Category: Tech News

• Using Virtual Reality to Save the White Rhino

  There are four northern white rhinoceroses left in the world. Will a 360-degree documentary help us preserve them?

  In the basement of the San Diego Zoo’s laboratory complex sits a four-foot-tall, liquid nitrogen-cooled aluminium canister. This “Frozen Zoo,” as the container is known, contains thousands of skin samples taken from a cornucopia of endangered animals, including those of the northern white rhinoceros, a subspecies that is perilously close to extinction. Only four such animals are left in the world. A genetic rescue team at the zoo is working to transform the frozen cells into stem cells that can be used to create the sperm and eggs necessary to grow a new generation of rhinos through in-vitro fertilization.

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• To Study the Brain, a Doctor Puts Himself Under the Knife

  How one of the inventors of brain-computer interfaces ended up getting one himself.

  Phil Kennedy no longer saw any other way to get the data. That was how one day he came to lie blissfully unconscious on an operating table in Belize while a neurosurgeon sawed off the top of his skull.

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• Robot Toddler Learns to Stand by "Imagining" How to Do It

  Instead of being programmed, a robot uses brain-inspired algorithms to “imagine” doing tasks before trying them in the real world.

  Like many toddlers, Darwin sometimes looks a bit unsteady on its feet. But with each clumsy motion, the humanoid robot is demonstrating an important new way for androids to deal with challenging or unfamiliar environments. The robot learns to perform a new task by using a process somewhat similar to the neurological processes that underpin childhood learning.

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• CRISPR Gene Editing to Be Tested on People by 2017, Says Editas

  A biotechnology company says it will test advanced gene-engineering methods to treat blindness.

  The biotechnology startup Editas Medicine intends to begin tests of a powerful new form of gene repair in humans within two years.

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• New Sepsis Detector Shrinks the Diagnosis from Days to Hours

  Sepsis affects more than a million people every year in the U.S. alone, and diagnosis can take five days. A new tool cuts the time to five hours.

  Hospitals are beginning to use a new, more potent weapon against sepsis, the devastating condition that kills more than 25 percent its victims and costs hospitals billions of dollars annually. In the U.S. alone, more than a million people become infected each year, and it contributes to as many half of all deaths in hospitals.

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• Google Aims to Make VR Hardware Irrelevant Before It Even Gets Going

  Smartphones have sidelined digital cameras and other special-purpose devices. Now Google thinks mobile phones will shove virtual-reality headsets like the Oculus Rift into the shadows, too.

  The bright black sand at Diamond Beach, Iceland, is dotted with smooth gray pebbles and glassy chunks of ice. The crash of foamy waves fills my ears as I turn my head to look up and down the beach and see the dark strip of sand fade into white fog as if it goes on forever. I don’t feel the cold, because I’m not really there. Moments earlier, I had been standing in a cable car climbing over Onomichi, Japan.

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• Yes, There Is a Technology Bubble, and That’s Okay

  Nobel laureate Robert Shiller sees economic benefits to today’s technology-driven economy, but worries that automation poses “the challenge of our time.”

  Nobel-winning economist Robert Shiller is famous for spotting bubbles as they form in different markets. In 2000 he published Irrational Exuberance, a best seller that predicted the imminent bursting of the U.S. stock market bubble that had grown up around the dot-com boom. A few years later, he became one of the first to argue that U.S. real estate prices had similarly gotten out of hand, predicting the real estate and housing bust that began in 2007.

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• Marvin Minsky Reflects on a Life in AI

  A founding father of artificial intelligence talks about the great breakthroughs of his early years.

  Marvin Minsky is one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence, and over the past 60 years he has made key contributions in mathematics, robotics, computer graphics, machine perception, and machine learning. I was lucky enough to be invited to meet with Minsky at his home in Boston recently, and I took a videographer to capture the conversation.

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• Alphabet’s Stratospheric Loon Balloons to Start Serving Internet to Indonesia

  The high-flying Internet balloons dreamed up by Google will get their biggest test yet in 2016.

  The three largest cellular networks serving Indonesia’s 250 million people are set to get an upgrade from a fleet of stratospheric helium balloons floating 20 kilometers overhead.

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• A Drone with a Sense of Direction

  A small drone capable of building its own maps of an indoor space shows how the craft could become easier to use.

  Commercial drones are starting to be used for tasks like inspecting oil rigs and crops. But they still require a highly skilled human pilot, and even those that are semi-autonomous usually use prebuilt maps or access the data over a wireless link.

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