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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
These Creepy Fake Humans Represent a New Age in AI
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
“[The simulated humans] are synthetic data designed to feed the growing appetite of deep-learning algorithms. Firms like Datagen offer a compelling alternative to the expensive and time-consuming process of gathering real-world data. They will make it for you: how you want it, when you want—and relatively cheaply.”

ROBOTICS
For $2,700, You Too Can Have Your Very Own Robotic Dog
Victoria Song | Gizmodo
“You’re probably familiar with Spot, Boston Dynamics’ highly advanced, nightmare-inducing robot dog. And while it went on sale last year, few of us have an extra $74,500 lying around to buy one. However, Chinese firm Unitree Robotics has a similar quadruped bot that’s not only a fraction of the size, but it also starts at a mere $2,700. For an advanced robot dog, that’s actually pretty dang affordable.”

SPACE
Terran R Rocket From Relativity Space Will Be Completely 3D Printed, Completely Reusable
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“This week, Relativity Space is announcing the Terran R, a 65 meter tall entirely 3D-printed two stage launch vehicle capable of delivering 20,000 kg into low Earth orbit and then returning all of its bits and pieces safely back to the ground to be launched all over again. Relativity Space’s special sauce is that they 3D print as close to absolutely everything as they possibly can, reducing the part count of their rockets by several orders of magnitude.”

BIOTECH
Wake Forest Teams Win a NASA Prize for 3D Printing Human Liver Tissue
A. Tarantola | Engadget
“i‘I cannot overstate what an impressive accomplishment this is. When NASA started this challenge in 2016, we weren’t sure there would be a winner,’ Jim Reuter, NASA associate administrator for space technology, said in a recent press statement. ‘It will be exceptional to hear about the first artificial organ transplant one day and think this novel NASA challenge might have played a small role in making it happen.’i”

SPACE
How Risky Is It to Send Jeff Bezos to Space?
Eric Niiler | Wired
“The rich-guy space race between Bezos and Branson (SpaceX’s Elon Musk is the odd man out for now) may convince other well-heeled space tourists who want assurances that a rocket ride is both fun and safe. But experts note that space travel is always risky, even when spacecraft have undergone years of testing. Blue Origin’s flight will be its first launch with human passengers; previous flights have only carried a mannequin. For Virgin Galactic, it will be only the second time the rocket plane has carried people.”

ETHICS
OpenAI Claims to Have Mitigated Bias and Toxicity in GPT-3
Kyle Wiggers | VentureBeat
“In a study published today, OpenAI, the lab best known for its research on large language models, claims it’s discovered a way to improve the ‘behavior’ of language models with respect to ethical, moral, and societal values. The approach, OpenAI says, can give developers the tools to dictate the tone and personality of a model depending on the prompt that the model’s given.”

NEUROSCIENCE
Neuroscientists Have Discovered a Phenomenon That They Can’t Explain
Ed Yong | The Atlantic
“Put it this way: The neurons that represented the smell of an apple in May and those that represented the same smell in June were as different from each other as those that represent the smells of apples and grass at any one time. …’Scientists are meant to know what’s going on, but in this particular case, we are deeply confused. We expect it to take many years to iron out,’ [said neuroscientists Carl Schoonover].”

CRYPTOCURRENCY
Global Banking Regulators Call for Toughest Rules for Cryptocurrencies
Kalyeena Makortoff | The Guardian
“The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which consists of regulators from the world’s leading financial centres, is proposing a ‘new conservative prudential treatment’ for crypto-assets that would force banks to put aside enough capital to cover 100% of potential losses. That would be the highest capital requirement of any asset, illustrating that cryptocurrencies and related investments are seen as far more risky and volatile than conventional stocks or bonds.”

SCIENCE
DNA Jumps Between Species. Nobody Knows How Often.
Christie Wilcox | Quanta
“Recent studies of a range of animals—other fish, reptiles, birds and mammals—point to a similar conclusion: The lateral inheritance of DNA, once thought to be exclusive to microbes, occurs on branches throughout the tree of life.”

GOVERNANCE
Italy’s Failed Digital Democracy Dream Is a Warning
Michele Barbero | Wired UK
“Aside from the Five Star’s shortcomings and latest woes, however, citizens’ direct participation in party politics by means of digital tools is likely to pick up pace in the near future. ‘We are going to see more and more the use of the internet to delegate powers to party members,’ says D’Alimonte: ‘The internet is changing the functioning of democracy, we are just at the beginning.’i”

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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 art. …But oh what a difference a year makes. Researchers from the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence announced on Tuesday the release of their own generative deep learning model, Wu Dao, a mammoth AI seemingly capable of doing everything GPT-3 can do, and more.”

