Tag Archives: stories

BIOTECH
A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth
Carl Zimmer | The New York Times
“A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth. The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct.”

TECH
Alphabet’s Project Taara Laser Tech Beamed 700TB of Data Across Nearly 5km
Richard Lawler | The Verge
“Sort of like fiber optic cables without the cable, FSOC can create a 20Gbps+ broadband link from two points that have a clear line of sight, and Alphabet’s moonshot lab X has built up Project Taara to give it a shot. They started by setting up links in India a few years ago as well as a few pilots in Kenya, and today X revealed what it has achieved by using its wireless optical link to connect service across the Congo River from Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

TRANSPORTATION
EV Startup Lucid’s First Car Can Travel 520 Miles on a Full Battery—Beating Tesla by 115 Miles
Tim Levin | Business Insider
“When Lucid Motors’ hotly anticipated first cars reach customers later this year, they’ll become the longest-range electric vehicles on the road. …The startup’s debut sedan, the Air Dream Edition R, has earned a range rating of 520 miles from the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s the longest range rating the agency has ever awarded.”

ENERGY
Self-Sustaining Solar House on Wheels Wants To Soak up the Sun
Doug Johnson | Ars Technica
“The vehicle has the aerodynamic tear-drop shape of other solar-powered vehicles and sports a series of solar panels on its roof. However, it also has additional roofing that slides up when stationary, making it easier to stand inside to cook or sleep. …To showcase its creation, Solar Team Eindhoven will begin to drive the vehicle 3,000 kilometers from Eindhoven to the southern tip of Spain this Sunday.”

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
Biology Starts to Get a Technological Makeover
Steve Lohr | The New York Times
“Proponents of synthetic biology say the field could reprogram biology to increase food production, fight disease, generate energy and purify water. The realization of that potential lies decades in the future, if at all. But it is no longer the stuff of pure science fiction because of advances in recent years in biology, computing, automation and artificial intelligence.”

TRANSPORTATION
Michelin’s Airless Passenger Car Tires Get Their First Public Outing
Loz Blain | New Atlas
“GM will begin offering [Michelin’s airless] Uptis [tires] as an option on certain models ‘as early as 2024,’ and the partnership is working with US state governments on regulatory approvals for street use, as well as with the federal government. At IAA Munich recently, the Uptis airless tire got its first public outing, in which ‘certain lucky members of the public’ had a chance to ride in a Mini Electric kitted out with a set.”

SCIENCE
Biologist Rethink the Logic Behind Cells’ Molecular Signals
Phillip Ball | Quanta
“Biologists often try to understand how life works by making analogies to electronic circuits, but that comparison misses the unique qualities of cellular signaling systems. …[The] signaling systems of complex cells are nothing like simple electronic circuits. The logic governing their operation is riotously complex—but it has advantages.”

Image Credit: SpaceX / Unsplash Continue reading →

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 intelligence, biotechnology, and robotics. ‘The death of Moore’s law has been greatly exaggerated,’ del Alamos says. ‘I think it’s going to go on for quite some time.’i”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
These Super-Efficient, Artificial Neurons Do Not Use Electrons
Payal Dhar | IEEE Spectrum
“[Though] artificial intelligence has come a long way, these systems are still far from matching the brain’s energy efficiency. …’The human brain…needs only 20 watts [to function], essentially [as much as] a light bulb,’ says Paul Robin, one of the scientists on the study. ‘Computers need much more energy. Our idea is that maybe the reason why our brain is so much more efficient is that it uses ions and not electrons to function.’i”

FUTURE
Artificial Intelligence and the ‘Gods Behind the Masks’
Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan | Wired
“In an excerpt from AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan explore what happens when deepfakers attack the deepfakes. …Touching on impending breakthroughs in computer vision, biometrics, and AI security, it imagines a future world marked by cat-and-mouse games between deepfakers and detectors, and between defenders and perpetrators.”

ENERGY
This Wildly Reinvented Wind Turbine Generates Five Times More Energy Than Its Competitors
Elissaveta M. Brandon | Fast Company
“Unlike traditional wind turbines, which consist of one pole and three gargantuan blades, the so-called Wind Catcher is articulated in a square grid with over 100 small blades. At 1,000 feet high, the system is over three times as tall as an average wind turbine, and it stands on a floating platform that’s anchored to the ocean floor.”

ROBOTICS
Segway’s New Lawn Robot Uses GPS to Cut Your Grass
David Watsky | CNET
“While it’s not the first robotic lawnmower, the Navimov’s value proposition against a competitive set is that it doesn’t require boundary cords as with most other devices in the category. Rather, it relies on something called the Exact Fusion Locating System—also known as ‘GPS’—to allow ‘precise positions and systematic mowing patterns’ in an effort you get you that perfectly manicured lawn without having to, ya know, actually mow it.”

