Yearly Archives: 2022

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

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DeepMind Has Predicted the Structure of Almost Every Protein Known to Science Melissa Heikkilä | MIT Technology Review "From today, the Alphabet-owned AI lab is...

No Pigs Were Harmed for These Pork Sausages, But They’re Real (Cultured) Meat

For a technology that was largely unheard of a decade ago, cultured meat has taken off quickly in recent years. Not only are there...

Combining Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI Yields a Foundational Model of Human Thought

Progress in artificial intelligence has enabled the creation of AIs that perform tasks previously thought only possible for humans, such as translating languages, driving...

A Startup Is 3D Printing Bionic Arms for Ukrainians Injured in Conflict

Two years ago, prosthetics startup Unlimited Tomorrow launched TrueLimb, its next-generation bionic arm. Six years of research and development went into TrueLimb, and the...

Protein-Designing AI Opens Door to Medicines Humans Couldn’t Dream Up

Designing a protein is a bit like making a cabinet. The first step is building the backbone that holds the protein together. But then...

This ‘Solar Tower’ System Produces Jet Fuel From CO2, Water, and Sunlight

In theory, it's possible to create jet fuel from nothing more than water, CO2, and energy from the sun, but doing so outside of...

Why Can’t You Remember the First Years of Your Life? What Scientists Know About ‘Infantile Amnesia’

Whenever I teach about memory in my child development class at Rutgers University, I open by asking my students to recall their very first...

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

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OpenAI Is Ready to Sell DALL-E to its First Million Customers Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review "'We've seen much more interest than we...

The World’s Biggest Vertical Farm Just Opened in Dubai

As the climate in many parts of the world gets hotter and drier, it’s becoming increasingly crucial to find innovative ways to grow food....

Scientists Studied the Antarctic Ice Sheet Over 10,000 Years. Their Findings Hold Insight for the Future

Alarming stories from Antarctica are now more frequent than ever; the ice surface is melting, floating ice shelves are collapsing, and glaciers are flowing...

A 165-Mile Drone Superhighway Will Soon Be Built in the UK

As organizations increasingly look to employ drones for everything from deliveries to pest control to surveillance, safety in the skies is becoming an issue...

DeepMind Gave an AI ‘Intuition’ by Training It Like a Baby

Babies are bubbly, cuddly, giggly balls of joy. They’re also enormously powerful learning machines. At three months old, they already have intuition about how...

Electric Seagliders Could Enable Short-Haul Emissions-Free Air Travel This Decade

Electrifying aviation could help tackle the sector’s serious emissions problems, but battery-powered passenger jets are still some way off. All-electric seagliders that skim the...

Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: What Genetic Engineers Can Learn From ‘Jurassic World’

Jurassic World: Dominion is hyperbolic Hollywood entertainment at its best, with an action-packed storyline that refuses to let reality get in the way of a...

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

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Meet Plato, an AI That Gains Intuition Like a Human Baby Monisha Ravisetti | CNET "In collaboration with AI research laboratory DeepMind in the UK,...

A New Era in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life: We Can Finally Analyze Exoplanet Atmospheres

The ingredients for life are spread throughout the universe. While Earth is the only known place in the universe with life, detecting life beyond...

This Solar Car Will Soon Hit Production—and It Costs Less Than $26K

A year and a half ago, San Diego-based Aptera Motors started taking orders for the Aptera, its three-wheeled solar car that resembles a cross...

Swiss Company to Build an Intercity Network of Tunnels for Robotic Cargo Pods

In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, economies around the world all but ground to a halt. Production scaled back, roads went quiet, airports...

Scientists Cloned Mice From Freeze-Dried Skin Cells, Opening the Door to Biopreservation

On the surface, Dorami was just an average mouse. She grew to a healthy weight, had pups of her own, and died naturally near...

Japan Proposes a Wild Concept for Making Artificial Gravity on the Moon

The list of challenges space explorers will face is formidable. They'll have to produce breathable air, clean water, and food in extremely hostile environments...

Evolutionary Tree of Life: DNA Analysis Is Showing How We Got So Much Wrong

If you look different to your close relatives, you may have felt separate from your family. As a child, during particularly stormy fallouts you...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 9)

SPACE Rocket Lab Offers Next-Day Shipping to Space Devin Coldewey | TechCrunch "It wasn’t long ago that orbital launches were something that took years of planning and...

This AI Predicts Crime a Week in Advance—and Highlights Policing Bias

Efforts to use AI to predict crime have been fraught with controversy due to the potential to replicate existing biases in policing. But a...

Meta’s Going After a Universal Translator. Its AI Now Works for 200 Languages

As the pandemic at long last winds down, international travel is picking up, with millions looking to make up for lost time. As travelers...

Scientists Tracked 77 Species for Decades to Reveal Secrets of Long Life

Ever wondered about the secret to a long life? Perhaps understanding the lifespans of other animals with backbones (vertebrates) might help us unlock this...

