Yearly Archives: 2020

Forget Your Five-Year Plan: What If We Visualized Humanity’s Future in Centuries, Millennia, and Beyond?

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” It’s a classic job interview question, designed to probe your level of ambition and aspiration. And...

‘WTF?’: Newly Discovered Ghostly Circles in the Sky Can’t Be Explained by Current Theories, and Astronomers Are Excited

In September 2019, my colleague Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she’d found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had...

Fighting Covid-19 Brought These Lasting Breakthroughs to Science and Medicine

2020 was the year of the pandemic. But the arrival of Covid-19 in January not only threw an Earth-sized wrench into our lives, it...

New IBM Research Means We Could Soon Train Neural Networks on a Smartphone

The neural networks that power today’s AI are incredibly powerful, but training them can require entire server farms and huge amounts of energy. A...

How a Software Map of the Entire Planet Could Change the World Forever

i “3D map data is the scaffolding of the 21st century.” –Edward Miller, Founder, Scape Technologies, UK Covered in cameras, sensors, and a distinctly spaceship looking...

These Were the 15 Most-Read Singularity Hub Stories of 2020

Most Saturdays we post a curated collection of our favorite articles from the week. But with the year nearing its end, this Saturday and...

Anthropocene: Human-Made Materials Now Weigh as Much as All Living Biomass, Say Scientists

Our deficiencies have always driven us, even among our distant ancestors, back in the last Ice Age. Having neither the speed and strength to...

Amazon’s New Robotaxi Has No Steering Wheel, But It Can Drive for 16 Hours Straight

After almost a year of limiting our contact with the people in our lives and humanity in general, it’s hard to imagine a future...

2020 in Neuroscience, Longevity, and AI—and What’s to Come

Covid-19 sucked most of the oxygen out of science this year. But we still had brilliant wins. The pandemic couldn’t bring rockets or humans down:...

Autonomous Ravn X Drone to Launch Satellites From Airport Runways

Huntsville Alabama’s Lowe Mill arts and entertainment center offers studios to artists of all kinds—sculptors, bookbinders, woodworkers. It’s the kind of place where, in...

QuantumScape’s New Solid-State Battery Is Twice as Energy-Dense as Lithium-Ion

The biggest barriers to widespread adoption of electric vehicles are their limited range and long charging times compared to gasoline cars. But the release...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 19)

HEALTH How Science Beat the Virus Ed Yong | The Atlantic "Much like famous initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, epidemics focus the...

Future Cities: New Challenges Mean We Need to Reimagine the Look of Urban Landscapes

Imagining future cities has long been a favorite activity for architects, artists, and designers. Technology is often central in these schemes—it appears as a...

SpaceX Starship Prototype Exploded, but It’s Still a Giant Leap Towards Mars

Private company SpaceX launched SN8, a prototype of its Starship spacecraft, designed to go to the moon and Mars, on December 10. Its short...

Algorithms for Love: Japan Will Soon Launch an AI Dating Service

Every year for the last 13 years, Japan’s population has shrunk. The country has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, and...

DeepMind’s AlphaFold Is Close to Solving One of Biology’s Greatest Challenges

DeepMind may just have cracked one of the grandest challenges in biology. One that rivals the discovery of DNA’s double helix. It could change...

New Deep Learning Method Helps Robots Become Jacks-of-all-Trades

One of the biggest things standing in the way of the robot revolution is their inability to adapt. That may be about to change...

Why the Price of New Solar Electricity Fell an Incredible 89% in the Last Decade

In 1956, an early demonstration of solar photovoltaics produced a watt of energy for the modest price of an inflation-adjusted $1,865. Put another way,...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 12)

ENVIRONMENT Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth Stephanie Pappas | Scientific American "Humanity has reached a new milestone in its dominance of the planet: human-made...

Europe’s Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots

From cultured meat to plant-based foods to robotic kitchen assistants, tech seems to be infiltrating every corner of our food system. And it’s a...

Lunar Gold Rush Could Create Conflict on the Ground if We Don’t Act Now—New Research

When it comes to the moon, everyone wants the same things. Not in the sense of having shared goals, but in the sense that...

This Wild Electric Car Needs Little Charging, Because It Runs Partly on Sunshine

The number of miles electric cars can go on a single charge is slowly climbing, but it’s still almost invariably less than how far...

How Does Social Interaction Change Our Brains? Hyperscans Can Show Us

Brain scans, like social distancing, are inherently very lonely. Regardless of the equipment, brain scans often rely on a single person performing a single task,...

Scientists Beamed Shapes and Motion Directly Into Monkeys’ Brains Using Light

Being able to beam images directly into someone's brain could help restore sight to the blind and open up a host of new possibilities...

