Earlier this year, a digital artist conned unsuspecting NFT collectors to highlight a vulnerability in the way cryptographically secured assets are managed online. The...
BIOTECH
A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth
Carl Zimmer | The New York Times
"A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced...
Remember the philosophical argument our universe is a simulation? Well, a team of astrophysicists say they’ve created the biggest simulated universe yet. But you...
In 1953, a Harvard psychologist thought he discovered pleasure—accidentally—within the cranium of a rat. With an electrode inserted into a specific area of its...
Walmart has been America’s biggest retailer since the 1990s, its focus on low costs and ultra-efficient logistics helping it edge out competitors and keep...
Self-driving cars are taking longer to hit roads than many experts predicted. Despite impressive progress in the field—like trucks using self-driving features to move...
The world’s largest car manufacturer by volume has been sluggish in its efforts to electrify compared to competitors. But Toyota has just announced a...
LONGEVITY
Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley's Latest Wild Bet on Living Forever
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
"Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to...
Global warming is a big challenge for warm-blooded animals, which must maintain a constant internal body temperature. As anyone who’s experienced heatstroke can tell...
Between the grim outlook reported by the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report last month and frequent reports of extreme weather events all over the world,...
Zolgensma—which treats spinal muscular atrophy, a rare genetic disease that damages nerve cells, leading to muscle decay—is currently the most expensive drug in the...
CRISPR has revolutionized genome engineering, but the size of its molecular gene-editing components has limited its therapeutic uses so far. Now, a trio of...
COMPUTING
The $150 Million Machine Keeping Moore's Law Alive
Will Knight | Wired
"The technology will be crucial for making more advanced smartphones and cloud computers, and...
Today, wireless charging is little more than a gimmick for high-end smartphones or pricey electric toothbrushes. But a new approach that can charge devices...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Sixth Assessment Report in early August, and the outlook isn’t good. The report has added renewed...
Deep learning is solving biology’s deepest secrets at breathtaking speed.
Just a month ago, DeepMind cracked a 50-year-old grand challenge: protein folding. A week later,...
3D printing is picking up speed as a construction technology, with 3D printed houses, schools, apartment buildings, and even Martian habitat concepts all being...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
What Would It Be Like to Be a Conscious AI? We May Never Know
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"It’s possible that one...
Much of the recent progress in AI has come from building ever-larger neural networks. A new chip powerful enough to handle “brain-scale” models could...
Imagine if you could power your kettle using the energy generated from the vegetable cuttings quietly breaking down in your kitchen’s compost bin. That...
Nature hides astonishing medical breakthroughs.
Take CRISPR, the transformative gene editing tool. It was inspired by a lowly bacterial immune defense system and co-opted to...
Swiss researchers at the University of Applied Sciences Graubünden this week claimed a new world record for calculating the number of digits of pi—a...
ENERGY
Laser Fusion Experiment Unleashes an Energetic Burst of Optimism
Kenneth Chang | The New York Times
"Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported on Tuesday that...
Vaccine and drug development, artificial intelligence, transport and logistics, climate science—these are all areas that stand to be transformed by the development of a...
At the end of 2020, Boston Dynamics released a spirits-lifting, can’t-watch-without-smiling video of its robots doing a coordinated dance routine. Atlas, Spot, and Handle...
In the beginning, computer programmers translated their desires into the language of machines. Now, those machines are becoming conversant in the language of their...
ROBOTICS
CyberDog Is a New Ominous-Looking Robot From Xiaomi
James Vincent | The Verge
"Looking at pictures of CyberDog...it’s clear Xiaomi isn’t pitching the machine as a...
Consciousness is arguably the most important scientific topic there is. Without consciousness, there would after all be no science. But while we all know...
Last week, NASA released a timelapse video showing construction of a supersonic jet called the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST or “son of Concorde”...
The group of Japanese centenarians had seemingly magical health powers.
Sure, with an average age of 107, they’re among the longest-living humans on Earth. But...
NEUROSCIENCE
This Is a Map of Half a Billion Connections in a Tiny Bit of Mouse Brain
Tatyana Woodall | MIT Technology Review
"Neuroscientists have released the...
