Monthly Archives: January, 2019

Can the Sustainable Development Goals Be Measured by Satellite?

In 2015 the UN established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be met by 2030. From universal access to clean water and education to...

The Home of the Future Isn’t Smart—It’s ‘Living’ and Green

The varied universes of science fiction often offer inspiration for emerging technologies, or at least fitting leads for articles to describe them. Take the...

From Parkour to Surgery, Here Are the Top 10 Recent Advancements in Robotics

The robot revolution may not be here quite yet, but our mechanical cousins have made some serious strides. And now some of the leading...

Can AI Tell the Difference Between a Polar Bear and a Can Opener?

Scarcely a day goes by without another headline about neural networks: some new task that deep learning algorithms can excel at, approaching or even...

Advancing Vehicle-to-Grid Tech: Why Solar Energy Needs Your Electric Car

Solar may be the future of energy production, but for the time being, it causes a lot of problems.  Energy producers, grid managers, and...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 26)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DeepMind Beats Pros at Starcraft in Another Triumph for Bots Tom Simonite | Wired "DeepMind’s feat is the most complex yet in a long train...

Twins in Space: The Impact of Space Travel on Gene Expression

Researchers have had a rare opportunity to see how conditions on the International Space Station translated to changes in gene expression by comparing identical...

How Microrobots Will Fix Our Roads and Save Us Billions

Swarms of microrobots will scuttle along beneath our roads and pavements, finding and fixing leaky pipes and faulty cables. Thanks to their efforts, we...

To Extend Our Longevity, First We Must Understand Why We Age

Healthcare today is reactive, retrospective, bureaucratic, and expensive. It's sick care, not healthcare. But that is radically changing at an exponential rate. Through this multi-part blog series...

CRISPR Just Got More Powerful With an “On” Switch

For all its gene-editing prowess, mechanistically CRISPR is a bit like a power tool with a broken “off” switch. Hear me out: the entire CRISPR...

The Top Biotech and Medicine Advances to Expect in 2019

2018 was bonkers for science. From a woman who gave birth using a transplanted uterus, to the infamous CRISPR baby scandal, to forensics adopting consumer-based...

Are We Ready for a Sky Full of Drones? Recent Airport Attacks Say No

With just a week to go before Christmas, he might have been hoping for a quick getaway at the end of a long shift....

Black Mirror’s ‘Bandersnatch’ Takes Viewers on a Wild Interactive Ride

When was the last time you watched a movie where you could control the plot? Bandersnatch is the first interactive film in the sci fi...

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

FUTURE The Most Powerful Person in Silicon Valley Katrina Brooker | Fast Company "Billionaire Masayoshi Son—not Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg—has the most audacious vision...

The Catch No One’s Talking About: Renewable Energy Relies on Non-Renewable Resources

Renewable energy is generally viewed as a long-term solution to climate change. It’s no surprise, then, that a great deal of effort is going...

The Power of Unlearning: Serena Williams’ Story

At the beginning of the 2010 season, tennis superstar Serena Williams was at the pinnacle of her sport. She was the top-ranked female tennis...

5 Discoveries That Made 2018 a Huge Year for Neuroscience

2018 was when neuroscience made the impossible possible. There was the dazzling array of crazy neurotech: paralyzed patients shopped and texted using an Android tablet...

These Smart Seafaring Robots Have a Whole New Set of Skills

Drones. Self-driving cars. Flying robo taxis. If the headlines of the last few years are to be believed, terrestrial transportation in the future will...

The Rise of a New Generation of AI Avatars

I recently discovered it’s possible for someone in their 20s to feel old—just mention Microsoft’s Clippy to anyone born after the late 90s. Weirdly,...

The Verge’s ‘Better Worlds’ Sci Fi Series Launches Today

When you picture what the world will look like in 10, 20, or 50 years, what comes to mind? Most people probably envision a...

Big Brother Nation: The Case for Ubiquitous, Open-Sourced Surveillance in Smart Cities

Powerful surveillance cameras have crept into public spaces. We are filmed and photographed hundreds of times a day. To further raise the stakes, the...

Understanding the Hidden Bias in Emotion-Reading AIs

Facial recognition technology has progressed to point where it now interprets emotions in facial expressions. This type of analysis is increasingly used in daily...

Making Superhumans Through Radical Inclusion and Cognitive Ergonomics

Imagine trying to read War and Peace one letter at a time. The thought alone feels excruciating. But in many ways, this painful idea...

How Can Leaders Ensure Humanity in a World of Thinking Machines?

It’s hard to avoid the prominence of AI in our lives, and there is a plethora of predictions about how it will influence our...

How Scientists Hacked Photosynthesis to Up Crop Yields By 40 Percent

Almost every living creature on Earth relies on photosynthesis for its survival, but the process is far from efficient. Now some clever genetic engineering...

3D Printed Heads Can Unlock Phones. What Does that Mean for Biometric Security?

Facial recognition technology is likely not as safe as you may have thought. This was illustrated by a recent test where 3D printed busts...

Blacklisted in China—Misbehaving Scientists Poised for “Social” Punishment

When Dr. He Jiankui announced the birth of CRISPR-edited babies last month, the world grappled with how to handle the aftermath. Should journals overlook his...

Are Stablecoins the New and Improved Bitcoin?

PwC, the global consulting and assurance firm, recently signalled its entrance into the cryptocurrency world by announcing a partnership with decentralized lending platform Cred....

5 Major Drug Breakthroughs That Happened in 2018

The pharmaceutical industry churns out dozens of new drugs and biological products every year. Most are small tweaks to something previously approved by the...

Could an Atlas of the Brain’s Genome Solve Neuropsychiatric Disorders?

Dr. Thomas Lehner was tired of his research repeatedly hitting a wall. A scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, Lehner studies the genetic...

Gene Drives Survived a Proposed UN Ban in 2018—What’s Next?

In September 2018, a lab-based study published in Nature Biotechnology confirmed what many had long believed possible. The experiment involved cages of a few...

AI Will Create Millions More Jobs Than It Will Destroy. Here’s How

In the past few years, artificial intelligence has advanced so quickly that it now seems hardly a month goes by without a newsworthy AI...
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