We tend to dream of a future enabled by miraculous materials—nanoscale honeycomb lattices of strong, ultralight superconducting metals. Carbon nanotubes and graphene come to mind. Fishing line and sewing thread? Not so much. But recent research out of XX shows how miraculous outcomes can be firmly rooted in even the most mundane materials. By twisting fishing line and thread like a rubber band and selectively passing an electric current through it, they were able to produce artificial muscle 100 times stronger than human muscle.
As the science advances, it’s becoming increasingly possible to dispatch robots into war zones alongside or instead of human soldiers. Several military powers, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel and China, are already using partially autonomous weapons in combat and are almost certainly pursuing other advances in private, according to experts.
Stanford University researchers led by civil engineer Mark Jacobson has drawn up detailed plans for each state in the union that show how the United States could move to 100 percent wind, water and solar power by 2050 using only technology that’s already available.
More than ever, the Internet is connecting people to information—if you live in the developed world. According to a recent Pew survey, however, most people in many developing countries are still offline. Broadening Internet access isn’t about building more infrastructure or selling laptops, however. Just as developing countries leapfrogged landlines with cellphones, they'll tap the Internet on mobile connections and affordable smartphones.
It’d been awhile, so we contacted Jason Silva to find out what gets him up in the morning these days. Though he’s added a mainstream audience, Silva seems eager as ever to chase the “adjacent possible” and leap over it into even dreamier domains.
To learn why, among other things, he’s slightly disappointed Google Glass isn’t Scarlett Johansson, why privacy is malleable and mostly overrated, and how femto-scale computing at black hole densities accounts for the eery silence of the universe—read on.
In what they claim is a first, researchers have navigated nanomotors inside living human cells in the lab. The motors — made from gold and ruthenium and ostensibly safe for use inside the body — derive power from ultrasound waves as the sound scatters off the ends of the rod-shaped devices. The ultrasound source can be turned down to pause the motors, and magnetism crudely controls their direction.
Traffic congestion costs the U.S. economy $100 billion a year, according to Winston's research. Roughly 30,000 people die every year in car accidents, and many more are injured. Could self-driving cars bring those numbers down?
Google is on a mission to update the web's wiring—and they're not talking a decade or more to do it. The firm's CFO, Patrick Pichette, recently said his firm is working to boost internet speeds a thousand fold in the next three years. "That's where the world is going. It's going to happen." The project is called Google Fiber and, though it's in just three cities so far, an additional 34 cities in nine metro areas may be approved for Fiber by yearend.
Researchers used MRI and CT scans of rabbit and human hearts to 3D-print custom fitting flexible mesh sacs that fitted each heart perfectly and stayed in place as it beat. The mesh holds sensors and electrodes precisely in place and could deliver drug therapies.
The benefits of modern medicine are clear. Lower infant mortality; longer life expectancy; a range of once killer diseases all but eradicated—fewer leeches. But challenges? Yes, there are still plenty of those too. In a recent conversation, Dr. Daniel Kraft, Medicine and Neuroscience Chair at Singularity University, told Singularity Hub that the US spends some 18% of gross domestic product on healthcare and yet, according to a 2013 report, ranks 17th on a list of 17 developed countries by outcome.
In early January, Planet Labs sent 28 satellites to the international space station; earlier this month, NASA began deploying them into orbit. Sixteen of the toaster-sized satellites are already sending photos back to Earth, and the company hopes the fleet will revolutionize satellite imaging.
Worried about the impending robot takeover? Maybe you should be. Once confined to specific tasks, automatons are now capable of activities we tend to think...
Netflix has tried a number of different ways to improve its recommendations, and it recently announced that it is increasingly using artificial intelligence to do so. But Netflix isn’t buying all the computing power to build an artificial intelligence system for itself. Instead, Netflix will host its efforts right on competitor Amazon’s cloud.
Beginning in 2012, the U.S. Border Patrol has turned to robots to help it find and search the tunnels smugglers use to get drugs into the United States from Mexico.
So video games are addictive—this we know.
