The four drivers received specialist training, including a new virtual reality mode…
Lincolnshire police officers have been receiving extra lessons in high-speed car chases — by playing a video game.
Continue reading “Game on! Police play Gran Turismo Sport to improve driving skills” »
In his new book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, Galloway, an entrepreneur and professor at NYU Stern, provides a perceptive analysis of the four-horse race to become the first trillion-dollar company. In a casually incisive style, he uncovers how each of these companies have deployed iconic leadership, technology, storytelling, fearless innovation, lightning execution — and blatant plagiarism- to devastating effect.
From 2013 to 2017, the combined market capitalisation of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google increased in size by the GDP of Russia – $1.4 trillion. And the power of The Four keeps on growing.
Military applications of gene-altering technology must also be considered (Op-Ed by Tomasz Pierscionek)
Recent developments in the field of biotechnology have shown that mutations can be edited out of the human genome. What are the future implications of this research and will it be used to the benefit or detriment of society?
Last month, UK scientists performed gene-editing experiments for the first time in order to gain a greater understanding of how embryos develop, and it is likely researchers in other countries will soon follow suit.
Continue reading “Where’d you get those genes? The answer may shock you” »
Interesting article on how Google’s mismanagement took a wrecking ball to the robotics industry. Most notably almost ruining Boston Dynamics that thankfully managed to get away to Soft Banks.
Its scattered, ambiguous, frequently abandoned objectives for its string of big acquisitions have hurt the whole field.
Philip lubin, university of california, santa barbara, directed energy for interstellar study.
Starting at 26 minutes of this video.
They are making progress with laser locking over kilometer distances. They are making 2 gram starchip prototypes. they are looking at making ultrathin starchips that would be a meter across but very lightweight.
Continue reading “Directed Energy Propulsion has made a lot of experimental progress” »
You could drive past and never see the only farm in San Carlos, California. The tiny city of 30,000 that sits between San Francisco and Silicon Valley has all the charms of suburbia—sprawling office parks and single-story homes—but doesn’t seem a likely suspect for agriculture.
The farm, run by startup Iron Ox, is nestled between three stonemasons and a plumber in a nondescript office park building; there’s no greenhouse, no rows of freshly-tilled soil, or tractor parked outside. Only peeking in the large bay door reveals the building’s tenants: a few hundred plants and two brightly-colored robot farmers.
Iron Ox looks a lot like a tech company. One of its co-founder is an ex-Google engineer and it raised $1.5 million in pre-seed venture capital from Y Combinator, Pathbreaker, and Cherubic Ventures in April 2016. Instead of fake food, or plant-based meat meals, or even a food delivery service tethered to an app, Iron Ox is reinventing farming, raising real, not faux, food. Think hydroponically raised lettuce and basil, like what you’d get at an ordinary farmers market.
With the EV market about to explode and the European Union planning a battery-making consortium to bring the continent onto the global EV battery scene, Stanford researchers released a paper claiming their sodium battery could compete with the lithium-ion market leader.
New battery development has been fairly slow against the backdrop of the projected electric car market size, and so far no innovation has proved to be as economical as lithium-ion. The Stanford battery uses sodium—a cheaper, more abundant material than lithium—and is still in the development stages.
Sodium makes up the Stanford battery’s cathode, and the anode is made from phosphorus, with the addition of a compound called myo-inositol, which can be derived from rice bran or corn. According to the researchers, this chemical combination yields efficiency rates comparable to that of lithium-ion batteries at a lower cost—a much lower cost.
Continue reading “There’s a new challenger to lithium batteries” »
https://youtube.com/watch?v=o6A9bbDI6fo
The first attempt at human CRISPR gene editing did not occur in a hospital or University or in a clinical trial by some $100 million funded company. Instead, it happened in small cramped room in San Francisco in front of 30 or so people who squeezed in to listen to a talk about how biohackers are making genetic and cellular modification accessible.
Aleksandr Noy has big plans for a very small tool. A senior research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Noy has devoted a significant part of his career to perfecting the liquid alchemy known as desalination—removing salt from seawater. His stock-in-trade is the carbon nanotube. In 2006, Noy had the audacity to embrace a radical theory: Maybe nanotubes—cylinders so tiny, they can be seen only with an electron microscope—could act as desalination filters. It depended on just how wide the tubes were. The opening needed to be big enough to let water molecules flow through but small enough to block the larger salt particles that make seawater undrinkable. Put enough carbon nanotubes together and you potentially have the world’s most efficient machine for making clean water.
