The push to retire combustion engine cars and transition to electric vehicles is intensifying, even as energy prices rise and electrical grids get stretched...
Solid-state batteries could be more energy dense, safer, and faster charging than today's technology, but finding a way to make them commercially viable is...
On the smallest scales, our universe gets weird. Particles act like billiard balls or waves on water, depending how you probe them. Properties can't...
BIOTECHNOLOGY
Neoplants Bioengineers Houseplants to Use Them as Air Purifiers
Romain Dillet | TechCrunch
"Neoplants targets specifically a group of indoor air pollutants that can’t be efficiently...
Beyond Meat has been selling plant-based imitation meat since 2012, with an ever-growing list of products including burgers, ground meat, sausage, meatballs, jerky, and...
Ninety percent of American adults don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, opting for fast food and processed foods instead. Cost, flavor, and convenience are...
TECH
Chip Can Transmit All of the Internet's Traffic Every Second
Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist
"A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of...
Thanks to its mild climate, expansive highway network, and lax regulations, Texas has become the country’s proving ground for driverless trucks. From cargo to...
In 2021, wind turbines generated over 9 percent of US utility-scale electricity. The majority of the turbines making up that figure are the horizontal-axis...
In July, a puzzling new image of a distant extreme star system surrounded by surreal concentric geometric rings had even astronomers scratching their heads....
FUTURE
9 Astonishing Ways That Living Standards Have Improved Around the World
Tony Morley | Big Think
"Over the last 200 years, the lives of average people...
Exoskeletons have been largely confined to the realm of fiction, appearing in sci-fi or superhero movies to make characters stronger, taller, or more destructive...
Fake photography is nothing new. In the 1910s, British author Arthur Conan Doyle was famously deceived by two school-aged sisters who had produced photographs...
DeepMind has done it again.
After solving a fundamental challenge in biology—predicting protein structure—and untangling the mathematics of knot theory, it’s taken aim at a...
Heart disease is the number one cause of death among American adults. Conditions like obesity or diabetes increase a person’s risk of developing heart...
Scientific study of human evolution historically reassured us of a comforting order to things. It has painted humans as cleverer, more intellectual, and more...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind’s Game-Playing AI Has Beaten a 50-Year-Old Record in Computer Science
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"The headline result is that AlphaTensor discovered...
Even as 3D printing gains more traction as a next-gen homebuilding method, new ideas for sustainable, affordable housing are continuously popping up. There’s “foldable”...
Several weeks ago, climate scientists said an extreme heatwave in China was the worst on record anywhere. Days later, Pakistan declared a national state...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Meta’s New Text-to-Video AI Generator Is Like DALL-E for Video
James Vincent | The Verge
"The videos are clearly artificial, with blurred subjects and distorted...
Coastal urban centers around the world are urgently looking for new, sustainable water sources as their local supplies become less reliable. In the US,...
Restaurants have been struggling with labor shortages since the worst days of the pandemic, and the situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better....
Today, September 26, a spacecraft moving eight times faster than a speeding bullet will impact an asteroid almost 7 million miles (11 million kilometers)...
ROBOTICS
These Autonomous, Wireless Robots Could Dance on a Human Hair
Devin Coldewey | TechCrunch
"The competition to create ever smaller, ever better robots is a fierce...
Vertical farms are popping up everywhere from Pennsylvania to Dubai, most of them growing some sort of leafy green (and one growing mushroom fungus!)....
Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system— they’re called exoplanets. But in summer 2022, teams working on NASA’s Transiting...
Though it’s still a controversial technology, direct air capture—also called carbon capture—is gaining traction. In the last few years, carbon capture plants have sprung...