It comes down to dopamine, one of the brain’s basic signaling molecules. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as pleasure, engagement, excitement,...
Stanford’s Helen Blau, director of the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology, studies a banal, but also ubiquitous, use of stem cells in the body: helping muscles repair themselves. The lab's most recent findings suggest that stem cell therapy could be used to help older patients recover from muscular injuries, for example from falls, or perhaps even weakness following surgery.
China has been vilified in recent years for stealing US manufacturing jobs, as have the multinationals increasing assembling products there. One reason for the outsourcing, if not its vilification, is a rational one—Chinese factory workers demand and require lower wages than do their American counterparts. In an interesting twist, however, Foxconn, the notorious Chinese manufacturer of all things Apple, recently announced they’re opening a factory in Pennsylvania.
Scientists at the University of Malta think touch screens are for suckers. Mind-controlled devices? Now, that’s where it’s at. Outfitted in an electrode-studded cap, users of the group’s specially designed music software are able to play a song, fast forward tracks, and adjust the volume by merely looking at the screen.
IBM recently announced that it will invest in a research program in Africa to improve water and sanitation, agriculture, healthcare and education on the continent using its artificial intelligence platform, Watson.
Robot fear outsells robot awe and wonder every time. It’s very nearly axiomatic. But if you need proof, go to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where two 8-foot robots are directing traffic. The automatons are little more than traffic lights dressed up as campy 1960s robots—and yet everyone obeys them. This is significant because the Congolese drivers completely failed to obey the humans previously directing traffic there.
3D printing is increasingly an essential part of industrial processes. But for those lacking digital design experience and who aren’t daily fabricating rocket motors or bike parts—essential isn’t quite the word. MIT Media Lab’s Matter.io is on a mission to lure in the masses with user-friendly design software; software that vastly simplifies 3D modeling.
With a test group of 16 of the most dire cases of adult B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or B-ALL, a cell therapy approach that boosts the patient's own immune system managed to guide nearly 90 percent into complete remission.
A system of robots built by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering demonstrates that robots can build human-scale buildings working independently with a set of simple rules.
A fatal car crash in Hartford, Connecticut, would have been little more than a blip on local news programs but for one thing: The police spotted a drone flying around the accident. With the FAA actively trying to determine how to regulate the civilian use of drones, everything about the accident then became news. But, as an indication of how little the public understands the issues related to drones, news reports got most of it wrong.
The adoption of new technologies is accelerating, and nowhere is the trend more obvious than in mobile computing. It took telephones some 45 years to enter mainstream use in the US. Mobile phones took seven years. Smartphones just four. Today, according to Cisco’s 2013 global mobile data forecast, there are almost as many mobile devices (7 billion) as there are humans on the planet, and online traffic from these devices in 2013 was 18 times greater than the entire Internet in 2000.
The Irish company Experior Medical aims to make doctors better readers of diagnostic X-ray films by giving them real-world practice on the go on their iPads.
Perhaps in hindsight we all should have seen Google’s turn to robotics coming when, under Andy Rubin, the company dubbed its mobile operating system...
With a former Army medic as one of its founders, RevMedX’s mission is to stop bleeding faster so that those who suffer traumatic injuries like gunshot wounds have a better chance of survival. The company’s high-tech solution to this brutal problem is the sponge.
Cancer Research UK is asking humans to sort through its data to mark genetic areas that have extra copies of a particular chromosome because, it says, humans can see the disparities better than computers. And they're doing it with a mobile game.
3D Systems, a big maker of 3D printers and accessories, recently lowered their profit estimate for 2013 and outlook for 2014—and their stock took a big hit. The decline extended to other leading 3D printing stocks, like Stratasys. Is it a sign of doom and gloom for 3D printing? Has the much-hyped technology finally jumped the shark? Maybe a bit. But the long-term potential is still there.
The Nymi wristband that taps the user’s heartbeat as a biometric marker has said that it will also double as a bitcoin wallet. Is it revolutionary or just a digital twist on cash in pocket wallets?
Dennis Sørensen underwent a month-long clinical trial of a computerized prosthetic hand that established a two-way exchange of information between his brain and sensors in the artificial hand that allowed him to feel for the first time in a decade.
