Curation
Singularity Hub curates the latest news in exponential technologies. Curation is where you’ll find awesome stories from around the web.
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 21)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Pedro Domingos on the Arms Race in Artificial Intelligence
Christoph Scheuermann and Bernhard Zand | Spiegel Online
“AI lowers the cost of knowledge by orders of magnitude. One good, effective machine learning system can do...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 14)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Learns a New Trick: Measuring Brain Cells
Robbie Gonzalez | Wired
“For three months, I spent three or four hours a day, five or six days a week, in a small room, peering through...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 7)
CYBERNETICS
A Brain-Boosting Prosthesis Moves From Rats to Humans
Robbie Gonzalez | WIRED
“Today, their proof-of-concept prosthetic lives outside a patient's head and connects to the brain via wires. But in the future, Hampson hopes, surgeons could...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 31)
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
The Next Best Version of Me: How to Live Forever
David Ewing Duncan | Wired
“Church is one of the leaders of an initiative called the Genome Project-Write, or GP-Write, which is organizing the efforts...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 24)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How the AI Cloud Could Produce the Richest Companies Ever
Peter Burrows | MIT Technology Review
“Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—and to a lesser extent companies like Apple, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP—have the massive computing...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 17)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
China Wants to Shape the Global Future of Artificial Intelligence
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“China’s booming AI industry and massive government investment in the technology have raised fears in the US and elsewhere...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 10)
COMPUTING
Google Thinks It's Close to 'Quantum Supremacy.' Here's What That Really Means.
Martin Giles and Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“Seventy-two may not be a large number, but in quantum computing terms, it’s massive. This...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 3)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Inside the Alexa Prize
James Vlahos | Wired
“The fevered quest for conversational AI has pitted Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft in a battle for two vital resources. The first is finite: top-shelf PhDs...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through February 24)
COMPUTING
Serious Quantum Computers Are Finally Here. What Are We Going to Do With Them?
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
"'The thing driving the hype is the realization that quantum computing is actually real,' says Isaac...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through February 17)
BIOTECH
In the Future We Won’t Edit Genomes—We’ll Just Print Out New Ones
Bryan Walsh | MIT Technology Review
“'Over the next 10 years synthetic biology is going to be producing all kinds of compounds and materials...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through February 10)
SPACE
Falcon Heavy Rocket Makes History With Successful First Launch
Michael Greshko | National Geographic
“'I'm still trying to absorb everything that happened. It seemed surreal to me,' SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a post-launch press...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through February 3)
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico
Nellie Bowles | The New York Times
“Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter…And these men—because they are almost...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 27)
COMPUTING
China Wants to Make the Chips That Will Add AI to Any Gadget
Yiting Sun | MIT Technology Review
“The chip is just one example of an important trend sweeping China’s tech sector. The country’s semiconductor...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 20)
AUGMENTED REALITY
AR Has Inherited All the Promise and Hype of VR
Nick Statt | The Verge
“The full spectrum of AR was present on the floor of the show’s many gadget expos and booth halls, making...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 13)
TRANSPORTATION
CES 2018: Phantom Auto Demonstrates First Remote-Controlled Car on Public Roads
Mark Harris | IEEE Spectrum
“But Shukman is not sitting next to me in the driver’s seat of Phantom’s Lincoln MKZ, and he hasn’t felt...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 6)
ROBOTS
The Year Robots Backflipped Their Way Into Our Hearts
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“Legged robots remain very expensive and difficult to commercialize. So it came as little surprise when Google sold Boston Dynamics to...
The 7 Hub Stories That Got the Most Social Media Love This Year
I bet you think 2017 was a hot mess, a relentless series of tragedies and catastrophes that exposed humanity for what little it's worth. Let us re-instill in you a sense of optimism with...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through December 16)
BITCOIN
Bitcoin Is a Delusion That Could Conquer the World
Derek Thompson | The Atlantic
“What seems most certain is that the future of money will test our conventional definitions—of currencies, of bubbles, and of initial offerings....