New Quantum Computer in China Claims Quantum Advantage With Light

The amazing thing about quantum computers isn't that they’re currently revolutionizing computers as we know them. The machines are still clunky, finicky, expensive, and...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 5)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 'It Will Change Everything': DeepMind's AI Makes Gigantic Leap in Solving Protein Structures Ewen Callaway | Nature "In some cases, AlphaFold's structure predictions were indistinguishable...

Not All Sunshine and Rainbows: Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Take on Inclement Weather

How do you train self-driving software to safely pilot a vehicle through city streets? There are a few options; the first that probably springs to...

After 1.5 Billion Years in Flux, Here’s How a New, Stronger Crust Set the Stage for Life on Earth

Our planet is unique in the solar system. It’s the only one with active plate tectonics, ocean basins, continents and, as far as we...

Breakthrough NASA Study Discovers Surprising Key to Astronauts’ Health in Space

Thanks to SpaceX, traveling beyond Earth now seems pretty tangible for us commoners. True, a ticket to the International Space Station currently runs $55 million...

As Algorithms Take Over More of the Economy, We Should Cede Control (Very) Carefully

Algorithms play an increasingly prominent part in our lives, governing everything from the news we see to the products we buy. As they proliferate,...

Is the Pandemic Spurring a Robot Revolution?

"Are robots really destined to take over restaurant kitchens?" This was the headline of an article published by Eater four years ago. One of...

How Much Do Our Genes Restrict Free Will?

Many of us believe we are masters of our own destiny, but new research is revealing the extent to which our behavior is influenced...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 28)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything? Dennis Overbye | The New York Times "Computer programs like DeepMind’s AlphaGo keep discovering new ways to...

Solar Power Stations in Space Could Be the Answer to Our Energy Needs

It sounds like science fiction: giant solar power stations floating in space that beam down enormous amounts of energy to Earth. And for a...

This Company Wants to Put a Human-Size Hologram Booth in Your Living Room

Over the last several months we’ve gotten very used to communicating via video chat. Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, and the like have not only...

Another Win for Senolytics: Fighting Aging at the Cellular Level Just Got Easier

Longevity research always reminds me of the parable of blind men and an elephant. A group of blind men, who’ve never seen an elephant...

MIT Report: Robots Aren’t the Biggest Threat to the Future of Work—Policy Is

Fears of a robot-driven jobs apocalypse are a recurring theme in the media. But a new report from MIT has found that technology is...

The Trillion-Transistor Chip That Just Left a Supercomputer in the Dust

The history of computer chips is a thrilling tale of extreme miniaturization. The smaller, the better is a trend that’s given birth to the digital...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 21)

HEALTH Larry Brilliant Says We'll Beat Covid—After We Go Through Hell Steven Levy | Wired "The epidemiologist calls it 'the best of times and the worst of...

Who Should Get a Covid-19 Vaccine First?

If the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, as Galileo once declared, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought that truth home...

A 3D Printed Apartment Building Is Going Up in Germany

3D printing is making strides in the construction industry. In just a couple years we’ve seen the tech produce single-family homes in a day,...

McDonald’s Is Making a Plant-Based Burger; You Can Try It in 2021

Fast-food chains have been doing what they can in recent years to health-ify their menus. For better or worse, burgers, fries, fried chicken, roast...

This Is How We’ll Engineer Artificial Touch

Take a Jeopardy! guess: this body part was once referred to as the “consummation of all perfection as an instrument.” Answer: “What is the human...

90% of the Global Power Capacity Added in 2020 Will Be Renewable

There’s been plenty of hand-wringing about the potential for the Covid-19 pandemic to distract from the ongoing fight against climate change. But the latest...

Will the Coronavirus Evolve to Be Less Deadly?

No lethal pandemic lasts forever. The 1918 flu, for example, crisscrossed the globe and claimed tens of millions of lives, yet by 1920, the...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 14)

COMPUTING Like a Futuristic Phone Booth, PORTL Lets You Communicate Via Full-Body Hologram Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends " wants to reinvent the way we beam people,...

Smart Concrete Could Pave the Way for High-Tech, Cost-Effective Roads

Every day, Americans travel on roads, bridges, and highways without considering the safety or reliability of these structures. Yet much of the transportation infrastructure...

How the Ownership Economy Could Make Internet Platforms Work for Everyone

The way we transact with each other and conduct business has changed a lot in the last 10 years. For some of us it’s hard...

You Can Buy This Electric Car for $7,999 in California

A tiny electric car that costs just $4,200 has been all the rage in China this year. The Wuling Hong Guang Mini EV generated...

Why We Need a Collective Vision to Design the Future of Health

My mother died of Covid-19 at the age of 91. She was recovering from surgery in an assisted-living facility in Durham, North Carolina. While...
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