SPACE
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Finally Scooped Up a Piece of Mars
Neel V. Patel | MIT Technology Review
“The rover bounced back from a failed attempt and acquired a sample of rock and soil that could reveal the secrets of ancient life on Mars. …[It] marks the first time a sample has ever been recovered on the planet. …Collecting samples is one of the marquee goals of the mission. Perseverance is equipped with 43 collection tubes, and NASA hopes to fill them all with rock and soil samples from Mars to one day bring back to Earth.”

ETHICS
The Fight to Define When AI Is ‘High Risk’
Khari Johnson | Wired
“The AI Act is one of the first major policy initiatives worldwide focused on protecting people from harmful AI. If enacted, it will classify AI systems according to risk, more strictly regulate AI that’s deemed high risk to humans, and ban some forms of AI entirely, including real-time facial recognition in some instances. In the meantime, corporations and interest groups are publicly lobbying lawmakers to amend the proposal according to their interests.”

Image Credit: Hector Falcon / Unsplash Continue reading →

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 small and cute, CyberDog is sleek and futuristic—even a little menacing. …Xiaomi says CyberDog is nimble enough to perform backflips, has a maximum payload of 3kg, and can trot along at speeds of 3.2m/s (compared to Spot’s 1.6m/s).”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Can AI Make a Better Fusion Reactor?
Rebecca Sohn | IEEE Spectrum
“The challenge, and it’s a big one, would be to accelerate the worldwide quest to tame instabilities in hot plasmas and ultimately provide a source of sustainable, and carbon-free power. …[The University of Lisbon’s] Diogo Ferreira recently collaborated with colleagues working on the Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK in a study that detailed three different uses for AI, machine learning, and deep learning models for fusion research.”

TRANSPORTATION
Joby Aviation Makes Its Public Trading Debut on the NYSE
Aria Alamalhodaei | TechCrunch
“Joby is developing a five-seat electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, which it unveiled to much anticipation in February. The company, which has backing from Toyota and JetBlue, has released a slew of announcements in recent months as it geared up for the public listing. ‘A lot of people talk about us as a secretive company,’ Bevirt said in an interview with TechCrunch. ‘We’re not actually a secretive company, we just choose to do the work and then show our work, rather than talking about it and then doing it.’i”

ENVIRONMENT
The UN Climate Report: All Is Not Well—But All Is Not Lost
Matt Simon | Wired
“i‘Is it still possible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees? The answer is yes,’ [coauthor Maisa Rojas Corradi, the director of the Center for Climate and Resilience Research at the University of Chile] said. ‘But unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reduction of all greenhouse gases, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees will be beyond the reach.’i”

INNOVATION
Without Code for DeepMind’s AI, This Lab Wrote Its Own
Grace Huckins | Wired
“The Google subsidiary solved a fundamental problem in biology but didn’t promptly share its solution. So a University of Washington team tried to re-create it. …Baker thinks that questions about information sharing between academia and industry will only grow more pressing. Problems in artificial intelligence require enormous time and resources to solve, and companies like DeepMind have access to personnel and computing power on a scale unimaginable for a university lab.”

SECURITY
AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test
Lily Hay Newman | Wired
“At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas this week, a team from Singapore’s Government Technology Agency presented a recent experiment in which they sent targeted phishing emails they crafted themselves and others generated by an AI-as-a-service platform to 200 of their colleagues …They were surprised to find that more people clicked the links in the AI-generated messages than the human-written ones—by a significant margin.”

COMPUTING
The Most Important Personal Computers in History, Ranked
Luke Dormehl | IEEE Spectrum
“Forty years ago this week, the iconic IBM PC made its debut, cementing the personal computer as a mainstream product category to be reckoned with. Within a few years, America—and the world—went computer wild, with home computers suddenly the province of ordinary people. But which desktop computers go down as the most influential of all time? Here are 10 that changed the game.”

SCIENCE
Physicists Create a Bizarre ‘Wigner Crystal’ Made Purely of Electrons
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | Quanta
“In 1934, Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, theorized a strange kind of matter—a crystal made from electrons. …Physicists tried many tricks over eight decades to nudge electrons into forming these so-called Wigner crystals, with limited success. In June, however, two independent groups of physicists reported in Nature the most direct experimental observations of Wigner crystals yet.”

Image Credit: Joel Filipe / Unsplash Continue reading →

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, created from an animal whose brain architecture is very similar to our own—the mouse. The map and underlying data set, which are now freely available to the public, depict more than 200,000 neurons and half a billion neural connections contained inside a cube of mouse brain no bigger than a grain of sand.”

SPACE
SpaceX Stacks the Full Starship Launch System for the First Time, Standing Nearly 400 Feet Tall
Darrell Etherington | TechCrunch
“SpaceX has achieved another major milestone in its Starship fully reusable launch system: It stacked the Starship spacecraft itself on top of a prototype of its Super Heavy booster, which itself is loaded up with a full complement of 29 Raptor rocket engines, and the Starship on top has six itself. The stacked spacecraft now represents the tallest assembled rocket ever developed in history.”

