Yearly Archives: 2019

Inflatable Robot Astronauts and How to Control Them

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 Are Estimated to Be Cheaper Than Regular Cars by 2022

Electric cars have developed a reputation as the ultimate status symbol of the champagne environmentalist, but that could be very close to changing. New...

How Augmented Reality Will Create a World of On-Demand Experts

During a recent Lyft ride, I discovered that my driver had never been to San Francisco and had just arrived that morning—I happened to...

A Deceptively Simple Tweak to CRISPR Makes It 50 Times More Accurate

CRISPR may be the premiere gene editing prodigy poised to upend natural genomes and erase inherited diseases. But since its inception, one thing has...

5 AI Breakthroughs We’ll Likely See in the Next 5 Years

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...

How AI Can Tap into the Collective Mind to Transform Healthcare

In 2013, IBM sold the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center on an audacious idea: that a single AI-powered platform, IBM Watson, could...

New Lifelike Biomaterial Self-Regenerates and Has a Metabolism

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...

Solving a Math Problem Just Brought Holograms Closer to Reality

Holograms are a staple in science fiction, but creating ones detailed enough to have serious applications in the real world has proved difficult. While...

China’s Electric Buses Save More Diesel Than All Electric Cars Combined

Tesla and other electric cars are great for the environment. However, they pale in comparison to electric buses. According to a report from Bloomberg...

As We Democratize Biology, We Must Avoid Biologizing Democracy

Technology is rapidly being demonetized and democratized, and that includes biotechnology. Almost anyone can now access and apply powerful biotech tools like genetic testing...

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

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...

What Makes the Impossible Burger Look and Taste Like Real Beef?

People eat animals that eat plants. If we just eliminate that middle step and eat plants directly, we would diminish our carbon footprint, decrease...

A Lab-Grown Brain Twitched an Isolated Muscle. Here’s Why That’s Amazing

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...

Where Should We Draw the Line Between Rejecting and Embracing Black Box AI?

Deep learning is powering some amazing new capabilities, but we find it hard to scrutinize the workings of these algorithms. Lack of interpretability in...

The Electrifying Mission of the First Private Lunar Spacecraft

In September 2007, I was joined on stage by Larry Page, Buzz Aldrin, and the deputy administrator of NASA to announce a $30 million...

The Private Space Industry Is Breaking Out of Earth’s Orbit

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...

Senolytics Show Promise Against Alzheimer’s in Mice

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...

NASA Twins Study Provides New Insight Into How Space Travel Affects Human Health

Thanks to 18 years of humans continuously working on the International Space Station (ISS), we already have a basic idea of what happens to...

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

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...

AI and Robotics Are Transforming Disaster Relief

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...

The Tangled Web of Turning Spider Silk Into a Super Material

Spider-Man is one of the most popular superheroes of all time. It’s a bit surprising given that one of the more common phobias is...

New CRISPR Method Can Edit Over 13,000 Spots in a Single Cell

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,...

Watch These Robots Do Tasks You Thought Were Simple (But for Them Are Pretty Hard)

Robots have been masters of manufacturing at speed and precision for decades, but give them a seemingly simple task like stacking shelves, and they...

5 Big Breakthroughs to Anticipate in 3D Printing

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...

The Three Frontrunners in the CRISPR Therapy Race

CRISPR is the ultimate child star in the biomedical universe. Just six years old, the gene editing prodigy is now the subject of multiple clinical...

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

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...

In the Future, Everyone Might Use Quantum Computers

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...

China Is Taking the Worldwide Lead in Wind Power

Renewable energy demand and capacity are growing explosively. When looking at numbers for wind energy production, China stands above all other countries. Figures released...

Synthetic Cell Component Expands the Code of Life in Complex Cells

Two billion years ago, on a geochemically bubbly youth Earth, a simple bacteria engulfed its neighbor. Rather than dissolving into nutrients, against all odds...

A Birth Control Pill for Men Is One Step Closer

Women have long borne the brunt of contraception responsibilities, but this may be shifting in coming years. A new trial published in the Journal...

Microsoft Is Building an All-In-One DNA Data Storage Device

The modern world is facing a tsunami of data. DNA is emerging as an ultra-compact way of storing it all, and now researchers supported...

The New Science of Psychedelics: A Tool for Changing Our Minds

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...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 30)

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...

A Bus-Sized Robot Will Soon Be Mining the Ocean Floor

Four kilometers below sea level between Mexico and Hawaii sit vast deposits of rare metals central to technologies like renewable energy and computing. The...

Extending Human Longevity With Regenerative Medicine

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...

AI Performed Like a Human on a Gestalt Psychology Test

Dr. Been Kim wants to rip open the black box of deep learning. A senior researcher at Google Brain, Kim specializes in a sort of...

What Would It Mean for AI to Become Conscious?

As artificial intelligence systems take on more tasks and solve more problems, it’s hard to say which is rising faster: our interest in them...

Intel Is Building the World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer

A supercomputer capable of a quintillion operations a second will go online in 2021 after the US government handed Intel and supercomputer manufacturer Cray...

A Spotless Mind? Precisely-Timed Anesthesia May Dim Traumatic Memories

We all have things we’d rather forget. But for over four million people in the US who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 23)

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...

Traditional Higher Education Is Losing Relevance. Here’s What’s Replacing It

Should you go to graduate school? If so, why? If not, what are your alternatives? Millions of young adults across the globe—and their parents...

7 Non-Obvious Trends Shaping the Future

When you think of trends that might be shaping the future, the first things that come to mind probably have something to do with...

SETI Is Making a New ‘Mixtape for Aliens’, and You Can Contribute

For centuries, people have looked up at the sky and wondered whether we’re alone in the universe. Science fiction and popular media have imagined...

To Be Ethical, AI Must Become Explainable. How Do We Get There?

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...

Flashing Light and Sound Reduced Alzheimer’s Symptoms in Mice

The last thing Dr. Li-Huei Tsai expected to help her Alzheimer’s mice was a disco cage. Three years back, in a strobe of insight, her team...

Like Animals, AI Is Learning From Experience

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....

Finally, Proof That Quantum Computing Can Boost Machine Learning

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...

This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 16)

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...

Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050

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,...

Top Takeaways From The Economist Innovation Summit

Over the past few years, the word 'innovation’ has degenerated into something of a buzzword. In fact, according to Vijay Vaitheeswaran, US business editor...
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