Singularity Hub Staff
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This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 11)
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 rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 4)
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 also for key areas of emerging technology such as artificial...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 28)
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 day there could be as many forms of consciousness as...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 21)
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 by using 192 gigantic lasers to annihilate a pellet of...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 14)
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 rival to Aibo, Sony’s own robot canine. While Aibo is...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 7)
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 most detailed 3D map of the mammalian brain ever made,...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 31)
ROBOTICS
This Robot Made a 100,000-Domino ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Mural in 24 Hours
I. Bonifacic | Engadget
"Created by YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober, the Dominator is the result of more than five years of...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 24)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Ethics of a Deepfake Anthony Bourdain Voice
Helen Rosner | The New Yorker
"The new documentary 'Roadrunner' uses AI-generated audio without disclosing it to viewers. How should we feel about that? ...On Friday, to...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 17)
COMPUTING
Tapping Into the Brain to Help a Paralyzed Man Speak
Pam Belluck | The New York Times
"He has not been able to speak since 2003, when he was paralyzed at age 20 by a severe...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 10)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Need to Fit Billions of Transistors on Your Chip? Let AI Do It
Will Knight | Wired
"Google, Nvidia, and others are training algorithms in the dark arts of designing semiconductors—some of which will be...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 3)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
GitHub and OpenAI Launch a New AI Tool That Generates Its Own Code
Dave Gershgorn | The Verge
"Copilot is built on a new algorithm called OpenAI Codex, which OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman describes as a...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 26)
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Andreessen Horowitz Goes Ham on Crypto With a New $2.2B Fund
Arielle Pardes | Wired
"The $2.2 billion Crypto Fund III will be among the largest capital commitments to the crypto ecosystem in history, and about...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 19)
FUTURE OF WORK
Kill the 5-Day Work Week
Joe Pinsker | The Atlantic
"People who work a four-day week generally report that they’re healthier, happier, and less crunched for time; their employers report that they’re more efficient...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 12)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
These Creepy Fake Humans Represent a New Age in AI
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
" are synthetic data designed to feed the growing appetite of deep-learning algorithms. Firms like Datagen offer a compelling...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 5)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
China's Gigantic Multi-Modal AI Is No One-Trick Pony
A. Tarantola | Engadget
"When Open AI's GPT-3 model made its debut in May of 2020, its performance was widely considered to be the literal state of the...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 22)
COMPUTING
Google Aims for Commercial-Grade Quantum Computer by 2029
Sara Castellanos | The Wall Street Journal
"Alphabet Inc.’s Google plans to spend several billion dollars to build a quantum computer by 2029 that can perform large-scale business and...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 15)
COMPUTING
A New Brain Implant Translates Thoughts of Writing Into Text
John Timmer | Wired
"In early experiments, a paralyzed man with implants in his premotor cortex typed 90 characters per minute—by envisioning he was writing by...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 8)
SPACE
Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going To Do This Mars Thing
Marina Koren | The Atlantic
"Take this path all the way to Boca Chica, past the solar-panel farms and storage sheds, past the little...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 1)
ROBOTICS
The Robot Surgeon Will See You Now
Cade Metz | The New York Times
"Real scalpels, artificial intelligence—what could go wrong? ...The project is a part of a much wider effort to bring artificial intelligence...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 24)
COMPUTING
Now for AI's Latest Trick: Writing Computer Code
Will Knight | Wired
"It can take years to learn how to write computer code well. SourceAI, a Paris startup, thinks programming shouldn’t be such a big deal. The company...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 17)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
15 Graphs You Need to See to Understand AI in 2021
Charles Q. Choi | IEEE Spectrum
"If you haven’t had time to read the AI Index Report for 2021, which clocks in at 222 pages,...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 10)
INTERNET
SpaceX a Handful of Starlink Launches Away From Blanketing Earth in Broadband
Eric Mack | CNET
"In the next few months, SpaceX could have more than 1,600 of its Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, and that may be...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 3)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Here's How We'll Know an AI Is Conscious
Joel Frohlich | Nautilus
"Just as ethical tragedies arise when we pull the plug on patients who are aware yet unresponsive, similar tragedies will arise if we pull...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 27)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Could Enable 'Swarm Warfare' for Tomorrow's Fighter Jets
Will Knight | Wired
"Last March, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) invited teams to develop AI systems capable of controlling fighter jets in aerial...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 20)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy
Cade Metz | Wired
"How the shape of deep learning—and the fate of the tech industry—went up for sale in Harrah's Room 731, on...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 13)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This Chip for AI Works Using Light, Not Electrons
Will Knight | Wired
"As demand for artificial intelligence grows, so does hunger for the computer power needed to keep AI running. Lightmatter, a startup born at MIT,...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 6)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Facebook's New AI Teaches Itself to See With Less Human Help
