual services as artificial intelligence to secure funding.© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. #startup #backed #microsoft #revealed #indian
    WWW.LATINTIMES.COM
    AI Startup Backed by Microsoft Revealed to Be 700 Indian Employees Pretending to Be Chatbots
    A Microsoft-backed AI startup that relied on hundreds of human workers posing as chatbots has collapsed into bankruptcy amid fraud allegations. ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP via Getty Images A once-hyped AI startup backed by Microsoft has filed for bankruptcy after it was revealed that its so-called artificial intelligence was actually hundreds of human workers in India pretending to be chatbots.Builder.ai, a London-based company previously valued at $1.5 billion, marketed its platform as an AI-powered solution that made building apps as simple as ordering pizza. Its virtual assistant, "Natasha," was supposed to generate software using artificial intelligence.In reality, nearly 700 engineers in India were manually coding customer requests behind the scenes, the Times of India reported.The ruse began to collapse in May when lender Viola Credit seized $37 million from the company's accounts, uncovering that Builder.ai had inflated its 2024 revenue projections by 300%. An audit revealed the company generated just $50 million in revenue, far below the $220 million it claimed to investors.A Wall Street Journal report from 2019 had already questioned Builder.ai's AI claims, and a former executive sued the company that same year for allegedly misleading investors and overstating its technical capabilities.Despite that, the company raised over $445 million from big names including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority. Builder.ai's collapse has triggered a federal investigation in the U.S., with prosecutors in New York requesting financial documents and customer records.Founder Sachin Dev Duggal stepped down earlier this year and was replaced by Manpreet Ratia, who reportedly uncovered the company's internal misrepresentations.The company now owes millions to Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing costs and has laid off around 1,000 employees. On LinkedIn, the company announced its entry into insolvency proceedings, citing "historic challenges and past decisions" that strained its finances.The fallout is seen as one of the biggest failures of the post-ChatGPT AI investment boom and has renewed scrutiny of "AI washing"—the trend of rebranding manual services as artificial intelligence to secure funding.© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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  • Behind the Scenes, Elon Musk Is Reportedly Seething About Donald Trump

    The drama between US president Donald Trump and his former buddy-in-chief Elon Musk is far from over.As ABC reported today, now that he's been summarily retired from the White House, the billionaire SpaceX boss has been privately venting his frustrations at Trump. One particularly stinging betrayal, per the network's reporting: Trump's sudden withdrawal of Musk's buddy and financial benefactor, Jared Isaacman, from consideration to be the next NASA administrator.As the day progressed, Musk's tension with Trump exploded into public view as history's richest man tweeted or amplified no less than 25 posts blasting Trump's "big, beautiful" tax and spending bill, which takes the form of yet another piece of legislation meant to gut assistance for the poorest Americans while siphoning money to the ultra-wealthy.However, that isn't Musk's issue with the package. Instead, his commentary is centered on the bill's impact on the US national deficit — something he tried and failed to curb in any meaningful way during his time as a pay-to-play government operative.On X-formerly-Twitter, Musk's frenzied posts range from Rand Paul interview clips to hysterical conspiracy peddling."Call your Senator, call your Congressman, bankrupting America is NOT ok!" Musk urged his 220 million followers on X-formerly-Twitter. "KILL the BILL."The tech titan also went out of his way to amplify some low-res footage of Warren Buffett explaining his theoretical plan to reduce the deficit. "Anytime there's a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection," the investor suggested, to which Musk replied that "this is the way."Needless to say, a month ago — or even a week — this type of assault on Trump by Musk would have been unthinkable. The bill is also a baffling hill for the tech mogul to die on, especially considering that government spending is what made his tech dynasty possible in the first place. It's more plausible, as Axios notes, that national debt is a smokescreen for other issues nearer to Musk's heart. Most notably, the big beautiful bill is set to cut the electric vehicle tax credits that made Tesla the automotive giant it is today. Of course, that raises another intriguing possibility: that at least some portion of Musk's rage at Trump is essentially kayfabe, with Musk betting that a break from the president could resuscitate at least some enthusiasm for the Tesla brand among the left-leaning customers that he's successfully turned off over the past year.If so, it's not hard to imagine Musk instead accidentally alienating more or less everybody — failing to get the environmental left back on board, but also creating a powerful enemy with Trump, who holds immense power over the government contracts and policy that keep Musk's business empire afloat.More on politics: Elon Musk’s Dad Slams His Son's Whimpering Failure at PoliticsShare This Article
    #behind #scenes #elon #musk #reportedly
    Behind the Scenes, Elon Musk Is Reportedly Seething About Donald Trump