ROBOTICS
A New Generation of AI-Powered Robots Is Taking Over Warehouses
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
“In the months before the first reports of covid-19 would emerge, a new kind of robot headed to work. Built on years of breakthroughs in deep learning, it could pick up all kinds of objects with remarkable accuracy, making it a shoo-in for jobs like sorting products into packages at warehouses. …Within a few years, any task that previously required hands to perform could be partially or fully automated away.”

FUTURE
The Pentagon Is Using AI to Predict Events Days Into the Future
Eric Mack | CNET
“The Pentagon hasn’t released many specific details on what exactly GIDE involves, but it certainly doesn’t include any precogs bathing in creepy opaque white liquids. Rather, the idea seems to be combining data with machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence to gain enough of an informational edge to enable the proactive approach [commander of NORAD Gen. Glen D.] VanHerck describes.”

AUTOMATION
China Targets the Robotaxi Industry
Craig S. Smith | IEEE Spectrum
“China’s self-driving vehicle market is moving faster than that of the United States thanks to government regulatory support. In the past year, Baidu and AV competitor AutoX, backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, have announced a series of steps in the race toward what promises to be a massive market.”

VIRTUAL REALITY
Facebook Can Project Your Eyes Onto a VR Headset, and It’s Exactly as Uncanny as It Sounds
Adi Robertson | The Verge
“Facebook Reality Labs wants to help people see your eyes while you’re in virtual reality—even if the results sit somewhere between mildly unsettling and nightmarish. Earlier this week, FRL released a paper on ‘reverse passthrough VR,’ a recipe for making VR headsets less physically isolating. Researchers devised a method for translating your face onto the front of a headset, although they emphasize it’s still firmly experimental.”

ENERGY
China Says It’s Closing in on a Thorium Nuclear Reactor
Prachi Patel | IEEE Spectrum
“There is no denying the need for nuclear power in a world that hungers for clean, carbon-free energy. At the same time, there’s a need for safer technologies that bear less proliferation risk. Molten salt nuclear reactors (MSRs) fit the bill—and, according to at least one source, China may be well on their way to developing MSR technology.”

SECURITY
Watch a Hacker Hijack a Capsule Hotel’s Lights, Fans, and Beds
Andy Greenberg | Wired
“The hacker, who is French but asked to be called by his handle, Kyasupā, says he found half a dozen hackable vulnerabilities in the internet-of-things systems used in a capsule hotel he stayed at in 2019. They allowed him to hijack the controls for any room at the hotel to mess with its lights, ventilation, and even the beds in each room that convert to a couch, all of which are designed to be managed by networked systems linked to an iPod Touch given to every guest.”

Image Credit: NASA / Unsplash Continue reading →

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 work. …[Rober’s team] programmed more than 14,000 lines of code, and outfitted it with components like omnidirectional wheels and 3D-printed funnels to create what Rober says is a ‘friendly robot that’s super good at only one thing: setting up a butt-ton of dominos really, really fast.’i”

INNOVATION
I’m Sorry Dave, I’m Afraid I Invented That: Australian Court Finds AI Systems Can Be Recognized Under Patent Law
Josh Taylor | The Guardian
“[A]iFederal court judge says allowing artificial intelligence systems, as well as humans, to be inventors is ‘consistent with promoting innovation.’ ‘In my view, an inventor as recognized under the act can be an artificial intelligence system or device,’ [justice Jonathan Beach] said. …[He] said there needed to be a consideration beyond the mere dictionary definition of ‘inventor’ as being a human.”

TRANSPORTATION
Watch Joby Aviation’s Electric Air Taxi Complete a 150-Mile Flight
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“Granted, it doesn’t sound too impressive, but it’s actually among the longest flights ever performed by an electric aircraft. It’s equivalent to a trip between Seattle and Vancouver, or Los Angeles to San Diego—the type of regional trip conducted hundreds of times a day by regional partners to major airlines. Swapping out those polluting airplanes for a zero-emissions aircraft like Joby’s could be a major step toward the reduction of CO2 emissions.”

COMPUTING
Intel’s Ambitious Plan to Regain Chipmaking Leadership
Will Knight | Wired
“The technology changes laid out in the road map include a new transistor design and a new way of delivering power to a chip, both slated to debut in 2024 under the name Intel20A, which references the sub-nanometer angstrom scale. …Intel is also developing new ways of stacking the components in a chip together that promise improved performance and design flexibility.”

SCIENCE
Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real
Natalie Wolchover | Quanta
“…researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine ‘time crystal’ for the first time. A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Fast, Efficient Neural Networks Copy Dragonfly Brains
Frances Chance | IEEE Spectrum
“By harnessing the speed, simplicity, and efficiency of the dragonfly nervous system, we aim to design computers that perform these functions faster and at a fraction of the power that conventional systems consume.”

DIGITAL CURRENCY
Why Does the Federal Reserve Need a Digital Currency?
John Detrixhe | Quartz
“As physical cash goes away, so do the properties that make it special. …Is it time for America’s central bank to create a digital dollar? Congress is asking. And in hearings on July 27, a group of experts laid out their reasons why the Federal Reserve needs to go digital. Here are a few of their arguments.”

Image Credit: Scott Webb / Unsplash Continue reading →