This year saw significant rises in consumer prices across all sorts of goods, one of them being food. Amid supply chain complications, labor shortages,...
Few technologies encapsulate the techno-utopian dream as much as fusion power, but its promise of limitless renewable energy has always remained tantalizingly out of...
By rocket, drone, and giant centrifuge, humans are getting better at hurling just about anything into space. There's a Tesla Roadster cruising around somewhere...
Not a day passes without a fascinating snippet on the ethical challenges created by “black box” artificial intelligence systems. These use machine learning to...
COMPUTING
This 'Breakthrough' in Chipmaking Could Bring Us a Phone With One-Week Battery Life
Phillip Tracy | Gizmodo
"The world’s largest chipmakers are promising significant performance and...
With land in virtual worlds selling for millions of dollars, NFTs flooding the internet, and Meta (formerly Facebook) employees saying the word "metaverse" over...
Many of the headlines that followed this year’s UN Climate Change Conference (also called the COP26) were pretty grim, with the overarching message being...
Sleep on it. That’s the advice we’ve all heard when challenged with a seemingly impossible dilemma.
A new study suggests it’s not just folklore. When...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Deepmind Says Its New Language Model Can Beat Others 25 Times Its Size
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"DeepMind’s main result is...
In 2020, scientists made global headlines by creating “xenobots”—tiny “programmable” living things made of several thousand frog stem cells.
These pioneer xenobots could move around...
Today's mega-threats are systemic and interconnected. The growing demand for energy and meat helps explain the steady rise in carbon and methane emissions. Coal-belching...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Training Is Outpacing Moore's Law
Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
"The increase in transistor density would account for a little more than doubling...
The global aviation industry is responsible for two percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. Some countries are having success convincing people to fly...
The cause of Alzheimer’s was supposedly simple. Mangled proteins aggregate into tangles and clumps. These clumps overwhelm neurons. Neurons lose their function and eventually...
Our mastery of biology has improved dramatically in recent decades, but we are still largely restricted to nature's repertoire of forms. That could be...
NEUROSCIENCE
Can Digital Reality Be Jacked Directly Into Your Brain?
Adam Rogers | Wired
"The idea of uploading a synthetic experience into a mind has been a...
Artificial neural networks are famously inspired by their biological counterparts. Yet compared to human brains, these algorithms are highly simplified, even “cartoonish.”
Can they teach...
COMPUTING
This New Startup Has Created a Record-Breaking 256-Qubit Quantum Computer
Siobhan Roberts | MIT Technology Review
"The QuEra machine is the latest leap in scaling up...
It’s crunch time on climate change, and companies, governments, philanthropists, and NGOs around the world are starting to take action, be it through donating...
Thanks to deep learning, the central mysteries of structural biology are falling like dominos.
Just last year, DeepMind shocked the biomedical field with AlphaFold, an...
With the pace of emissions reductions looking unlikely to prevent damaging climate change, controversial geoengineering approaches are gaining traction. But aversion to even studying...
Alongside advances in space exploration, we’ve recently seen much time and money invested into technologies that could allow effective space resource utilization. And at...
COMPUTING
Two of World's Biggest Quantum Computers Made in China
Charles Q. Choi | IEEE Spectrum
"...scientists in China have tested two different quantum computers on what...
