Yearly Archives: 2018

Why the Future of Solar Power Is from Space

Over seven decades ago in 1941, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story, “Reason” (PDF), in which energy captured from the sun was transmitted via...

The Most Surprising Tech Breakthroughs of 2018

Development across the entire information technology landscape certainly didn’t slow down this year. From CRISPR babies, to the rapid decline of the crypto markets,...

Singularity Hub’s Top Articles of the Year

2018 was a big year for science and technology. The first gene-edited babies were born, as were the first cloned monkeys. SpaceX successfully launched...

How AR and VR Will Shape the Future of Work and Play

How we work and play is about to transform. After a prolonged technology “winter”—or what I like to call the ‘deceptive growth’ phase of any...

The Milestones of Human Progress We Reached in 2018

When you look back at 2018, do you see a good or a bad year? Chances are, your perception of the year involves fixating...

Quantum Communication Just Took a Great Leap Forward

Researchers in the field of quantum communication have recently made great strides, taking us closer to a perfectly secure method of communication. For years, researchers...

Nvidia’s Fake Faces Are a Masterpiece—But Have Deeper Implications

‘Don’t believe everything you see on the internet’ is pretty standard advice, but it’s getting harder than ever to distinguish the real from the...

Eating, Hacked: When Tech Took Over Food

In 2018, Uber and Google logged all our visits to restaurants. Doordash, Just Eat, and Deliveroo could predict what food we were going to...

Educating the Wise Cyborgs of the Future

When we think of wisdom, we often think of ancient philosophers, mystics, or spiritual leaders. Wisdom is associated with the past. Yet some intellectual...

This Drone Seamlessly Transitions Between Swimming and Flying

It isn’t unreasonable to think of drones as pesky technological nuisances. Our modern digital ecosystem regularly infringes on traditional notions of privacy and bombards...

Virgin Galactic’s Spaceflight and the Power of Grit

Moonshots are hard. Sometimes they take decades, or cost billions of dollars, and sometimes they take human life. Early this week, I jumped in my plane...

Life-or-Death Algorithms: Avoiding the Black Box of AI in Medicine

When it comes to applications for machine learning, few can be more widely hyped than medicine. This is hardly surprising: it’s a huge industry...

First Successful Pig-to-Baboon Heart Transplant Heralds Human Trials

An oddity of an animal lived and thrived in a lab at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich in the past few years. On...

Will Electric Planes Ever Happen? Here’s an Update on Their Status

In 2015, airlines burned through 276 million tons of jet fuel. That's roughly 7 percent of global oil products, and leads to direct emissions...

Saving the Seas: New Technologies to Protect the Ocean

The ocean covers more than 70 percent of our planet’s surface. The Pacific alone is more than 60 million square miles. And yet, technologists...

The Next Great Leap Forward? Combining Robots With the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is a popular vision of objects with internet connections sending information back and forth to make our lives easier and...

Whale-Watching from Space: Why Satellites Are Monitoring Wildlife

A new study of whales shows that advances in satellite imagery and related technologies mean we can now recognize specific features of animals all...

How the Spatial Web Will Transform Every Element of Our Careers

What is the future of work? Is our future one of ‘technological socialism’ (where technology is taking care of our needs)? Or is our...

Disrupting Reproduction: Two New Advances in Tech-Assisted Baby-Making

Last week, news of CRISPR-engineered babies launched a firestorm of debate on the future of human reproduction: Is it safe? Is it ethical? Do...

How DeepMind’s AlphaZero Mastered Complex Games With No Human Input

It’s the end of an era in AI research. For decades complex board games like Go, chess, and shogi have been seen as the...

Are We Made of Memories? A Researcher’s Quest to Record His Life

How well do you remember what happened last week? Two weeks ago? Five weeks from last Tuesday? Unless you are meticulous in recording the...

Switching to Electric Vehicles Could Save the US Billions, But Timing Is Everything

Today, less than two percent of the vehicles Americans buy are electric. But within the next three decades, some automotive industry experts expect electric...

A Smartphone App and 3D Printed Attachment for HIV Detection

There are more than 1.1 million people in the US living with HIV, and 1 in 7 of them don’t even know they have...

The Promise—and Complications—of Domestic Robots

Every year, for just a few days in a major city, a small team of roboticists get to live the dream: ordering around their...

Research in Zero Gravity: 6 Wild Projects on the International Space Station

It’s been 20 years since the first components of the International Space Station (ISS) were launched from Earth. Orbiting the planet every 90 minutes...

CRISPR Babies: Stumbling Over Mankind’s Next Giant Leap

During the last weekend in November, MIT Tech Review broke a world-changing story: the birth of the first children to have undergone gene editing...