A Paralyzed Man Used His Mind to Control Two Robotic Arms to Eat Cake

The man sat still in the chair, staring intently at a piece of cake on the table in front of him. Wires protruded from...

Deepmind’s New AI May Be Better at Distributing Society’s Resources Than Humans Are

How groups of humans working together collaboratively should redistribute the wealth they create is a problem that has plagued philosophers, economists, and political scientists...

In the New Disney Pixar Movie Lightyear, Time Gets Bendy. Is Time Travel Real, or Just Science Fiction?

Spoiler alert: this article explains a key plot point, but we don’t give away anything you won’t see in trailers. Thanks to reader Florence,...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 2)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE We Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper About Itself—Then We Tried to Get It Published Almira Osmanovic Thunström | Scientific American "On a rainy...

New Artificial Photosynthesis Method Grows Food With No Sunshine

How can we grow more food using fewer resources? Scientists have been focused on this question for decades if not centuries, as an ever-growing...

Google’s AI Spotlights a Human Cognitive Glitch: Mistaking Fluent Speech for Fluent Thought

When you read a sentence like this one, your past experience tells you that it’s written by a thinking, feeling human. And, in this...

A New Carbon Capture Plant Will Pull 36,000 Tons of CO2 From the Air Each Year

A little under a year ago, the world’s biggest direct air capture (DAC) plant got up and running in Iceland. Christened Orca after the...

Metasurfaces Open the Door to Telekinesis and Telepathy With Technology

Stranger Things fans will be familiar with this scene: Eleven, a girl with telekinetic powers, stares intently at a Coke can. Without physically touching...

Three Kids Are Thriving After Kidney Transplants With No Immunosuppressants

Less than three years ago, eight-year-old Kruz and his little sister Paizlee lay on a surgical table ready to receive new kidneys. They had...

OpenAI’s New AI Learned to Play Minecraft by Watching 70,000 Hours of YouTube

In 2020, OpenAI’s machine learning algorithm GPT-3 blew people away when, after ingesting billions of words scraped from the internet, it began spitting out...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 25)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Yann LeCun Has a Bold New Vision for the Future of AI Melissa Heikkiläarchive page and Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review "In a...

Cosmic Dust From Venus Is Inspiring New Air Pollution-Busting Technology

Reducing carbon emissions from roads, railways, and shipping requires implementing a range of solutions simultaneously. As far as cars are concerned, cutting the number...

An Autonomous Ship Used AI to Cross the Atlantic Without a Human Crew

Just under 402 years ago, in August of 1620, the Mayflower set sail from Southampton, England, bound for America. The 100-foot-long-long, triple-masted wooden vessel...

Japan’s Kairyu Sea Turbine Will Harvest the Never-Ending Power of Deep Ocean Currents

A little over a year ago, a Scottish company called Orbital Marine Power was getting a two-megawatt tidal turbine up and running in the...

These 3D Printed Millirobots Can Sense and React to Their Surroundings

The millirobot looked like an adorable cartoon vehicle as it expertly navigated a complex maze. It’s a strange creature: the bottom resembles a collapsed...

Scientists Used CRISPR to Trace Every Human Gene to Its Function

Genes are like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Thanks to advances in whole-genome sequencing, it’s increasingly easy to read each DNA letter. But the strings of A,...

AI Shakespeare and AI Oscar Wilde Debate Machine Creativity at Oxford

"Nay, nay, I say! This cannot be, That machines should e'er surpass our art. We are the masters, them the slaves, And thus it ever shall be...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 18)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE This AI Model Tries to Re-create the Mind of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Pranshu Verma | The Washington Post "The model, called Ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg,...

Amazon Will Pilot Drone Delivery in California This Year

The number of packages people order—and the number of people ordering packages—isn’t likely to go down anytime in the foreseeable future, and companies are...

Alquist Says It Will 3D Print 200 Houses in a Small Virginia Town

In late 2021, a 3D printed house went up in Williamsburg, Virginia. The printed portion of the three-bed two-bath home—that is, the exterior walls—took...

If Artificial Intelligence Were to Become Sentient, How Would We Know?

Google’s LaMDA software (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is a sophisticated AI chatbot that produces text in response to user input. According to software...

In Its Greatest Biology Feat Yet, AI Unlocks the Complex Proteins Guarding Our DNA

AI has done it again. After solving one of the grandest mysteries in biology—predicting protein structure—it decoded how proteins link up into complexes, and dreamed...

Scientists Used Human Cells to Make Self-Healing ‘Living Skin’ for Robots

Androids that are part human, part robot are a staple of science fiction. But they're now a step closer to reality after researchers crafted...

Microsoft to Archive Music on Futuristic Slivers of Glass That Will Live 10,000 Years

War, disease, division—things aren't looking too rosy for humanity at the moment. But thanks to Microsoft, at least we'll be listening to Stevie Wonder...

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 11)

COMPUTING Photonic Chip Performs Image Recognition at the Speed of Light Charles Q. Choi | IEEE Spectrum "In a new study, researchers have developed a photonic deep...
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