Tag Archives: awesome
#434797 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
GENE EDITING
Genome Engineers Made More Than 13,000 Genome Edits in a Single Cell
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“The group, led by gene technologist George Church, wants to rewrite genomes at a far larger scale than has currently been possible, something it says could ultimately lead to the ‘radical redesign’ of species—even humans.”
ROBOTICS
Inside Google’s Rebooted Robotics Program
Cade Metz | The New York Times
“Google’s new lab is indicative of a broader effort to bring so-called machine learning to robotics. …Many believe that machine learning—not extravagant new devices—will be the key to developing robotics for manufacturing, warehouse automation, transportation and many other tasks.
VIDEOS
Boston Dynamics Builds the Warehouse Robot of Jeff Bezos’ Dreams
Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends
“…for anyone wondering what the future of warehouse operation is likely to look like, this offers a far more practical glimpse of the years to come than, say, a dancing dog robot. As Boston Dynamics moves toward commercializing its creations for the first time, this could turn out to be a lot closer than you might think.”
TECHNOLOGY
Europe Is Splitting the Internet Into Three
Casey Newton | The Verge
“The internet had previously been divided into two: the open web, which most of the world could access; and the authoritarian web of countries like China, which is parceled out stingily and heavily monitored. As of today, though, the web no longer feels truly worldwide. Instead we now have the American internet, the authoritarian internet, and the European internet. How does the EU Copyright Directive change our understanding of the web?”
VIRTUAL REALITY
No Man’s Sky’s Next Update Will Let You Explore Infinite Space in Virtual Reality
Taylor Hatmaker | TechCrunch
“Assuming the game runs well enough, No Man’s Sky Virtual Reality will be a far cry from gimmicky VR games that lack true depth, offering one of the most expansive—if not the most expansive—VR experiences to date.”
3D PRINTING
3D Metal Printing Tries to Break Into the Manufacturing Mainstream
Mark Anderson | IEEE Spectrum
“It’s been five or so years since 3D printing was at peak hype. Since then, the technology has edged its way into a new class of materials and started to break into more applications. Today, 3D printers are being seriously considered as a means to produce stainless steel 5G smartphones, high-strength alloy gas-turbine blades, and other complex metal parts.”
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#434755 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind and Google: The Battle to Control Artificial Intelligence
Hal Hodson | 1843
“Hassabis thought DeepMind would be a hybrid: it would have the drive of a startup, the brains of the greatest universities, and the deep pockets of one of the world’s most valuable companies. Every element was in place to hasten the arrival of AGI and solve the causes of human misery.”
ROBOTICS
Robot Valets Are Now Parking Cars in One of France’s Busiest Airports
James Vincent | The Verge
“Stanley Robotics say its system uses space much more efficiently than humans, fitting 50 percent more cars into the same area. This is thanks in part to the robots’ precision driving, but also because the system keeps track of when customers will return. This means the robots can park cars three or four deep, but then dig out the right vehicle ready for its owner’s return.”
COMPUTING
Quantum Computing Should Supercharge This Machine-Learning Technique
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“Quantum computing and artificial intelligence are both hyped ridiculously. But it seems a combination of the two may indeed combine to open up new possibilities.”
BIOTECH
Scientists Reawaken Cells From a 28,000-Year-Old Mammoth
Becky Ferreira | Motherboard
“Yuka the woolly mammoth died a long time ago, but scientists gave her cells a short second life in mouse egg cells.”
ETHICS
CRISPR Experts Are Calling for a Global Moratorium on Heritable Gene Editing
Niall Firth | MIT Technology Review
“We still don’t know what the majority of our genes do, so the risks of unintended consequences or so-called off-target effects—good or bad—are huge. …Changes in a genome might have unforeseen outcomes in future generations as well. ‘Attempting to reshape the species on the basis of our current state of knowledge would be hubris,’ the letter reads.”
GENETICS
Unleash the Full Potential of the Human Genome Project
Paul Glimcher | The Hill
“So how do the risks embedded in our genes become the diseases, the so-called phenotypes, we seek to cure or prevent? …It is not just nature, but also nurture, which leads to disease. This is something that we have known for centuries, but which we seem to have conveniently forgotten in our rush to embrace the technology of genetics. In 1990 the only thing we could measure comprehensively was genetics, so we did it. But why did we stop there?”
