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Have to admit this nurse has Kahunas. Not sure I would have the guts to put my arm in that hole.


Shanghai’s first intelligent blood collection robot has started operations at Zhongshan Hospital.

The robot can take the place of a nurse to handle blood sample collection, the hospital said.

The robot will check each person’s blood vessel condition to make an intelligent decision on the position, direction and angle of the needle to ensure safety and accuracy as well as control pain.

Circa 2012.


A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1 A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

This glass dome is where the toilet is, crew member Jared Isaacman, who purchased the four seats for the mission, told Insider’s Morgan McFall-Johnsen in July.

SpaceX CEO Musk tweeted on Thursday that he had spoken with Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor, and Chris Sembroski, the four people on board.

“All is well,” Musk said in his Twitter post. He didn’t mention what was discussed.

It is quickly becoming a hot topic among machine learning experts and those concerned with AI safety.

One of us (Anders) has a background in computational neuroscience, and now works with groups such as the AI Objectives Institute, where we discuss how to avoid such problems with AI; the other (Thomas) studies history, and the various ways people have thought about both the future and the fate of civilization throughout the past. After striking up a conversation on the topic of wireheading, we both realized just how rich and interesting the history behind this topic is.

It is an idea that is very of the moment, but its roots go surprisingly deep. We are currently working together to research just how deep the roots go: a story that we hope to tell fully in a forthcoming book. The topic connects everything from the riddle of personal motivation, to the pitfalls of increasingly addictive social media, to the conundrum of hedonism and whether a life of stupefied bliss may be preferable to one of meaningful hardship. It may well influence the future of civilization itself.

Curtin University research has identified a new, cheaper and more efficient electrocatalyst to make green hydrogen from water that could one day open new avenues for large-scale clean energy production.

Typically, scientists have been using , such as platinum, to accelerate the reaction to break water into hydrogen and oxygen. Now Curtin research has found that adding nickel and cobalt to cheaper, previously ineffective catalysts enhances their performance, which lowers the required to split the water and increases the yield of hydrogen.

Lead researcher Dr. Guohua Jia, from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences, said this discovery could have far-reaching implications for sustainable green fuel generation in the future.

A provocative and controversial Documentary about solutions for Humanity and Global Warming.


A film following Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg who offers a fresh perspective on global warming based on human needs as well as environmental concerns.

Magnets, typically using rare earth metals like neodymium, are found at the heart of most electric vehicle motors. It’s nice to have a permanent source of powerful rare earth magnetism in your rotor, because using powered coils instead means you have to somehow transfer electricity from the battery through to the coils in a spinning rotor. That means you’ll need a sliding point of contact, and sliding points of contact develop wear and tear over time.

Permanent magnets, though, come with their own baggage. Ninety seven percent of the world’s rare earth metal supply comes out of China, and state control over such a crucial resource across a number of high-tech industries has been a serious issue in the past. Official accounts differ about why China decided to restrict rare earth exports back at the start of the decade, as official accounts tend to do, but the result either way was a 750-percent leap in neodymium prices and a 2,000-percent leap in dysprosium prices.

Could these metals be produced elsewhere? Yes. They’re not as rare as the name might suggest. But wherever they’re mined, the only way to economically turn them into magnets is to send them to China for processing – nowhere else in the world is set up for the task, and nobody can compete against China’s minimal labor costs and environmental regulations.