The typical cultural image of a robot—as a steel, chrome, humanoid bucket of bolts—is often far from the reality of cutting-edge robotics research. There...
Electric cars have developed a reputation as the ultimate status symbol of the champagne environmentalist, but that could be very close to changing. New...
CRISPR may be the premiere gene editing prodigy poised to upend natural genomes and erase inherited diseases. But since its inception, one thing has...
Convergence is accelerating disruption… everywhere! Exponential technologies are colliding into each other, reinventing products, services, and industries.
As AI algorithms such as Siri and Alexa...
Life demands flux.
Every living organism is constantly changing: cells divide and die, proteins build and disintegrate, DNA breaks and heals. Life demands metabolism—the simultaneous...
Holograms are a staple in science fiction, but creating ones detailed enough to have serious applications in the real world has proved difficult. While...
Tesla and other electric cars are great for the environment. However, they pale in comparison to electric buses. According to a report from Bloomberg...
Technology is rapidly being demonetized and democratized, and that includes biotechnology. Almost anyone can now access and apply powerful biotech tools like genetic testing...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Open AI's Dota 2 AI Steamrolls World Champion e-Sports Team With Back-to-Back Victories
Nick Statt | The Verge
"... tells me there probably does not...
Floating inside a petri dish in a lab at Cambridge University, a single disjointed muscle twitched.
Normally that’s not news. But in this case, the...
Deep learning is powering some amazing new capabilities, but we find it hard to scrutinize the workings of these algorithms. Lack of interpretability in...
Hopes for the first ever privately-funded moon landing were dashed last Thursday after the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed on its final descent. But despite...
For the past quarter century, scientists battled Alzheimer’s disease under a single guiding principle: that protein clumps—beta-amyloid—deposited outside sensitive brain cells gradually damage neuronal...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Two Rival AI Approaches Combine to Let Machines Learn Like a Child
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
"...the hybrid system addresses key limitations of...
During the past 50 years, the frequency of recorded natural disasters has surged nearly five-fold.
In this blog, I’ll be exploring how converging exponential technologies...
Dr. George Church, the legendary godfather of synthetic biology, just made another push towards massively editing life’s base code.
Since the inception of gene editing,...
Convergence is accelerating disruption. Exponential technologies are colliding into each other, reinventing products, services, and industries.
Over the course of my next five blogs, I’m going...
FUTURE OF FOOD
Behold the 'Beefless Impossible Whopper'
Nathaniel Popper | The New York Times
"Burger King is introducing a Whopper made with a vegetarian patty from...
Computers were once considered high-end technology, only accessible to scientists and trained professionals. But there was a seismic shift in the history of computing...
Renewable energy demand and capacity are growing explosively. When looking at numbers for wind energy production, China stands above all other countries. Figures released...
Two billion years ago, on a geochemically bubbly youth Earth, a simple bacteria engulfed its neighbor. Rather than dissolving into nutrients, against all odds...
As our prosperity rises, our mental health is on the decline—and fast. Rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, addiction, and other psychological disorders have skyrocketed...
GENE EDITING
Genome Engineers Made More Than 13,000 Genome Edits in a Single Cell
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
"The group, led by gene technologist George...
Four kilometers below sea level between Mexico and Hawaii sit vast deposits of rare metals central to technologies like renewable energy and computing. The...
Lizards can regrow entire limbs. Flatworms, starfish, and sea cucumbers regrow entire bodies. Sharks constantly replace lost teeth, often growing over 20,000 teeth throughout...
A supercomputer capable of a quintillion operations a second will go online in 2021 after the US government handed Intel and supercomputer manufacturer Cray...
COMPUTING
Racing Against China, US Reveals Details of $500 Million Supercomputer
Don Clark | The New York Times
"Lab officials predict it will be the first American...
As over-hyped as artificial intelligence is—everyone’s talking about it, few fully understand it, it might leave us all unemployed but also solve all the...
Trial and error is one of the most fundamental learning strategies employed by animals, and we’re increasingly using it to teach intelligent machines too....
Quantum supremacy sounds like something out of a Marvel movie. But for scientists working at the forefront of quantum computing, the hope—and hype—of this...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind and Google: The Battle to Control Artificial Intelligence
Hal Hodson | 1843
"Hassabis thought DeepMind would be a hybrid: it would have the drive...
Tomorrow’s cities are reshaping almost every industry imaginable, and birthing those we’ve never heard of.
Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains', high-speed networks,...
Over the past few years, the word 'innovation’ has degenerated into something of a buzzword. In fact, according to Vijay Vaitheeswaran, US business editor...
