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Apr 10, 2018

Killer robots: pressure builds for ban as governments meet

Posted by in categories: military, robotics/AI

Countries spending billions on ‘third revolution in warfare’ as UN debates regulation of AI-powered weapons.

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Apr 10, 2018

To Speed Up AI, Mix Memory and Processing

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI

New computing architectures aim to extend artificial intelligence from the cloud to smartphones.

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Apr 10, 2018

New cancer stem cell marker also kills off cancer cells

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Fluorescent dye not only highlights but also kills cancer stem cells.


Korean and Singaporean scientists have recently proposed a new probe to detect cancer stem cells, and it might be an effective seek-and-destroy weapon against a variety of cancer types.

In a paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie earlier this month, the researchers describe a fluorescent dye that they created to highlight cancer stem cells, and, as it turns out, the dye does more than that—it may actually be lethal to the cells it binds to [1].

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Apr 10, 2018

Scale: Maps Overlaid On the Moon

Posted by in category: space

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Apr 10, 2018

Why nuclear fusion is gaining steam – again

Posted by in category: innovation

As fusion becomes more technically viable, it’s time to assess whether it’s worth the money because breakthroughs in the lab don’t guarantee success in the marketplace.

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Apr 9, 2018

Zoltan Istvan — Adventurer, Futurist, Politician

Posted by in category: transhumanism

#Chicago friends, I’m honored to be speaking at the University of Chicago via the Chicago Society on Thursday, April 19, at 6PM CDT, Cobb 106. The Chicago Society has hosted speakers like Bill Gates, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Join me for a free talk and Q & A—and ask me all questions about #transhumanism and our coming wild tech future!

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Apr 9, 2018

New device modulates light and amplifies tiny signals

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology

Imagine a single particle, only one-tenth the diameter of a bacterium, whose miniscule jiggles induce sustained vibrations in an entire mechanical device some 50 times larger. By taking clever advantage of the interplay between light, electrons on the surface of metals, and heat, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time created a plasmomechanical oscillator (PMO), so named because it tightly couples plasmons—the collective oscillations of electrons at the surface of a metal nanoparticle—to the mechanical vibrations of the much larger device it’s embedded in.

The entire system, no bigger than a , has myriad technological applications. It offers new ways to miniaturize mechanical oscillators, improve communication systems that depend on the modulation of , dramatically amplify extremely weak mechanical and electrical signals and create exquisitely sensitive sensors for the tiny motions of nanoparticles.

NIST researchers Brian Roxworthy and Vladimir Aksyuk described their work in a recent issue of Optica.

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Apr 9, 2018

There’s a Lot of Sperm on the International Space Station Right Now

Posted by in category: space

Sperm in space!!!


For the first time (officially), NASA will set loose some human sperm in outer space.

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Apr 9, 2018

What 40 Years of Research Reveals About the Difference Between Disruptive and Radical Innovation

Posted by in categories: economics, finance, food, information science, robotics/AI

“If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.” Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric

The second wave of digitization is set to disrupt all spheres of economic life. As venture capital investor Marc Andreesen pointed out, “software is eating the world.” Yet, despite the unprecedented scope and momentum of digitization, many decision makers remain unsure how to cope, and turn to scholars for guidance on how to approach disruption.

The first thing they should know is that not all technological change is “disruptive.” It’s important to distinguish between different types of innovation, and the responses they require by firms. In a recent publication in the Journal of Product Innovation, we undertook a systematic review of 40 years (1975 to 2016) of innovation research. Using a natural language processing approach, we analyzed and organized 1,078 articles published on the topics of disruptive, architectural, breakthrough, competence-destroying, discontinuous, and radical innovation. We used a topic-modeling algorithm that attempts to determine the topics in a set of text documents. We quantitatively compared different models, which led us to select the model that best described the underlying text data. This model clustered text into 84 distinct topics. It performs best at explaining the variability of the data in assigning words to topics and topics to documents, minimizing noise in the data.

Continue reading “What 40 Years of Research Reveals About the Difference Between Disruptive and Radical Innovation” »

Apr 9, 2018

The ‘new’ battery that may be vital for a zero carbon future

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

Researchers have made a potentially vital breakthrough in the search for renewable energy storage.

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