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#434660 Video Friday: Innfos Humanoid Robot, and ...
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Continue reading →
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#434611 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
AUTOMATION
The Rise of the Robot Reporter
Jaclyn Paiser | The New York Times
“In addition to covering company earnings for Bloomberg, robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post and earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times.”
ROBOTICS
Penny-Sized Ionocraft Flies With No Moving Parts
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) thrusters, sometimes called ion thrusters, use a high strength electric field to generate a plasma of ionized air. …Magical, right? No moving parts, completely silent, and it flies!”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Making New Drugs With a Dose of Artificial Intelligence
Cade Metz | The New York Times
“…DeepMind won the [protein folding] competition by a sizable margin—it improved the prediction accuracy nearly twice as much as experts expected from the contest winner. DeepMind’s victory showed how the future of biochemical research will increasingly be driven by machines and the people who oversee those machines.”
COMPUTING
Nano-Switches Made Out of Graphene Could Make Our Devices Even Smaller
Emerging Technology From the arXiv | MIT Technology Review
“For the first time, physicists have built reliable, efficient graphene nanomachines that can be fabricated on silicon chips. They could lead to even greater miniaturization.”
BIOTECH
The Problem With Big DNA
Sarah Zhang | The Atlantic
“It took researchers days to search through thousands of genome sequences. Now it takes just a few seconds. …As sequencing becomes more common, the number of publicly available bacterial and viral genomes has doubled. At the rate this work is going, within a few years multiple millions of searchable pathogen genomes will be available—a library of DNA and disease, spread the world over.”
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Fire (and Lots of It): Berkeley Researcher on the Only Way to Fix Cryptocurrency
Dan Goodin | Ars Technica
“Weaver said, there’s no basis for the promises that cryptocurrencies’ decentralized structure and blockchain basis will fundamentally transform commerce or economics. That means the sky-high valuations spawned by those false promises are completely unjustified. …To support that conclusion, Weaver recited an oft-repeated list of supposed benefits of cryptocurrencies and explained why, after closer scrutiny, he believed them to be myths.”
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#434585 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The World’s Fastest Supercomputer Breaks an AI Record
Tom Simonite | Wired
“Summit, which occupies an area equivalent to two tennis courts, used more than 27,000 powerful graphics processors in the project. It tapped their power to train deep-learning algorithms, the technology driving AI’s frontier, chewing through the exercise at a rate of a billion billion operations per second, a pace known in supercomputing circles as an exaflop.”
ROBOTICS
iRobot Finally Announces Awesome New Terra Robotic Lawnmower
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“Since the first Roomba came out in 2002, it has seemed inevitable that one day iRobot would develop a robotic lawn mower. After all, a robot mower is basically just a Roomba that works outside, right? Of course, it’s not nearly that simple, as iRobot has spent the last decade or so discovering, but they’ve finally managed to pull it off.”
3D Printing
Watch This Super Speedy 3D Printer Make Objects Suddenly Appear
Erin Winick | MIT Technology Review
“The new machine—which the team nicknamed the ‘replicator’ after the machine from Star Trek—instead forms the entire item all in one go. It does this by shining light onto specific spots in a rotating resin that solidifies when exposed to a certain light level.”
GENETICS
The DIY Designer Baby Project Funded With Bitcoin
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“i‘Is DIY bio anywhere close to making a CRISPR baby? No, not remotely,’ David Ishee says. ‘But if some rich guy pays a scientist to do the work, it’s going to happen.’ He adds: ‘What you are reporting on isn’t Bryan—it’s the unseen middle space, a layer of gray-market biotech and freelance science where people with resources can get things done.’i”
SCIENCE
The Complete Cancer Cure Story Is Both Bogus and Tragic
Megan Molteni | Wired
“You’d think creators and consumers of news would have learned their lesson by now. But the latest version of the fake cancer cure story is even more flagrantly flawed than usual. The public’s cancer cure–shaped amnesia, and media outlets’ willingness to exploit it for clicks, are as bottomless as ever. Hope, it would seem, trumps history.”
BOOKS
An AI Reading List—From Practical Primers to Sci-Fi Short Stories
James Vincent | The Verge
“The Verge has assembled a reading list: a brief but diverse compendium of books, short stories, and blogs, all chosen by leading figures in the AI world to help you better understand artificial intelligence.”
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