Welcome to the CRISPR Baby World—Here’s What You Should Know

Last week, the gene editing world was hit by news the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. In a video on YouTube, Dr. Jiankui He at...

Britain Is Developing an AI-Powered Predictive Policing System

The tantalizing prospect of predicting crime before it happens has got law enforcement agencies excited about AI. Most efforts so far have focused on...

The Surprising Parallels Between Netflix’s ‘Maniac’ and Real-Life Therapy Tech

The human mind can be a confusing and overwhelming place. Despite incredible leaps in human progress, many of us still struggle to make our...

How Blockchain Is Changing Computer Gaming

Ripples of change are starting to spread throughout the $108.9 billion computer gaming industry, as blockchain technology looks set to change core aspects of...

Inspired by Sci-Fi, an Airplane With No Moving Parts and a Blue Ionic Glow

Since their invention more than 100 years ago, airplanes have been moved through the air by the spinning surfaces of propellers or turbines. But...

How One Researcher Is Using VR to Help Our Eyes Adapt to Seeing in Space

It’s not like moon-walking astronauts don’t already have plenty of hazards to deal with. There’s less gravity, extreme temperatures, radiation—and the whole place is...

Paralyzed Patients Can Now Control Android Tablets With Their Minds

Patient T6 was barely middle-aged when she began losing muscle function. A talented musician with a love for red lipstick, T6 was diagnosed with Amyotrophic...

Would a Universal Genetic Database Be a Crime-Solving Wonder, Or an Orwellian Nightmare?

The privacy of our DNA is being increasingly eroded, a phenomenon highlighted by the rash of criminal cases recently solved using publicly-accessible genomic data....

Incepting Sight? This Brain Implant Lets Blind Patients “See” Letters

For most of us, “eyes” are synonymous with “sight”: whatever our eyes capture, we perceive. Yet under the hood, eyes are only the first step...

How Small Tech Tweaks Can Have a Big Impact on Our Conversations

After Twitter extended its character limit from 140 to 280 in November 2017, there was a bit of an uproar. Stephen King and JK...

What Happens to the Brain in Zero Gravity?

NASA has made a commitment to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. This is an ambitious goal when you think that a typical...

Digital Authoritarianism Is Rising. Here’s What That Means

The internet has long been touted as a force for freedom that can topple dictatorships around the world. But according to a new report...

Thanksgiving Food for Thought: The Tech Helping Make Food Abundant

With the Thanksgiving holiday upon us, it’s a great time to reflect on the future of food. Over the last few years, we have...

How the Spatial Web Will Fix What’s Broken About the Internet

Converging exponential technologies will transform media, advertising and the retail world. The world we see, through our digitally-enhanced eyes, will multiply and explode with...

It’s Time For an Airport Security Tech Upgrade

We’re in the midst of one of the busiest weeks of the year for air travel, with 30.6 million passengers expected to fly on...

Managing the Unintended Consequences of Technology

Last month, I attended the first annual Unintended Consequences of Technology (or UCOT) in San Francisco. I can’t say enough about the high quality...

The SpiNNaker Supercomputer, Modeled After the Human Brain, Is Up and Running

We've long used the brain as inspiration for computers, but the SpiNNaker supercomputer, switched on this month, is probably the closest we’ve come to...

Follow the Data? Investigative Journalism in the Age of Algorithms

You probably have a picture of a typical investigative journalist in your head. Dogged, persistent, he digs through paper trails by day and talks...

Sci-Fi Movies Are the Secret Weapon That Could Help Silicon Valley Grow Up

If there’s one line that stands the test of time in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic Jurassic Park, it’s probably Jeff Goldblum’s exclamation, “Your scientists...

The Spatial Web Will Map Our 3D World—And Change Everything In the Process

The boundaries between digital and physical space are disappearing at a breakneck pace. What was once static and boring is becoming dynamic and magical. For...

How Quantum Computing is Enabling Breakthroughs in Chemistry

Note: Mark Jackson is Scientific Lead of Business Development at Cambridge Quantum Computing  Quantum computing is expected to solve computational questions that cannot be addressed...

Why Scientists Are Rushing to Catalog the World’s Poop

If a group of scientists is successful, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will be getting a cousin—one that may initially sound rather strange. Instead...

Designer Babies, and Their Babies: How AI and Genomics Will Impact Reproduction

As if stand-alone technologies weren’t advancing fast enough, we’re in age where we must study the intersection points of these technologies. How is what’s...

Ears Grown From Apples? The Promise of Plants for Engineering Human Tissue

Inspiration for game-changing science can seemingly come from anywhere. A moldy bacterial plate gave us the first antibiotic, penicillin. Zapping yeast with a platinum...
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