    The drama between US president Donald Trump and his former buddy-in-chief Elon Musk is far from over.As ABC reported today, now that he's been summarily retired from the White House, the billionaire SpaceX boss has been privately venting his frustrations at Trump. One particularly stinging betrayal, per the network's reporting: Trump's sudden withdrawal of Musk's buddy and financial benefactor, Jared Isaacman, from consideration to be the next NASA administrator.As the day progressed, Musk's tension with Trump exploded into public view as history's richest man tweeted or amplified no less than 25 posts blasting Trump's "big, beautiful" tax and spending bill, which takes the form of yet another piece of legislation meant to gut assistance for the poorest Americans while siphoning money to the ultra-wealthy.However, that isn't Musk's issue with the package. Instead, his commentary is centered on the bill's impact on the US national deficit — something he tried and failed to curb in any meaningful way during his time as a pay-to-play government operative.On X-formerly-Twitter, Musk's frenzied posts range from Rand Paul interview clips to hysterical conspiracy peddling."Call your Senator, call your Congressman, bankrupting America is NOT ok!" Musk urged his 220 million followers on X-formerly-Twitter. "KILL the BILL."The tech titan also went out of his way to amplify some low-res footage of Warren Buffett explaining his theoretical plan to reduce the deficit. "Anytime there's a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection," the investor suggested, to which Musk replied that "this is the way."Needless to say, a month ago — or even a week — this type of assault on Trump by Musk would have been unthinkable. The bill is also a baffling hill for the tech mogul to die on, especially considering that government spending is what made his tech dynasty possible in the first place. It's more plausible, as Axios notes, that national debt is a smokescreen for other issues nearer to Musk's heart. Most notably, the big beautiful bill is set to cut the electric vehicle tax credits that made Tesla the automotive giant it is today. Of course, that raises another intriguing possibility: that at least some portion of Musk's rage at Trump is essentially kayfabe, with Musk betting that a break from the president could resuscitate at least some enthusiasm for the Tesla brand among the left-leaning customers that he's successfully turned off over the past year.If so, it's not hard to imagine Musk instead accidentally alienating more or less everybody — failing to get the environmental left back on board, but also creating a powerful enemy with Trump, who holds immense power over the government contracts and policy that keep Musk's business empire afloat.More on politics: Elon Musk’s Dad Slams His Son's Whimpering Failure at PoliticsShare This Article #behind #scenes #elon #musk #reportedly
    FUTURISM.COM
    Behind the Scenes, Elon Musk Is Reportedly Seething About Donald Trump
    The drama between US president Donald Trump and his former buddy-in-chief Elon Musk is far from over.As ABC reported today, now that he's been summarily retired from the White House, the billionaire SpaceX boss has been privately venting his frustrations at Trump. One particularly stinging betrayal, per the network's reporting: Trump's sudden withdrawal of Musk's buddy and financial benefactor, Jared Isaacman, from consideration to be the next NASA administrator.As the day progressed, Musk's tension with Trump exploded into public view as history's richest man tweeted or amplified no less than 25 posts blasting Trump's "big, beautiful" tax and spending bill, which takes the form of yet another piece of legislation meant to gut assistance for the poorest Americans while siphoning money to the ultra-wealthy.However, that isn't Musk's issue with the package. Instead, his commentary is centered on the bill's impact on the US national deficit — something he tried and failed to curb in any meaningful way during his time as a pay-to-play government operative.On X-formerly-Twitter, Musk's frenzied posts range from Rand Paul interview clips to hysterical conspiracy peddling. ("America is in the fast lane to debt slavery," he fomented at one point.)"Call your Senator, call your Congressman, bankrupting America is NOT ok!" Musk urged his 220 million followers on X-formerly-Twitter. "KILL the BILL."The tech titan also went out of his way to amplify some low-res footage of Warren Buffett explaining his theoretical plan to reduce the deficit. "Anytime there's a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection," the investor suggested, to which Musk replied that "this is the way."Needless to say, a month ago — or even a week — this type of assault on Trump by Musk would have been unthinkable. The bill is also a baffling hill for the tech mogul to die on, especially considering that government spending is what made his tech dynasty possible in the first place. It's more plausible, as Axios notes, that national debt is a smokescreen for other issues nearer to Musk's heart. Most notably, the big beautiful bill is set to cut the electric vehicle tax credits that made Tesla the automotive giant it is today. (Confusingly, as recently as last year, Musk was publicly calling for an end to the tax credit — but that was before his activities in the White House eviscerated Tesla's brand image and sent it deeply into the red.)Of course, that raises another intriguing possibility: that at least some portion of Musk's rage at Trump is essentially kayfabe, with Musk betting that a break from the president could resuscitate at least some enthusiasm for the Tesla brand among the left-leaning customers that he's successfully turned off over the past year.If so, it's not hard to imagine Musk instead accidentally alienating more or less everybody — failing to get the environmental left back on board, but also creating a powerful enemy with Trump, who holds immense power over the government contracts and policy that keep Musk's business empire afloat.More on politics: Elon Musk’s Dad Slams His Son's Whimpering Failure at PoliticsShare This Article
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