Tag Archives: stories

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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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 is fine-tuning a tool that uses artificial intelligence to write code based on a short text description of what the code should do. Tell the company’s tool to ‘multiply two numbers given by a user,’ for example, and it will whip up a dozen or so lines in Python to do just that.”

SPACE
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Just Turned CO2 Into Oxygen
Morgan McFall-Johnsen | Business Insider
“That’s good news for the prospect of sending human explorers to Mars. Oxygen takes up a lot of room on a spacecraft, and it’s unlikely that astronauts will be able to bring enough with them to Mars. So they’ll need to produce their own oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, both for breathing and for fueling rockets to return to Earth.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Latest Neural Nets Solve World’s Hardest Equations Faster Than Ever Before
Anil Ananthaswamy | Quanta
“…researchers have built new kinds of artificial neural networks that can approximate solutions to partial differential equations orders of magnitude faster than traditional PDE solvers. And once trained, the new neural nets can solve not just a single PDE but an entire family of them without retraining.”

SPACE
NASA’s Bold Bet on Starship for the Moon May Change Spaceflight Forever
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“Until now, the plans NASA had contemplated for human exploration in deep space all had echoes of the Apollo program. …By betting on Starship, which entails a host of development risks, NASA is taking a chance on what would be a much brighter future. One in which not a handful of astronauts go to the Moon or Mars, but dozens and then hundreds. In this sense, Starship represents a radical departure for NASA and human exploration.”

AUTOMATION
Who Will Win the Self-Driving Race? Here Are Eight Possibilities
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“…predicting what the next couple of years will bring is a challenge. So rather than offering a single prediction, here are eight: I’ve broken down the future into eight possible scenarios, each with a rough probability. …A decade from now, we’ll be able to look back and say which companies or approaches were on the right track. For now, we can only guess.”

TECHNOLOGY
Europe’s Proposed Limits on AI Would Have Global Consequences
Will Knight | Wired
“The rules are the most significant international effort to regulate AI to date, covering facial recognition, autonomous driving, and the algorithms that drive online advertising, automated hiring, and credit scoring. The proposed rules could help shape global norms and regulations around a promising but contentious technology.”

SCIENCE
What Do You Call a Bunch of Black Holes: A Crush? A Scream?
Dennis Overbye | The New York Times
“[Astrophysicist Jocelyn Kelly Holley-Bockelmann] was trying to run a Zoom meeting of the [Laser Interferometer Space Antenna] recently ‘when one of the members said his daughter was wondering what you call a collective of black holes—and then the meeting fell apart, with everyone trying to up one another,’ she said in an email. ‘Each time I saw a suggestion, I had to stop and giggle like a loon, which egged us all on more.’i”

ENVIRONMENT
Stopping Plastic in Rivers From Reaching the Ocean With New Tech From the Ocean Cleanup Project
Stephen Beacham | CNET
“First announced by Ocean Cleanup founder and CEO Boyan Slat in 2019, the Interceptors are moored to river beds and use the currents to snag debris floating on the surface. Then they direct the trash onto a conveyor belt that shuttles it into six large onboard dumpsters. The Interceptors run completely autonomously day and night, getting power from solar panels.”

FUTURE
Hackers Used to Be Humans. Soon, AIs Will Hack Humanity
Bruce Schneier | Wired
“Hacking is as old as humanity. We are creative problem solvers. We exploit loopholes, manipulate systems, and strive for more influence, power, and wealth. To date, hacking has exclusively been a human activity. Not for long. As I lay out in a report I just published, artificial intelligence will eventually find vulnerabilities in all sorts of social, economic, and political systems, and then exploit them at unprecedented speed, scale, and scope.”

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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, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered. The massive document, produced by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, is packed full of data and graphs, and we’ve plucked out 15 that provide a snapshot of the current state of AI.”

FUTURE
Geoffrey Hinton Has a Hunch About What’s Next for Artificial Intelligence
Siobhan Roberts | MIT Technology Review
“Back in November, the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton had a hunch. After a half-century’s worth of attempts—some wildly successful—he’d arrived at another promising insight into how the brain works and how to replicate its circuitry in a computer.”

ROBOTICS
Robotic Exoskeletons Could One Day Walk by Themselves
Charles Q. Choi | IEEE Spectrum
“Ultimately, the ExoNet researchers want to explore how AI software can transmit commands to exoskeletons so they can perform tasks such as climbing stairs or avoiding obstacles based on a system’s analysis of a user’s current movements and the upcoming terrain. With autonomous cars as inspiration, they are seeking to develop autonomous exoskeletons that can handle the walking task without human input, Laschowski says.”

TECHNOLOGY
Microsoft Buys AI Speech Tech Company Nuance for $19.7 Billion
James Vincent | The Verge
“The $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance is Microsoft’s second-largest behind its purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 for $26 billion. It comes at a time when speech tech is improving rapidly, thanks to the deep learning boom in AI, and there are simultaneously more opportunities for its use.”

ENVIRONMENT
Google’s New 3D Time-Lapse Feature Shows How Humans Are Affecting the Planet
Sam Rutherford | Gizmodo
“Described by Google Earth director Rebecca Moore as the biggest update to Google Earth since 2017, Timelapse in Google Earth combines more than 24 million satellite photos, two petabytes of data, and 2 million hours of CPU processing time to create a 4.4-terapixel interactive view showing how the Earth has changed from 1984 to 2020.”

GENETICS
The Genetic Mistakes That Could Shape Our Species
Zaria Gorvett | BBC
“New technologies may have already introduced genetic errors to the human gene pool. How long will they last? And how could they affect us? …According to [Stanford’s Hank] Greely, who has written a book about the implications of He [Jiankui]’s project, the answer depends on what the edits do and how they’re inherited.”

SPACE
The Era of Reusability in Space Has Begun
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“As [Earth orbit] becomes more cluttered [due to falling launch costs], the responsible thing is to more actively refuel, recycle, and dispose of satellites. Northrop Grumman has made meaningful progress toward such a future of satellite servicing. As a result, reusability is now moving into space.”

COMPUTING
100 Million More IoT Devices Are Exposed—and They Won’t Be the Last
Lily Hay Newman | Wired
“Over the last few years, researchers have found a shocking number of vulnerabilities in seemingly basic code that underpins how devices communicate with the internet. Now a new set of nine such vulnerabilities are exposing an estimated 100 million devices worldwide, including an array of internet-of-things products and IT management servers.”

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