I’m sitting in a café with some forty other people. Most us are working on a laptop, and each laptop has a camera. In fact, many of my café coworkers also have a smartphone. These devices have a camera. Most have two. While there’s something like 100+ cameras within twenty feet of me, few of them are likely recording. But a (not-so-new) movement would change that. It’s called lifelogging, and if you have geekish tendencies, you’ve likely heard of it.
The Harvard SEAS Connectome Group is building a color-coded three-dimensional map from scans of paper-thin slices of a mouse brain, and the map comes to life in a recent National Geographic video.
An industrial 3D printer hums to life at bicycle maker, Trek. The designers are prototyping a new hand grip of soft rubber layered over a core of hard plastic. Traditionally, the print job would require the designers to switch print nozzles and materials or to compromise the design to speed things along. However, Trek is one of the first firms to employ the multi-material, color Stratasys Objet500 Connex3 3D printer. And their new grip can go from design to printed prototype in a single step.
Even cars that retain their human drivers despite growing numbers of self-driving vehicles will gain automated safe-driving features in the United States, according to an announcement this week that U.S. federal agencies will encourage vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V, communication technology for passenger vehicles. The proposal relates to a kind of internet in which the connected computers are cars and trucks sharing data about speed, position and nearby traffic signals ten times a second in order to reduce accidents.
Douglas Scharre, an Ohio State University neurologist, has developed a cognitive test that’s cheap and easy and can be administered to large groups of people at once. Particularly since as many as 4 in 10 cases of dementia stem from issues other than Alzheimer’s disease, some eminently treatable, the elderly stand to gain quite a bit from getting regular cognitive check-ups. But, for the most part, they don’t.
The idea that household appliances need Internet-connected capabilities has always seemed over the top. Take the example of Samsung’s infamous “smart fridge.” Debuted at...
In the last six years, sequencing costs have far outpaced Moore’s Law, falling four orders of magnitude from $10 million at the end of 2007 to under $5,000 at the end of 2013. And in early 2014? Illumina, a manufacturer of sequencers, just announced their HighSeq X Ten can sequence 18,000 genomes per year for $1,000 per genome.
Some of us are more prone to misplacing items than others, but we’ve probably all lost something small and important at some point. Never fear. A more connected, smarter future has you covered. In this case, it’s by way of a small, white square called Tile.
Thanks to a few thoughtful individuals and a 3D printer, Dudley the duck has a new lease on life. Still a duckling, Dudley and his siblings were placed in a cage at an animal shelter with some aggressive chickens. In a fight that left his siblings dead, Dudley’s leg was seriously injured and had to be amputated. The shelter’s owner, Brandon Schweitser, coaches jiu jitsu on the side. One of his students, Terence Loring, runs a 3D design company called 3D Pillar. Schweitser asked Loring whether he might design a new leg for Dudley.
New research has found a way to develop the malleable stem cells using a much simpler method than the one that earned the 2012 Nobel Prize. In a paper published in Nature, researchers from Harvard University and Japan’s RIKEN Center show that by simply giving an adult cell an acid bath, they can convert it into a stem cell.
Google continued a spree of recent acquisitions earlier this week with its £400-million acquisition of the London-based artificial intelligence company, DeepMind. There’s no doubt about it: Google is expanding its view of software’s role in the world, venturing into self-driving cars, humanoid robots and health care. But its DeepMind acquisition is, in many ways, just more business as usual.
Efforts to devise better, cheaper tests are nothing new, but Rice University researcher Dmitri Lapotko has developed the first bloodless, instant test for the disease. According to a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lapotko's test is accurate enough to detect a single infected red blood cell in 800 with no false positives.
The world has long had robots. Lots of them. Robotic arms live in factories, tirelessly assembling heavy things, cutting through metal (like butter)—and generally doing some pretty dangerous and crucial work. Robotic arms are pretty amazing. And now you can assemble and mount your very own robotic arm on your desk, nightstand, or kitchen counter for a Kickstarter pledge of $185.