TRANSPORTATION
United Airlines Wants to Bring Back Supersonic Air Travel
Lauren Hirsch | The New York Times
“…United Airlines said it was ordering 15 jets that can travel faster than the speed of sound from Boom Supersonic, a start-up in Denver. …Boom, which has raised $270 million from venture capital firms and other investors, said it planned to introduce aircraft in 2025 and start flight tests in 2026. It expects the plane, which it calls the Overture, to carry passengers before the end of the decade.”

SPACE
Spacex Signs ‘Blockbuster Deal’ To Send Space Tourists to the ISS
Amanda Kooser | CNET
“On Wednesday, space tourism company Axiom Space announced a ‘blockbuster deal’ with SpaceX that will send private crews to the ISS through 2023. Axiom and SpaceX already had a deal in place for a Dragon spacecraft flight with three private citizens and former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría in early 2022. The new agreement expands the scope to a total of four flights.”

TRANSPORTATION
Why Electric Cars Will Take Over Sooner Than You Think
Justin Rowlatt | BBC News
“This isn’t a fad, this isn’t greenwashing. Yes, the fact many governments around the world are setting targets to ban the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles gives impetus to the process. But what makes the end of the internal combustion engine inevitable is a technological revolution. And technological revolutions tend to happen very quickly.”

ETHICS
Have Autonomous Robots Started Killing in War?
James Vincent | The Verge
“…over the past week, a number of publications tentatively declared, based on a UN report from the Libyan civil war, that killer robots may have hunted down humans autonomously for the first time. As one headline put it: ‘The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here.’ But is it? As you might guess, it’s a hard question to answer.”

ENERGY
Chart: Behind the Three-Decade Collapse of Lithium-Ion Battery Costs
Rahul Rao | IEEE Spectrum
“Between 1991 and 2018, the average price of the batteries that power mobile phones, fuel electric cars, and underpin green energy storage fell more than thirtyfold, according to work by Micah Ziegler Jessika Trancik and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. …Batteries today, the researchers say, have mass-production scales and energy densities unthinkable 30 years ago.”

HEALTH
The UK Has a Plan for a New ‘Pandemic Radar’ System
Maryn McKenna | Wired
“i‘What we really need is a broadly distributed, high-fidelity, always-on surveillance system…’ says Samuel V. Scarpino, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who directs its Emergent Epidemics Lab. ‘This is not something that can be built easily. But we have a narrow window right now, where basically the whole planet knows that we need to solve this.’i”

INTERFACES
Vilnius, Lithuania Built a ‘Portal’ to Another City To Help Keep People Connected
Kim Lyons | The Verge
“They really went all-in on the idea and the design; it looks quite a bit like something out of the erstwhile sci-fi movie/show Stargate. …The portals both have large screens and cameras that broadcast live images between the two cities—a kind of digital bridge, according to its creators—meant to encourage people to ‘rethink the meaning of unity,’ Go Vilnius said in a press release. Aw.”

SECURITY
Amazon Devices Will Soon Automatically Share Your Internet With Neighbors
Dan Goodin | Ars Technica
“Amazon’s experimental wireless mesh networking turns users into guinea pigs. …By default, a variety of Amazon devices will enroll in the system come June 8. And since only a tiny fraction of people take the time to change default settings, that means millions of people will be co-opted into the program whether they know anything about it or not.”

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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 hand. …[This easily topped] the previous record for implant-driven typing, which was about 25 characters per minute. The raw error rate was about 5 percent, and applying a system like a typing autocorrect could drop the error rate down to 1 percent.”

VIRTUAL REALITY
Grand Theft Auto Looks Frighteningly Photorealistic With This Machine Learning Technique
Andrew Liszewski | Gizmodo
“What’s even more impressive is that the researchers think, with the right hardware and further optimization, the gameplay footage could be enhanced by their convolutional network at ‘interactive rates’—another way to say in real-time—when baked into a video game’s rendering engine. So instead of needing a $2,000 PS6 for games to look like this, all that may be needed is a software update.”

INTERFACES
Better Than Holograms: 3D-Animated Starships Can Be Viewed From Any Angle
Jennifer Oullette | Ars Technica
“The technology making this science fiction a potential reality is known as an optical trap display (OTD). These are not holograms; they’re volumetric images, as they can be viewed from any angle, as they seem to float in the air.”

NEUROSCIENCE
Genes Linked to Self-Awareness in Modern Humans Were Less Common in Neanderthals
Emily Willingham | Scientific American
“Our creative powers may explain why we have been around for the past 40,000 years and Neanderthals have not. Also, traits that stand out in modern humans may provide clues as to why we have maneuvered a helicopter on Mars while chimpanzees have only engaged in the most basic tool use.”

