Monthly Archives: July, 2019

Moving Beyond Mind-Controlled Limbs to Prosthetics That Can Actually ‘Feel’

Brain-machine interface enthusiasts often gush about “closing the loop.” It’s for good reason. On the implant level, it means engineering smarter probes that only...

Exploring the Great Mysteries of Consciousness and Free Will With Annaka Harris

For thousands of years, humankind has been plagued by to two essential questions: Why do I have this unique voice inside my head? And...

Scientists Just Released a New Playbook for Engineering Longer, Healthier Lives

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment anti-aging research morphed from quackery to an established science. Some say it’s 1939, when an experiment that...

Microsoft Invests $1 Billion in OpenAI’s Mission to Build Artificial General Intelligence

Since its inception in 2015, OpenAI has been chasing the lofty goal of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of all. But...

First Human CRISPR Trial in the US Aims to Cure Inherited Blindness

Gene editing is advancing at a faster pace than most of us can keep up with. One significant recent announcement was gene editing tool...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 27)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Microsoft Invests $1 Billion in OpenAI to Pursue Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence James Vincent | The Verge "i'The creation of AGI will be the...

Brain-Machine Interfaces Are Getting Better and Better—and Neuralink’s New Brain Implant Pushes the Pace

Elon Musk grabbed a lot of attention with his July 16 announcement that his company Neuralink plans to implant electrodes into the brains of...

Introducing Singularity University Radio: The Home for SU Podcasts

In this gig-economy age of entrepreneurs and full-time hustlers, podcasts have become a signature way to stay up-to-date, inspired, and educated while on the...

Five Ways Buildings of the Future Will Use Biotech to Become Living Things

What if our homes were alive? I don’t mean smart homes with the disembodied voice of Alexa deciding the setting for your living room...

Editing RNA Expands CRISPR’s Use Far Beyond Genetic Diseases

CRISPR advances have been coming so frequently that it’s hard to keep track. In just a few years, it’s evolved from a nifty genome word...

How Scientists Used Light to Incept Sensations and Memories in Mice

Last week, Elon Musk’s mysterious Neuralink finally revealed their master plan after two years of silence: to build high bandwidth, immune resistant, thread-like brain-machine...

Are Robots Coming for Our Jobs? Careful, It’s a Trick Question

The robots are coming, and they’ll probably take your job when they get here. Oh wait—have you heard that recently? As recently as, say, yesterday?...

Machine Learning vs. Climate Change: AI for the Greener Good

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Despite increasing global consensus about the urgency of reducing emissions since the...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 20)

ROBOTICS Boston Dynamics' Robots Are Preparing to Leave the Lab—Is the World Ready? James Vincent | The Verge "After decades of kicking machines in parking lots, the...

A Layer of ‘Aerogel’ Could Make Mars Habitable and Even Enable Life to Develop There

Transforming the red planet to support life has long been a dream of science fiction. Mars is now too cold to support life. Its...

The First Complete Brain Wiring Diagram of Any Species Is Here

For a humble, microscopic worm with only 302 neurons, C. elegans has had a lot of firsts. It was the first multicellular animal to...

How Will We Store Three Septillion Bits of Data? Your Metabolome May Have the Answer

Thanks to the cloud, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever run out of data storage. But by 2040, we may be swarmed by...

How Tech Can Help Curb Emissions by Planting 500 Billion New Trees

Trees are a low-tech, high-efficiency way to offset much of humankind’s negative impact on the climate. What’s even better, we have plenty of room...

The Poker-Playing AI That Beat the World’s Best Players

Poker is a powerful combination of strategy and intuition, something that’s made it the most iconic of card games and devilishly difficult for machines...

This Chatbot has Over 660 Million Users—and It Wants to Be Their Best Friend

Your New Best Friend? Making a new friend is a complex business. You might begin with small talk: introductions, explorations. Perhaps you bond over something...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 13)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 'Superhuman' AI Crushes Pros at Six-Player Texas Hold'em George Dvorsky | Gizmodo " said, 'Poker in particular has been an early sandbox for AI, and...

So Far Cultured Meat Has Been Burgers—the Next Big Challenge Is Animal-Free Steaks

The meat you eat, if you’re a carnivore, comes from animal muscles. But animals are composed of a lot more than just muscle. They...

The Pentagon’s New Laser-Based Tool Uses Your Heartbeat to Track You

The government’s hefty arsenal of surveillance tools just welcomed a powerful new member. Rather than monitoring an external device—a bug or a smartphone—or even...

Cancer-Killing Living Drug Is Made Safer With a Simple Off Switch

When it comes to battling cancer, our most powerful weapon is also our most dangerous. You’ve heard of CAR-T: the cellular immunotherapy extracts a patient’s...

Alphabet Releases Its Master Plan for Toronto’s New Smart City

Ever dreamed of living in a giant experiment? If so, Toronto may be the city for you. Sidewalk Labs has released blueprints for its...

Virtual Influencers Are on the Rise. How Far Will Their Influence Go?

In early April 2019, something was suddenly very different about Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Instagram account. In lieu of retro-style pictures of chicken, a decidedly...

How the US Will Get to a 50 Percent Renewable Electric Economy by 2030

By 2030, more than 50 percent of the US economy will run on electricity derived from renewables. What are the implications as we shift the...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 6)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Machine Learning Has Been Used to Automatically Translate Long-Lost Languages Emerging Technology from the arXiv | MIT Technology Review "Some languages that have never been...

Facebook Claims Libra Offers Economic Empowerment to Billions—an Economist Is Skeptical

Facebook is joining the cryptocurrency craze. Should we be concerned? The social network site on June 18 said it’s launching a new cryptocurrency called Libra...

Could Lab-Grown Brains Develop Consciousness?

There’s a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of self and other is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside...

This Radical New DNA Microscope Reimagines the Cellular World

It’s not every day that something from the 17th century gets radically reinvented. But this month, a team from the Broad Institute at MIT and...

The LightSail-2 Mission Launched Last Week. It Could Shape the Future of Solar Spaceflight

Just like the early explorers harnessed the wind to sail around the world, scientists have long dreamed of using light to sail through the...
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