Tag Archives: week

COMPUTING
Tapping Into the Brain to Help a Paralyzed Man Speak
Pam Belluck | The New York Times
“He has not been able to speak since 2003, when he was paralyzed at age 20 by a severe stroke after a terrible car crash. Now, in a scientific milestone, researchers have tapped into the speech areas of his brain—allowing him to produce comprehensible words and sentences simply by trying to say them. When the man, known by his nickname, Pancho, tries to speak, electrodes implanted in his brain transmit signals to a computer that displays his intended words on the screen.”

TRANSPORTATION
This Tiny, $6,800 Car Runs on Solar Power
Adele Peters | Fast Company
“The Squad, a new urban car from an Amsterdam-based startup, is barely bigger than a bicycle: Parked sideways, up to four of the vehicles can fit in a standard parking spot. The electric two-seater’s tiny size is one reason that it doesn’t use much energy—and in a typical day of city driving, it can run entirely on power from a solar panel on its own roof. A swappable battery provides extra power when needed.”

3D PRINTING
World’s First 3D-Printed Stainless Steel Bridge Spans a Dutch Canal
Adam Williams | New Atlas
“MX3D has finally realized its ambitious plan to install what’s described as the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge over a canal in Amsterdam. The Queen of the Netherlands has officially opened the bridge to the public and, as well as an eye-catching design, it features hidden sensors that are collecting data on its structural integrity, crowd behavior, and more.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think With Analogies
John Pavlus | Quanta
“Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies. … ‘Today’s state-of-the-art neural networks are very good at certain tasks,’ she said, ‘but they’re very bad at taking what they’ve learned in one kind of situation and transferring it to another’—the essence of analogy.”

SPACE
Here’s Why Richard Branson’s Flight Matters—and Yes, It Really Matters
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“During the last 50 years, the vast majority of human flights into space—more than 95 percent—have been undertaken by government astronauts on government-designed and -funded vehicles. Starting with Branson and going forward, it seems likely that 95 percent of human spaceflights over the next half century, if not more, will take place on privately built vehicles by private citizens. It’s a moment that has been a long time coming.”

ENVIRONMENT
Sweeping ‘Green Deal’ Promises to Revamp EU Economy, Slash Carbon Pollution
Tim De Chant | Ars Technica
“The…proposal would cut carbon pollution 55 percent below 1990 levels by leaning heavily on renewable energy and electric vehicles while also introducing a border carbon adjustment on imports and taxing aviation and maritime fuels. Together, the reforms signal the beginning of the end of fossil fuels in the EU. ‘The fossil fuel economy has reached its limits,’ said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.”

FUTURE
Why I’m a Proud Solutionist
Jason Crawford | MIT Technology Review
“Debates about technology and progress are often framed in terms of ‘optimism’ vs. ‘pessimism.’ …It’s tempting to choose sides. …But this represents a false choice. History provides us with powerful examples of people who were brutally honest in identifying a crisis but were equally active in seeking solutions.”

ETHICS
As Use of AI Spreads, Congress Looks to Rein It In
Tom Simonite | Wired
“There’s bipartisan agreement in Washington that the US government should do more to support development of artificial intelligence technology. At the same time, parts of the US government are working to place limits on algorithms to prevent discrimination, injustice, or waste. The White House, lawmakers from both parties, and federal agencies including the Department of Defense and the National Institute for Standards and Technology are all working on bills or projects to constrain potential downsides of AI.”

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Need to Fit Billions of Transistors on Your Chip? Let AI Do It
Will Knight | Wired
“Google, Nvidia, and others are training algorithms in the dark arts of designing semiconductors—some of which will be used to run artificial intelligence programs. …This should help companies draw up more powerful and efficient blueprints in much less time.”

DIGITAL MEDIA
AI Voice Actors Sound More Human Than Ever—and They’re Ready to Hire
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
“A new wave of startups are using deep learning to build synthetic voice actors for digital assistants, video-game characters, and corporate videos. …Companies can now license these voices to say whatever they need. They simply feed some text into the voice engine, and out will spool a crisp audio clip of a natural-sounding performance.”

AUGMENTED REALITY
5 Years After Pokémon Go, It’s Time for the Metaverse
Steven Levy | Wired
“That’s right, it’s now the fifth anniversary of Pokémon Go and the craze that marked its launch. That phenomenon was not only a milestone for the company behind the game, a Google offshoot called Niantic, but for the digital world in general. Pokémon Go was the first wildly popular implementation of augmented reality, a budding technology at the time, and it gave us a preview of what techno-pundits now believe is the next big thing.”

SPACE
Startups Aim Beyond Earth
Erin Woo | The New York Times
“Investors are putting more money than ever into space technology. Space start-ups raised over $7 billion in 2020, double the amount from just two years earlier, according to the space analytics firm BryceTech. …The boom, many executives, analysts and investors say, is fueled partly by advancements that have made it affordable for private companies—not just nations—to develop space technology and launch products into space.”

ENVIRONMENT
New Fabric Passively Cools Whatever It’s Covering—Including You
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“Without using energy, [passive cooling] materials take heat from whatever they’re covering and radiate it out to space. Most of these efforts have focused on building materials, with the goal of creating roofs that can keep buildings a few degrees cooler than the surrounding air. But now a team based in China has taken the same principles and applied them to fabric, creating a vest that keeps its users about 3º C cooler than they would be otherwise.”

SCIENCE
NASA Is Supporting the Search for Alien Megastructures
Daniel Oberhaus | Supercluster
“For the first time in history, America’s space agency is officially sponsoring a search for alien megastructures. ‘I’m encouraged that we’ve got NASA funding to support this,’ says [UC Berkeley’s Steve] Croft. ‘We’re using a NASA mission to fulfill a stated NASA objective—the search for life in the universe. But we’re doing it through a technosignature search that is not very expensive for NASA compared to some of their biosignature work.’i”

ROBOTICS
Boston Dynamics, BTS, and Ballet: The Next Act for Robotics
Sydney Skybetter | Wired
“Even though Boston Dynamics’ dancing robots are currently relegated to the realm of branded spectacle, I am consistently impressed by the company’s choreographic strides. In artists’ hands, these machines are becoming eminently capable of expression through performance. Boston Dynamics is a company that takes dance seriously, and, per its blog post, uses choreography as ‘a form of highly accelerated lifecycle testing for the hardware.’i”

INNOVATION
The Rise of ‘ARPA-Everything’ and What It Means for Science
Jeff Tollefson | Nature
“Enamored with the innovation that DARPA fostered in the United States, governments around the world, including in Europe and Japan, have attempted to duplicate the agency within their own borders. …Scientists who have studied the DARPA model say it works if applied properly, and to the right, ‘ARPA-able’ problems. But replicating DARPA’s recipe isn’t easy.”

AUTOMATION
No Driver? No Problem—This Is the Indy Autonomous Challenge
Gregory Leporati | Ars Technica
“The upcoming competition is, in many ways, the spiritual successor of the DARPA Grand Challenge, a robotics race from the early 2000s. …’If you could bring back the excitement of the DARPA Grand Challenge,’ [ESN’s president and CEO] Paul Mitchell continued, ‘and apply it to a really challenging edge use case, like high-speed racing, then that can leap the industry from where it is to where it needs to be to help us realize our autonomous future.’i”

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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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