GOVERNANCE
A Bill in Congress Would Limit Uses of Facial Recognition
Tom Simonite | Wired
"Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM say they want federal rules around the technology....
The diversity and complexity of life on Earth is astonishing: 8 million or more living species—from algae to elephants—all evolved from a simple, single-celled...
Tissue engineering just got wilder and weirder.
Using nothing but light and bioink, scientists were able to directly print a human ear-like structure under the...
Moore's Law is faltering, but that doesn't mean the end of progress in processing power. Rather than relying on semiconductor physics and silicon-fabrication technology,...
IMPACT
Can't Go Out and Protest? Here's How to Help From Home
Demetria Mosley | Wired
"Whether you’re trying to maintain your social distance or just looking...
Last year, Microsoft announced a billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, an organization whose mission is to create artificial general intelligence and make it safe for...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
OpenAI Debuts Gigantic GPT-3 Language Model With 175 Billion Parameters
Khari Johnson | VentureBeat
"A team of more than 30 OpenAI researchers have released a paper...
Long before coronavirus appeared and shattered our pre-existing “normal,” the future of work was a widely discussed and debated topic. We’ve watched automation slowly...
Although the coronavirus pandemic has dominated recent headlines, climate change hasn’t gone away. Many experts are calling for a “green” economic recovery that directs...
A few years ago, in a pitch black room at Stanford University, a monkey sat silently in his custom-made chair, utterly bewildered.
It wasn’t because...
COMPUTING
OpenAI's Supercomputer Collaboration With Microsoft Marks Its Biggest Bet Yet on AGI
Kyle Wiggers | VentureBeat
"Today, during Microsoft’s Build 2020 developer conference, the first fruit...
Few recognize the vast implications of materials science.
To build today’s smartphone in the 1980s, it would cost about $110 million, require nearly 200 kilowatts...
Amid the coronavirus lockdowns around the world, one of few positive pieces of news we’ve heard is that carbon emissions have dropped dramatically. The...
Most biomedical researchers are busy finding ways to squash the new coronavirus. Meanwhile, synthetic biologists are busy cloning it in droves.
In late February a...
AUTOMATION
The Pandemic Is Emptying Call Centers. AI Chatbots Are Swooping In
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
"Over the last few years, advances in natural-language processing...
The coronavirus outbreak has thrown the world into turmoil. On top of the infections and deaths it’s caused, there have been significant knock-on effects...
BIOTECH
With CRISPR, a Possible Quick Test for the Coronavirus
Carl Zimmer | The New York Times
"A team of scientists has developed an experimental prototype for...
Will our species go extinct? The short answer is yes. The fossil record shows everything goes extinct, eventually. Almost all species that ever lived,...
Archaeologists have uncovered scores of long-abandoned settlements along coastal Madagascar that reveal environmental connections to modern-day communities. They have detected the nearly indiscernible bumps...
FUTURE
Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
Ed Yong | The Atlantic
"...beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues...
On-the-spot DNA tests could prove invaluable to doctors, farmers, and officials responsible for food safety or environmental monitoring. Now Chinese researchers have created an...
