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Engineered for the Future

Buildings account for 30–40 percent of global energy expenditure and more than half of global electricity consumption. But the most advanced smart buildings—those with full automation, AI controls, and on-site generation—can achieve energy reductions of 50–70 percent. Scaled across the built environment, that translates to 60–110 exajoules of energy saved per year—that’s more than the entire current energy consumption of the United States, or the total output of all the world’s nuclear power plants combined.

Transforming the buildings we already live and work in to become a part of the system itself that generates, stores, and manages energy efficiently could be the blueprint for the future of energy use, creation, and management.

Finding the best ways for humans and robots to work together requires ‘swarm’ thinking

If the future of warehouse work belongs to humans and robots working side by side, a key question remains: What is the most effective way for them to collaborate?

Research published in Transportation Science suggests that the answer may be more flexible than many warehouse operators expect. The study, “Picking the Best Bot: Collaboration Strategies for Humans and Bots in Order Pick Systems with Traveling Salesman Problem Routing,” found that under many real-world conditions, warehouse workers achieve higher productivity when they dynamically switch among multiple autonomous mobile robots rather than work exclusively with a single robot.

The findings challenge a common assumption that fixed human–robot pairings are the most efficient approach.

The Colorado River Is Drying Out. I Paddled it to See What’s at Stake

With flows nearing record lows, the Colorado River and the people who depend on it are in for a rough summer. On a packrafting trip down a popular stretch of the river, a Backpacker editor finds a still-gorgeous landscape—and motivation to keep up the fight for one of America’s most important waterways.

Providing Low-cost Clean Water for a Billion People

This summer I attended Singularity University’s graduate studies program. Alongside 79 extraordinary entrepreneurs and scientists from around the globe, I had the opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in the world about a variety of rapidly advancing areas of technology. The context of these discussions was how we might use these technologies to implement solutions capable of affecting the lives of more than a billion people over the next decade.

Singularity University Limited Briefing: a Webinar Monday Sept. 13

Learn about the projects Singularity University (SU) students developed during its 2010 Graduate Studies Program, with SU Co-Founder and Chancellor Ray Kurzweil, SU Co-Founder & Chairman Peter Diamandis, and SU faculty head Dan Barry, three-time NASA astronaut.

Neuron ‘ground plans’ could simplify brain and behavior research

While E. Josie Clowney would never suggest that neuroscience is simple, a new study by her team at the University of Michigan could drastically reduce complexity in future studies. Their work focused on instinctual behaviors in fruit flies, but it has the potential to accelerate work to better understand the neurobiology that underlies behavior and decision-making in mammals, including humans.

The research establishes a new way to understand neurons, their connectivity and the behaviors they control. Within this new framework, the researchers can circumvent the conventional approach of considering each type of neuron individually and instead focus on groupings defined by shared structure and by two sets of regulatory genes. The work is published in the journal Nature.

While there are more than 8,000 kinds of neurons in the fruit fly cerebrum —the part of its brain where instinctual behaviors are hardwired—there are less than 200 major structural groups, or ground plans. Led by Najia Elkahlah, who recently defended her doctoral thesis in the Clowney lab, the team’s discoveries revealed how these ground plans get set up. There is a sort of order or hierarchy, where one set of genes coordinates the formation of the ground plan, and the other set produces small differences in shape and connectivity among neurons within each ground plan.

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