Monthly Archives: November, 2018

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...

Breaking Out of the Corporate Bubble With Uncommon Partners

For big companies, success is a blessing and a curse. You don’t get big without doing something (or many things) very right. It might...

Hacking the Mind Just Got Easier With These New Tools

For eons, the only way to access the three-pound mushy bio-computer between our ears was to physically crack the skull, or insert a sharp...

5 Technologies Bringing Healthcare Systems into the Future

If you think you’ve got a bad case of the travel bug, get this: Dr. John Halamka travels 400,000 miles a year. That’s equivalent...

How Do We Teach Autonomous Cars To Drive Off the Beaten Path?

Autonomous vehicles can follow the general rules of American roads, recognizing traffic signals and lane markings, noticing crosswalks and other regular features of the...

Clocking the Drugs, Drugging the Clock: The Health Impact Of Circadian Medicine

When it comes to healthcare disruption, technology is often at the center: wearables that track our biological stats, scanners that monitor our internal processes,...

The Fascinating, Creepy New Research in Human Hibernation for Space Travel

No interstellar travel movie is complete without hibernators. From Prometheus to Passengers, we’ve watched protagonists awaken in hibernation pods, rebooting their fragile physiology from...

Using Big Data to Give Patients Control of Their Own Health

Big data, personalized medicine, artificial intelligence. String these three buzzphrases together, and what do you have? A system that may revolutionize the future of healthcare,...

AI Won’t Replace Doctors, It Will Augment Them

The future of medicine is a physician-patient-AI golden triangle, one in which machines augment clinical care and diagnostics—one with the patient at its heart. That...

Custom-Grown Bones, and Other Wild Advances in Regenerative Medicine

The human body has always been an incredible machine, from the grand feats of strength and athleticism it can accomplish down to the fine...

Could Blockchain Voting Fix Democracy? Today, It Gets a Test Run

There’s no shortage of debate about the role tech has played in politics. From misinformation being spread via WhatsApp in Brazil to Facebook becoming...

Y Combinator’s Search For a Climate Change Unicorn

Silicon Valley's premier tech incubator, Y Combinator, has decided to take on climate change. They've put out a call for proposals for technology that can suck...

Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine Kicks Off Today in San Diego

Technology is enabling us to explore groundbreaking new ideas in medicine, and as a result the medical field is advancing more rapidly than ever...

Our Voting System Is Hackable. Here’s How to Secure It

The November 6, 2018 midterm elections are being widely regarded as a referendum on President Trump, but they will also serve another, less obvious...

Why Our Current Energy Transition Is Both Unprecedented and Urgent

The combustion of oil, gas, and coal have made possible a much higher standard of living for humans through radical innovations in technology and...

How Virtual Reality Can Transform Who You Are

In virtual reality, as far as our brains are concerned, it’s quite possible to become an entirely different person. At VR Days Europe, an annual...
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