Showing results for "The Magazine Article" in Science & Engineering

For energy technology startups in the United States, a lot has changed in five years. Between 2008 and 2011, venture capitalists were making record investments in companies building new technologies, and the government was enthusiastically doling out loans to help them commercialize products. Today, several high-profile company failures later, that support has largely evaporated.

The American tradition of retirement at age 65 is crumbling. As older workers stay on the job longer, challenges ranging from eyestrain to aching joints become increasingly prevalent. In response, technologists and ergonomics experts are rethinking working conditions.

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering professor at Cornell University (this July he’s moving his lab to Columbia University), is one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics.

Donald Trump has been forced to hand over his old phone for a more secure device—which might make tweeting a little harder.

The two men pecked out messages on opposite sides of the country. “Yes the Islamic State was a fantasy in 2004, now look at it. The U.S. was a fantasy in 1776, now look at it,” the man in Virginia wrote in a Twitter direct message to an online friend in Oregon.

The Human Genome Project was one of mankind’s greatest triumphs. But the official gene map that resulted in 2003, known as the “reference genome,” is no longer up to the job.

Many years ago, I protested at the gates of a nuclear power plant. For a long time, I believed it would be easy to get energy from biomass, wind, and solar. Small is beautiful. Distributed power, not centralized. I wish I could still believe that.

Donning headphones, we tapped into Skype Translator, a creation of Microsoft’s research team. My chatting partners were part-time consultants to Microsoft, who happened to be thousands of miles away from my West Coast U.S. base. When I asked Chen where he grew up, it didn’t faze me to hear him say a few lines in Mandarin. A few seconds later, a friendly synthetic voice told me: “My hometown is in the northeast in China, Liaoning Province, Anshan.”

Had artificial intelligence been named something less spooky, we’d probably worry about it less.

Most of us can recognize an object after seeing it once or twice. But the algorithms that power computer vision and voice recognition need thousands of examples to become familiar with each new image or word.

Before Apple’s Steve Jobs died in 2011, he told Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page that his company was trying to do too much.

Peak oil, if it even exists, is very much a moving target. But so, it turns out, is measuring how much oil is already above ground, sitting in the holds of ships and in storage facilities around the world. It’s not that humanity is fundamentally incapable of measuring how much oil we are extracting - it’s that many countries don’t report their inventories.

How would you engineer a baby? I mean really, actually do it. Last April, Chinese researchers reported that they had tried genetically editing human embryos for the first time to correct a disease gene. Out of more than 80 embryos, however, only a handful came out correctly. In the rest, the gene didn’t get fixed properly, or they ended up with unintended alterations to their DNA .

Google’s cuddly-looking robotic cars have taken a big step on the way to developing a harder edge: they’ve learned to honk. In the Google Self-Driving Car Project’s latest monthly report (PDF), the company says it has been testing horn algorithms in its prototype cars for some time, playing the horn sound inside the cars as a way to make sure they’re not beeping in a way that would confuse other drivers. As the algorithm has improved, the cars have recently begun “broadcasting our car horn to the world.”

When you give two robots the ability to communicate in real-time, the possibilities for their teamwork are vast. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have done just that: enabled two types of robots with very different capabilities to collaborate in order to fulfill people’s requests.

A startup called Zipline will use a fleet of long-distance drones to airdrop precious blood and medicines to remote medical facilities across Rwanda. The potentially life-saving project hints at the potential for unmanned aerial vehicles to revolutionize the delivery of some goods. But it also highlights the fact that drone delivery currently makes most sense only in extreme situations.

Roomba has a new friend. Researchers have developed a robot that can help clean the kitchen.

Apple CEO Tim Cook claims that if his company helps the FBI get into a dead terrorist’s iPhone, a precedent would be set that has “implications far beyond” this case. But is that true in the legal sense? Technologically speaking, it should be possible for Apple to cooperate with law enforcement - as telecommunications companies have done for 100 years - in this particular case without compromising the tough encryption standards now baked into its phones.

When MIT grad student Steve Mann began wearing a computer and a head-mounted camera every moment of the day in 1981, he wasn't thinking of Black Lives Matter, racism, or police violence. But Mann, now a professor at the University of Toronto, may have given us the key concept for understanding the role of ubiquitous cameras in documenting police violence against people of color.

China is laying the groundwork for a robot revolution by planning to automate the work currently done by millions of low-paid workers. The government’s plan will be crucial to a broader effort to reform China’s economy while also meeting the ambitious production goals laid out in its latest economic blueprint, which aims to double per capita income by 2020 from 2016 levels with at least 6.5 percent annual growth.