FUTURE
The Profound Potential of Elon Musk’s New Rocket
Robert Zubrin | Nautilus
“Starship won’t just give us the ability to send human explorers to Mars, the moon, and other destinations in the inner solar system, it offers us a two-order-of-magnitude increase in overall operational capability to do pretty much anything we want to do in space.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Pentagon Inches Toward Letting AI Control Weapons
Will Knight | Wired
“The drill was one of several conducted last summer to test how artificial intelligence could help expand the use of automation in military systems, including in scenarios that are too complex and fast-moving for humans to make every critical decision. The demonstrations also reflect a subtle shift in the Pentagon’s thinking about autonomous weapons, as it becomes clearer that machines can outperform humans at parsing complex situations or operating at high speed.”

TECHNOLOGY
Smartphone Is Now ‘the Place Where We Live’, Anthropologists Say
Alex Hern | The Guardian
“i‘The smartphone is perhaps the first object to challenge the house itself (and possibly also the workplace) in terms of the amount of time we dwell in it while awake,’ they conclude, coining the term ‘transportal home’ to describe the effect. ‘We are always “at home” in our smartphone. We have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets.”

SCIENCE
Extraterrestrial Plutonium Atoms Turn up on Ocean Bottom
William J. Broad | The New York Times
“Scientists studying a sample of oceanic crust retrieved from the Pacific seabed nearly a mile down have discovered traces of a rare isotope of plutonium, the deadly element that has been central to the atomic age. They say it was made in colliding stars and later rained down through Earth’s atmosphere as cosmic dust millions of years ago.”

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ROBOTICS
The Robot Surgeon Will See You Now
Cade Metz | The New York Times
“Real scalpels, artificial intelligence—what could go wrong? …The [Berkeley] project is a part of a much wider effort to bring artificial intelligence into the operating room. Using many of the same technologies that underpin self-driving cars, autonomous drones and warehouse robots, researchers are working to automate surgical robots too. These methods are still a long way from everyday use, but progress is accelerating.”

FUTURE
This Tech Was Science Fiction 20 Years Ago. Now It’s Reality
Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends
“A couple of decades ago, kids were reading Harry Potter books, Pixar movies were all the rage, and Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation were battling it out for video game supremacy. That doesn’t sound all that different from 2021. But technology has come a long way in that time. Not only is today’s tech far more powerful than it was 20 years ago, but a lot of the gadgets we thought of as science fiction have become part of our lives.”

LONGEVITY
How Long Can We Live?
Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine
“As the global population approaches eight billion, and science discovers increasingly promising ways to slow or reverse aging in the lab, the question of human longevity’s potential limits is more urgent than ever. When their work is examined closely, it’s clear that longevity scientists hold a wide range of nuanced perspectives on the future of humanity.”

3D PRINTING
Forget Digging for Fossils. This Museum Printed a Full T-Rex Skeleton Instead
Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends
“For a team of researchers at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, copying a T. rex took some state-of-the-art laser scanning technology, a giant 3D printer, a just-as-sizable postage bill, almost 45 million square millimeters of acrylic paint, and a group of experts wishing to push the boundaries of additive manufacturing.”

HEALTH
One Vaccine to Rule Them All
James Hamblin | The Atlantic
“i‘A universal SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is step one,’ [Anthony] Fauci said. Step two would be a universal coronavirus vaccine, capable of protecting us not only from SARS-CoV-2 in all its forms, but also from the inevitable emergence of new and different coronaviruses that might cause future pandemics. The race to create such a vaccine may prove one of the great feats of a generation.”

TECHNOLOGY
These Materials Could Make Science Fiction a Reality
John Markoff | The New York Times
“Imagine operating a computer by moving your hands in the air as Tony Stark does in Iron Man. Or using a smartphone to magnify an object as does the device that Harrison Ford’s character uses in Blade Runner. …These advances and a host of others on the horizon could happen because of metamaterials, making it possible to control beams of light with the same ease that computer chips control electricity.”

DRONES
Wingcopter Debuts a Triple-Drop Drone to Create ‘Logistical Highways in the Sky’
Aria Alamalhodaei | TechCrunch
“The Wingcopter 198, which was revealed Tuesday, is capable of making three separate deliveries per flight, the company said. Wingcopter has couched this multi-stop capability as a critical feature that will allow it to grow a cost-efficient—and hopefully profitable—drone-delivery-as-a-service business.”

SPACE
The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster
George Dvorsky | Gizmodo
“An international exercise to simulate an asteroid striking Earth has come to an end. With just six days to go before a fictitious impact, things don’t look good for a 185-mile-wide region between Prague and Munich. …This may sound like a grim role-playing game, but it’s very serious business. Led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, the asteroid impact simulation is meant to prepare scientists, planners, and key decision makers for the real thing, should it ever occur.”

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