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Imagine that instead of switching on a lamp when it gets dark, you could read by the light of a glowing plant on your desk.

MIT engineers have taken a critical first step toward making that vision a reality. By embedding specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, they induced the plants to give off dim for nearly four hours. They believe that, with further optimization, such plants will one day be bright enough to illuminate a workspace.

“The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp—a lamp that you don’t have to plug in. The light is ultimately powered by the energy metabolism of the plant itself,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study.

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A number of studies in different countries show that when people are asked “how long would you like to live?”, they respond with a figure equal to or slightly higher than the current life expectancy in a given country[1–4]. So, why does the public often lack enthusiasm for longevity?

These studies have shown that, generally, the public is uninterested in living longer than normal because they believe that these extra years will be spent suffering from the illnesses of old age. This is why the public often reacts to words like ‘longevity’ this way; to them, ten extra years likely means a decade spent in a wheelchair or some other decrepit state robbed of independence and health.

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A bold plan to rev up off-Earth manufacturing is about to get a big test.

A small, privately built machine designed to make optical fiber is launching toward the International Space Station (ISS) aboard SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule tomorrow (Dec. 12).

If all goes according to plan, this little factory — which is owned by California-based startup Made In Space — will churn out stuff that’s good enough to sell here on Earth, opening up space to greater commercial use. [3D Printing: 10 Ways It Could Transform Space Travel].

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When Kumar lost his job, he became part of a wave of layoffs washing through the Indian IT industry—a term that includes, in its vastness, call centers, engineering services, business process outsourcing firms, and infrastructure management and software companies. The recent layoffs are part of the industry’s most significant period of churn since it began to boom two decades ago. Companies don’t necessarily attribute these layoffs directly to automation, but at the same time, they constantly identify automation as the spark for huge changes in the industry. Bots, machine learning, and algorithms that robotically execute processes are rendering old skills redundant, recasting the idea of work and making a smaller labor force seem likely.

Technology outsourcing has been India’s only reliable job creator in the past 30 years. Now artificial intelligence threatens to wipe out those gains.

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So you want to learn how to program a quantum computer. Now, there’s a toolkit for that.

Microsoft is releasing a free preview version of its Quantum Development Kit, which includes the Q# programming language, a quantum computing simulator and other resources for people who want to start writing applications for a quantum computer. The Q# programming language was built from the ground up specifically for quantum computing.

The Quantum Development Kit, which Microsoft first announced at its Ignite conference in September, is designed for developers who are eager to learn how to program on quantum computers whether or not they are experts in the field of quantum physics.

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Ispace is a private lunar robotic exploration company that is developing micro-robotic technology to provide a low-cost and frequent transportation service to and on the Moon, conduct lunar surface exploration to map, process and deliver resources to our customers in cislunar space.

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From babysitting children to beating the world champion at Go, robots are slowly but surely developing more and more advanced capabilities.

And many scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, suggest it may only be a matter of time before machines gain consciousness.

In a new article for The Conversation, Professor Subhash Kak, Regents Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University explains the possible consequences if artificial intelligence gains consciousness.

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Artificial intelligence is seeping into every nook and cranny of modern life. AI might tag your friends in photos on Facebook or choose what you see on Instagram, but materials scientists and NASA researchers are also beginning to use the technology for scientific discovery and space exploration.

But there’s a core problem with this technology, whether it’s being used in social media or for the Mars rover: The programmers that built it don’t know why AI makes one decision over another.

Modern artificial intelligence is still new. Big tech companies have only ramped up investment and research in the last five years, after a decades-old theory was shown to finally work in 2012. Inspired by the human brain, an artificial neural network relied on layers of thousands to millions of tiny connections between “neurons” or little clusters of mathematic computation, like the connections of neurons in the brain. But that software architecture came with a trade-off: Since the changes throughout those millions of connections were so complex and minute, researchers aren’t able to exactly determine what is happening. They just get an output that works.

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