Yearly Archives: 2018

This DeepMind AI Spontaneously Developed Digital Navigation ‘Neurons’ Like Ours

When Google DeepMind researchers trained a neural network to tackle a virtual maze, it spontaneously developed digital equivalents to the specialized neurons called grid...

Why the Discovery of Room-Temperature Superconductors Would Unleash Amazing Technologies

Superconductors are among the most bizarre and exciting materials yet discovered. Counterintuitive quantum-mechanical effects mean that, below a critical temperature, they have zero electrical...

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

ROBOTICS Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini Robot Dog Goes on Sale in 2019 Stephen Shankland | CNET “The company has 10 SpotMini prototypes now and will work with manufacturing...

From Drone Swarms to Tree Batteries, New Tech Is Revolutionizing Ecology and Conservation

Understanding Earth’s species and ecosystems is a monumentally challenging scientific pursuit. But with the planet in the grip of its sixth mass extinction event,...

5 Space Companies Zeroing in on First Launch of Tourists Into Orbit and Beyond

It won’t be cheap, but your holiday plans could include a trip to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere or beyond—before the end of this...

How to Leverage the Power of Science Fiction for Exponential Innovation

“The only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing.” –Peter Diamandis Many of today’s biggest companies will no longer exist in 10...

Holograms Can Now Program Brain Activity—Are Fake Experiences Next?

Optogenetics, neuroscience’s hottest mind-control tool, just got a major update. Projecting 3D-light holograms—yes, holograms!—directly onto a mouse’s cortex, engineers at UC Berkeley instantaneously gained control...

Will Europe’s Looming Tech Rules Prove to Be a Template for the World?

There was a time when people bought most of the software on their computer, but this is, of course, now ancient history. Some software...

Self-Driving Cars Navigate Unmapped Country Roads With New MIT System

Self-driving cars are now a regular fixture in some American cities, but they are heavily reliant on high-precision 3D maps of the roads. That...

This New Startup Will Use CRISPR as a Search Engine to Hunt Down Diseases

By now, you’ve heard of CRISPR—the bacterial self-defense mechanism that can be used to modify the genome. From “biohackers” building the hype by injecting...

Leapfrogging Tech Is Changing Millions of Lives. Here’s How

Walking through any city in the US, you may not notice the evidence of centuries of technological progress around you. From the power lines...

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

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE How Can We Be Sure AI Will Behave? Perhaps by Watching It Argue with Itself. Will Knight | MIT Technology Review “Having AI programs argue...

Delivering VR in Perfect Focus With Nanostructure Meta-lenses

If wearing a virtual reality or augmented reality headset is ever to become commonplace, hardware manufacturers will need to figure out how to make...

Is the Secret to Significantly Longer Life Hidden in Our Cells?

Once upon a time, a powerful Sumerian king named Gilgamesh went on a quest, as such characters often do in these stories of myth...

CRISPR-on-a-Chip For Diagnosing Cancer May Soon Be a Thing

Oh CRISPR, how you’ve grown. From an obscure part of the bacterial immune defense system, you’re now on track to cure genetic diseases, thwart...

3 Major Shifts Are About to Transform Manufacturing as We Know It

We are on the verge of transforming one of society’s most fundamental building blocks: manufacturing. As new technologies enable manufacturers to customize everything, these same agents...

New Tech Marries the Best of Photonics and Electronics on the Same Silicon Chip

Optical communication has revolutionized long-distance data transfer, but scaling it down to microchips is tougher. Now, though, a new technique means optical components can...

Stuff 3.0: The Era of Programmable Matter

It’s the end of a long day in your apartment in the early 2040s. You decide your work is done for the day, stand...

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

CRYPTOCURRENCY Let's Destroy Bitcoin  Morgan Peck | MIT Technology Review "No one can copy an individual bitcoin, but anyone can copy the idea of Bitcoin. So how...

Scientists Discover How to Harness the Power of Quantum Spookiness by Entangling Clouds of Atoms

From tunneling through impenetrable barriers to being in two places at the same time, the quantum world of atoms and particles is famously bizarre....

A Data Storage Revolution? DNA Can Store Near Limitless Data in Almost Zero Space

In the age of big data, we are quickly producing far more digital information than we can possibly store. Last year, $20 billion was spent...

How Large Organizations Can Embrace Innovation in Digital Health

In an interview at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine in San Diego, Eugene Borukhovich described how big companies like his can better embrace digital health technologies. Borukhovich is the...

How Fukushima Changed Japanese Robotics and Woke Up the Industry

In March 2011, Japan was hit by a catastrophic earthquake that triggered a terrible tsunami. Thousands were killed and billions of dollars of damage...

China Plans to Bring Artificial Rain to Area Three Times the Size of Spain

Artificial rain is set to fall on mountainous plains three times the size of Spain. At least, that’s the plan for China’s latest weather...