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through December 9)
ROBOTICS
New Robots Can See Into Their Future
Brett Israel | Berkeley News
“Using this technology, called visual foresight, the robots can predict what their cameras will see if they perform a particular sequence of movements. These robotic...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through December 2)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself?
Cliff Kuang | New York Times
“Kosinski’s results suggested something stranger: that artificial intelligences often excel by developing whole new ways of seeing, or even thinking, that...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through November 18)
ROBOTS
Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot Does Backflips Now and It's Full-Tilt Insane
Matt Simon | Wired
“To be clear: Humanoids aren’t supposed to be able to do this. It's extremely difficult to make a bipedal robot that can move...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through November 11)
QUANTUM COMPUTING
IBM Raises the Bar With a 50-Qubit Quantum Computer
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“50 qubits is a significant landmark in progress toward practical quantum computers. Other systems built so far have...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through November 4)
TRANSPORTATION
Who's Ready to Put Their Kid on a Self-Driving School Bus?
Aarian Marshall | Wired
“The designers know the concept is provocative, but they think it points to a bigger truth: You’ll know autonomous vehicles are...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through October 28)
INTERNET OF THINGS
Amazon Key Is a New Service That Lets Couriers Unlock Your Front Door
Ben Popper | The Verge
“When a courier arrives with a package for in-home delivery, they scan the barcode, sending a...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through October 21)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Stunning AI Breakthrough Takes Us One Step Closer to the Singularity
George Dvorsky | Gizmodo
“A new paper published in Nature today describes how the artificially intelligent system that defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016 got its digital...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through October 14)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Google's Learning Software Learns to Write Learning Software
Tom Simonite | Wired
“In a project called AutoML, Google’s researchers have taught machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. In some instances, what it comes up...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around The Web (Through October 7)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Google Has Built Earbuds That Translate 40 Languages in Real Time
Dave Gershgorn | Quartz
“The last part of that process is traditionally done by putting together pre-recorded words or word fragments. However, DeepMind, Alphabet’s AI...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around The Web (Through September 30)
AUGMENTED REALITY
ZED Mini Turns Rift and Vive Into an AR Headset From the Future
Ben Lang | Road to VR
“When attached, the camera provides stereo pass-through video and real-time depth and environment mapping, turning the...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around The Web (Through September 23)
DRONES
The First Autonomous Drone Delivery Network Will Fly Above Switzerland Starting Next Month
Thuy Ong | The Verge
“Logistics company Matternet has announced a permanent autonomous drone network in Switzerland that will now see lab samples...
This Year’s Awesome Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories From Around the Web (Through Sept 16)
Each week we scour the web for great articles and fascinating advances across our core topics, from robots to biotech and AI. We pay special attention to and are excited to see new ways...
This Year’s Awesome Robot Stories From Around the Web (Through Sept 9)
Each week we scour the web for great articles and fascinating advances across our core topics, from AI to biotech and the brain. But robots have a special place in our hearts. This week,...
The Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through September 2)
AUGMENTED REALITY
Google Unveils ARCore, Its Answer to Apple's ARKit, But It Will Be Hard to Catch Up
Mark Sullivan | Fast Company
“With ARCore, Google says, developers can create AR apps and games that run...
The Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through August 26)
BIOTECH
Lab-Grown Food Startup Memphis Meats Raises $17 Million From DFJ, Cargill, Bill Gates, Others
Paul Sawers | Venture Beat
“Meat grown in a laboratory is the future, if certain sustainable food advocates have their way,...
The Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through August 19)
BIOHACKING
Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA
Andy Greenberg | WIRED
"Regardless of any practical reason for the research, however, the notion of building a computer attack—known as an 'exploit'—with nothing but the information stored...
The Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through August 12)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Blizzard and DeepMind Turn StarCraft II Into an AI Research Lab
Darrell Etherington | TechCrunch
“StarCraft II is such a useful environment for AI research basically because of how complex and varied the games can...
The Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through August 5)
TRANSPORTATION
A Pod Races Through the Hyperloop for the First Time Ever
Alex Davies | WIRED
“Once loaded into a 1,600-foot-long concrete tube in the Nevada desert, the pod hit 192 mph in about 5 seconds, using...
The Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 29)
AUGMENTED REALITY
$99 Headset Could Be Augmented Reality's First True Chance at a Mass Market
Rachel Metz | MIT Technology Review
“The headset, made by Mira, is like an AR version of Samsung’s Gear VR, which gives users...
The Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 22)
BIOTECH
Verily Robot Will Raise 20 Million Sterile Mosquitoes for Release in California
Emily Mullin | MIT Technology Review
“To help breed and release the mosquitoes, Verily has partnered with Kentucky-based Mosquito Mate and Fresno’s mosquito control...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 15)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind's AI Is Teaching Itself Parkour, and the Results Are Adorable
James Vincent | The Verge
"The research explores how reinforcement learning (or RL) can be used to teach a computer to navigate unfamiliar and...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 8)
DIGITAL MEDIA
Make Hollywood-Quality Animations at Low-Budget Prices With This Motion Capture Suit
Sarah Buhr | TechCrunch
"You might be familiar with the industry-standard green man MoCap suit many Hollywood studios use to capture the movement of...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 1)
DRONES
MIT Is Building Autonomous Drones That Can Both Drive and Fly
April Glaser | Recode
"The drones, which were built at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, also include route-planning software that can help calculate...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 24)
SPACE
NASA Finds Evidence of 10 New Earth-Sized Planets in Our Corner of the Galaxy
Sean O’Kane | The Verge
"A total of 2,335 of those have been verified as exoplanets, 21 of which are Earth-sized and...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 17)
SILICON VALLEY NEWS
Even Uber's Crisis Won't Kill Founder Worship in Tech
Davey Alba | WIRED
"Because of Uber's corporate structure, only Kalanick himself can really decide if he stays or goes. And the Valley has been...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 10)
ROBOTICS
Alphabet Is Selling Its Terrifying Robots to SoftBank
Mike Murphy | Quartz
"It’s unclear what SoftBank paid for Alphabet’s two robotics companies, but perhaps it sees a future where robots are as commonplace in our lives...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 3)
BIOTECH
These Color-Changing Tattoos Monitor Your Health, No Wearable Needed
Katharine Schwab | Fast Company
"Researchers are getting closer to turning the skin into an interface, while designers imagine what these interfaces might look like. Do they...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 27)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Google's AlphaGo Continues Dominance With Second Win in China
Cade Metz | WIRED
"The last game of the series is set for Saturday. But before then, on Friday, the machine will play two others: one...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 20)
ROBOTICS
San Francisco Considers Ban on Sidewalk Delivery Robots
Steven Musil | CNET
"San Francisco is considering legislation that would put the brakes on delivery robots rolling across the city's sidewalks. The robots, once confined to sci-fi...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 13)
TRANSPORTATION
Have Scientists Discovered the Cure for Potholes?
Angela Chen | The Verge
"Self-healing asphalt has been tested on 12 different roads in the Netherlands, and one of these has been functioning and open to the...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 6)
AUTOMATION
Veo Robotics Gives Industrial Robots a Sixth Sense for Safely Working Around People
Devin Coldewey | TechCrunch
"Veo’s system uses a set of four depth-sensing cameras placed around the work space so as to give complete...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 29)
BRAIN
Facebook Launches "Moon Shot" Effort to Decode Speech Direct From the Brain
Larry Greenemeier | Scientific American
"If all goes according to plan—and that’s a big if—Building 8’s neural prosthetic would strap onto a person’s head,...
