Business Insider spoke to six technology experts at the Mobile World Congress 2018. They spoke about the future we could experience within the next 50 years.
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How Big Tech is struggling with the ethics of AI
The companies that are leading research into AI in the US and China, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, SenseTime and Tencent, have taken very different approaches to AI and whether to develop technology that can ultimately be used for military and surveillance purposes.
Companies criticised for overruling and even dissolving ethics boards.
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Doctors used a drone to deliver a vital kidney transplant in historic flight
Drones might be a favorite toy among adults with significant disposable income, but they’ve also proven to be incredibly useful as tools, and sometimes life-saving ones at that. The latest example of this growing trend comes to us from the University of Maryland Medical Center, where a medical drone delivered a kidney that was subsequently successfully transplanted into a patient.
The delivery, which was documented in a brief YouTube video published by UMMC, is just a small first step in a larger effort to enhance the delivery systems used for vital items like organs and other medical materials.
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Astronomers Spot Distant Black Hole Spinning So Fast That It Warps Space-Time
Last observed in 2015, the black hole is spewing out ‘wobbly’ plasma jets that move so fast they change orientation within minutes.
Some 8,000 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation (“The Swan”), a small black hole weighing just nine times the mass of Earth’s sun is gobbling up a sun-like star. The black hole and its stellar victim are locked together in what astronomers call a binary system and orbit each other once every 6.5 days – with spectacular effects, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is reporting.
While the black hole may be relatively tiny as far as these celestial objects go – for instance, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*, is 4 million times more massive than the sun, per a previous report from The Inquisitr – it does pack a pretty mean punch. Dubbed V404 Cygni, the black hole is continuously siphoning material from its stellar companion, slowly consuming the unfortunate star.
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Grain of dust found from dead star that predates the Sun
At a glance, meteorites might only be marginally more interesting than regular old rocks, but look closely and they can tell us stories of ancient stars and long-lost planets. One of these stories has now been uncovered in a piece of space rock retrieved from Antarctica, containing grains from a stellar explosion that predates the Sun.
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‘Earth-shattering’: Drone delivers kidney for transplant over Baltimore
The drone delivery of a kidney recently used for an organ transplant in Baltimore is being characterized by the University of Maryland as a “pioneering breakthrough” advancement in human medicine and aviation technology.
“It’s huge. We knew from the very first time that we met with Dr. (Joseph) Scalea, and he suggested the idea of what he wanted to do — we knew it would be earth-shattering and life-changing, and it really has become that,” Matthew Scassero, director of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Site at the University of Maryland, told WTOP.
The unmanned aircraft system’s flight on April 19 through the city of Baltimore occurred at about 12:30 a.m. and was less than 3 miles, but represents a huge first step.
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Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions, Scientists Find
There is enough room in the world’s existing parks, forests, and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion additional trees, which would have the CO2 storage capacity to cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new analysis by ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university.
The research, presented at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington, D.C., argues that planting additional trees is one of the most effective ways to reduce greenhouse gases.
Trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change,” Crowther told The Independent. Combining forest inventory data from 1.2 million locations around the world and satellite images, the scientists estimate there are 3 trillion trees on Earth — seven times more than previous estimates. But they also found that there is abundant space to restore millions of acres of additional forests, not counting urban and agricultural land.
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