Robots Can Swim, Fetch, Lift, and Dance. But Can They Assemble an Ikea Chair?

Robotics has come a long way in the past few years. Robots can now fetch items from specific spots in massive warehouses, swim through...

Tech Optimists See a Golden Future—Let’s Talk About How We’ll Get There

Technology evangelists dream about a future where we’re all liberated from the more mundane aspects of our jobs by artificial intelligence. Other futurists go...

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

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Pedro Domingos on the Arms Race in Artificial Intelligence Christoph Scheuermann and Bernhard Zand | Spiegel Online “AI lowers the cost of knowledge by orders...

Your Next Pilot Could Be Drone Software

Would you get on a plane that didn’t have a human pilot in the cockpit? Half of air travelers surveyed in 2017 said they...

How Thought Leadership Inspires Action With Ideas

Denise Brosseau believes that leading in today’s complicated world requires clarity of intention, voice, and focus. In essence, it requires thought leadership. In Denise’s...

Mini-Brains Just Grew Their Own Blood Vessels—Here’s Why That’s Great News

If you ever put a brain through a Picasso filter, you’d probably get something close to a brain ball. When brain balls first hit the...

An Innovator’s City Guide to São Paulo, Brazil

The tenth-largest city in the world and the largest in the Americas, São Paulo is a unique place. Its size, diversity, and energy outweigh...

10 Amazing Things You Can Learn From Your Poop

Hardly a day goes by without a research study or article published talking sh*t—or more precisely, talking about the gut microbiome. When it comes...

This Startup Is Training AI to Gobble Up the News and Rewrite It Free of Bias

Bias in journalism is nothing new, but there are growing concerns technology is pushing us into echo chambers where we only hear one side...

Tiny Tooth Sensor Tracks What You Eat, and It Could Help You Be Healthier

The South Beach diet. The Atkins diet. Eating paleo. Cutting out gluten. Going vegan. The list of fad diets and health crazes goes on,...

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

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI Learns a New Trick: Measuring Brain Cells Robbie Gonzalez | Wired “For three months, I spent three or four hours a day, five or...

Robot Cities: Three Urban Prototypes for Future Living

Before I started working on real-world robots, I wrote about their fictional and historical ancestors. This isn’t so far removed from what I do...

How Will Merging Minds and Machines Change Our Conscious Experience?

One of the most exciting and frightening outcomes of technological advancement is the potential to merge our minds with machines. If achieved, this would...

MIT’s New Voiceless Interface Can Read the Words in Your Head

The way we interact with the technology in our lives is getting progressively more seamless. If typing terms or addresses into your phone wasn’t...

This Memory Prosthesis Boosts Recall in Humans by Roughly 40 Percent

This one’s for the books: in a jaw-dropping study, a team just turned the human brain from a read-only memory device to a rewritable...

How Big Is the Gap Between ‘Ready Player One’ and Current VR Tech?

Steven Spielberg's blockbuster Ready Player One depicts a future where VR technology can transport people into a completely realistic alternate universe. But how close...

Can We Make a Musical Turing Test?

As artificial intelligence advances, we’re encountering the same old questions. How much of what we consider to be fundamentally human can be reduced to...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 7)

CYBERNETICS A Brain-Boosting Prosthesis Moves From Rats to Humans Robbie Gonzalez | WIRED “Today, their proof-of-concept prosthetic lives outside a patient's head and connects to the brain...

Astronomers May Have Just Discovered a Dozen Black Holes in the Center of Our Galaxy

Astronomers first noticed an enigmatic object, dubbed “Sagittarius A*”, at the very heart of our Milky Way galaxy in the 1960s—the earliest days of...

Dungeons and Dragons, Not Chess and Go: Why AI Needs Roleplay

Everyone had died—not that you’d know it, from how they were laughing about their poor choices and bad rolls of the dice. As a...

New Bionic Arm Blurs Line Between Self and Machine for Wearers

At 29 years old, Canadian firefighter Rob Anderson lost his left arm and left leg to a harrowing helicopter crash into the side of...

An Innovator’s City Guide to Tallinn, Estonia

Tallinn is the capital of Estonia, a country that has emerged over the last 20 years as one of the most advanced digital societies...

This Planned Solar Farm in Saudi Arabia Would Be 100 Times Bigger Than Any in the World

Right now it only exists on paper, in the form of a memorandum of understanding. But if constructed, the newly-announced solar photovoltaic project in...

Can We Recycle CO2 Emissions to Make Carbon-Neutral Fuel?

Our failure to curb our carbon emissions is threatening to cause catastrophic climate change within our lifetimes. But what if we could recycle CO2...

This 3D Printed Electric Car Will Enter Production This Year

Cars have gone from a “get me from point A to point B by burning gas” mode of transportation to a dream project for...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 31)

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY The Next Best Version of Me: How to Live Forever  David Ewing Duncan | Wired “Church is one of the leaders of an initiative called...
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