Will Knight | Wired
"Peer inside an AI algorithm and you’ll find something constructed using data that was curated and labeled by an army...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 27)
GENETICS
An Extinct Cave Bear's DNA Was Still Readable After 360,000 Years
George Dvorsky | Gizmodo
"The bone analyzed in the new study—a petrous bone from the inner ear of an extinct cave bear—was approximately seven times...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 20)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A New Artificial Intelligence Makes Mistakes—on Purpose
Will Knight | Wired
"It took about 50 years for computers to eviscerate humans in the venerable game of chess. A standard smartphone can now play the kind of moves...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 13)
VIRTUAL REALITY
Epic Games' MetaHuman Creator Lets Developers Create Realistic Digital Humans Within Minutes
Dean Takahashi | VentureBeat
"Epic Games has unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, a new browser-based app that enables game developers and creators of real-time content...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 6)
SPACE
SpaceX Announces First 'All-Civilian' Mission to Space
Joey Roulette | The Verge
"Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning to send its first 'all-civilian' crew to space at the end of 2021 in a charity-focused mission commanded by...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 30)
3D PRINTING
A Real 3D-Printed Home Listing Just Popped Up on Zillow for a Cool $300,000
Sam Rutherford | Gizmodo
"Unlike many smaller 3D-printed abodes, the Riverhead home was built on-site rather than constructed in a warehouse...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 23)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This Chinese Lab Is Aiming for Big AI Breakthroughs
Will Knight | Wired
"China produces as many artificial intelligence researchers as the US, but it lags in key fields like machine learning. The government hopes...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 16)
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes
Nathaniel Popper | The New York Times
"Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 9)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This Avocado Armchair Could Be the Future of AI
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"OpenAI has extended GPT-3 with two new models that combine with image recognition to give its AI a...
‘The Secret History of the Moon’: The Epic Story of How the Moon Was Made
Where did the moon come from?
The leading theory suggests the moon was formed after a massive collision between a Mars-sized planet Theia and Earth in the early days of the solar system. Theia was...
These Were Our Favorite Tech Stories From Around the Web in 2020
This time last year we were commemorating the end of a decade and looking ahead to the next one. Enter the year that felt like a decade all by itself: 2020. News written in...
These Were the 15 Most-Read Singularity Hub Stories of 2020
Most Saturdays we post a curated collection of our favorite articles from the week. But with the year nearing its end, this Saturday and next we'll curate 2020 as a whole. First up, we'll...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 19)
HEALTH
How Science Beat the Virus
Ed Yong | The Atlantic
"Much like famous initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, epidemics focus the energies of large groups of scientists. ...But 'nothing in history...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 12)
ENVIRONMENT
Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth
Stephanie Pappas | Scientific American
"Humanity has reached a new milestone in its dominance of the planet: human-made objects may now outweigh all of the living beings on...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 5)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
'It Will Change Everything': DeepMind's AI Makes Gigantic Leap in Solving Protein Structures
Ewen Callaway | Nature
"In some cases, AlphaFold's structure predictions were indistinguishable from those determined using 'gold standard' experimental methods such as...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 28)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything?
Dennis Overbye | The New York Times
"Computer programs like DeepMind’s AlphaGo keep discovering new ways to beat humans at games like Go and chess, which have been studied...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 21)
HEALTH
Larry Brilliant Says We'll Beat Covid—After We Go Through Hell
Steven Levy | Wired
"The epidemiologist calls it 'the best of times and the worst of times,' as good news on vaccines and testing coincides with...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 14)
COMPUTING
Like a Futuristic Phone Booth, PORTL Lets You Communicate Via Full-Body Hologram
Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends
" wants to reinvent the way we beam people, public figures or otherwise, into living rooms all over the...
How the Ownership Economy Could Make Internet Platforms Work for Everyone
The way we transact with each other and conduct business has changed a lot in the last 10 years.
For some of us it’s hard to remember how we used to find rides or places...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 7)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Pioneer Geoff Hinton: 'Deep Learning Is Going to Be Able to Do Everything'
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
"i'I do believe deep learning is going to be able to do everything, but I...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 31)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Has Cracked a Key Mathematical Puzzle for Understanding Our World
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
"Partial differential equations can describe everything from planetary motion to plate tectonics, but they’re notoriously hard to solve....
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 24)
AUGMENTED REALITY
Forget AR Glasses. Augmented Reality Is Headed to Your Windshield
Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends
"...What Envisics has developed is a headset-free, in-car holography system that aims to transform the way we view the road....
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 17)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A Radical New Technique Lets AI Learn With Practically No Data
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
"Shown photos of a horse and a rhino, and told a unicorn is something in between, can...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 10)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
GPT-3 Bot Spends a Week Replying on Reddit, Starts Talking About the Illuminati
Rhett Jones | Gizmodo
"..the length of the replies was especially unusual in that they were sometimes coming within a minute of...
