This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 15)

HEALTH

Laser Destroys Cancer Cells Circulating in the Blood
Emily Waltz | IEEE Spectrum
"Tumor cells that spread cancer via the bloodstream face a new foe: a laser beam, shined from outside the skin, that finds and kills these metastatic little demons on the spot."

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Bill Gates Just Backed a Chip Startup That Uses Light to Turbocharge AI
Martin Giles | MIT Technology Review
"[Gates and other backers] are...betting the companies that break through the computing bottleneck will be the ones to help unleash the true potential of AI."

ROBOTICS

How Amazon Cloned a Neighborhood to Test Its Delivery Robots
Tom Simonite | Wired
"[Amazon's] digital copy mirrors the position of curbstones and driveways within centimeters, and textures like the grain of asphalt within millimeters. That synthetic suburb allows Amazon to test Scout thousands or perhaps millions of times under varying weather conditions without swarming the neighborhood with bright blue rovers until they become a nuisance."

AUTOMATION

Over 1,400 Self-Driving Vehicles Are Now in Testing by 80+ Companies
Darrell Etherington | TechCrunch
"This puts some sense of overall scale to the work being done to test and develop self-driving car tech in the US. ...[US Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine] Chao also shared that there are more than 1.59 million registered drones currently in the US, of which more than 372,000 are classified as commercial, with more than 136,000 registered commercial drone operators also on the books."

COMPUTING

I Wrote This on a 30-Year-Old Computer
Ian Bogost | The Atlantic
"[Back then] computing was an accompaniment to life, rather than the sieve through which all ideas and activities must filter. That makes using this 30-year-old device a surprising joy, one worth longing for on behalf of what it was at the time, rather than for the future it inaugurated."

TECHNOLOGY

How the Race to the Moon—With an Assist From Pop Culture—Changed the Meaning of the Word Technology
Charles Fishman | Fast Company
"The ’60s saw the birth of all kinds of revolutions—civil rights and feminism, the sexual revolution and rock and roll—but one revolution the ’60s doesn’t get enough credit for is the dawn of technology as a cultural phenomenon."

GOVERNANCE

The Information Arms Race Can't Be Won, But We Have to Keep Fighting
Cailin O'Connor | Aeon
"Participating in an informational arms race is exhausting, but sometimes there are no good alternatives. Public misinformation has serious consequences. For this reason, we should be devoting the same level of resources to fighting misinformation that interest groups are devoting to producing it."

Image Credit: Homesh Nasre / Shutterstock.com