Lifeboat Foundation

Engineering pioneer will produce 3 vehicles from scratch in bold £2 billion venture, Financial Times reports.

Quantum computing will transform our computing capabilities.

Credit: Hashem Al-Ghaili

In our weekly news roundup: researching immunity to CRISPR, this year’s flu season, the legal battle over frozen embryos, and more.

Bigelow Aerospace announced plans for sending soft-bodied modules that are compressed during launch but expand once they reach space.

We wanted to delve a little deeper into the future of AI, so we spoke to some experts working in the industry about how it’s expected to affect your dating, work and personal life very soon…

Andreessen Horowitz has invested in Anchor Labs, a stealthy startup planning to provide digital asset custody, according to multiple sources. The startup is raising up to $17 million in Series A funding, according to a Delaware filing from December that Axios obtained from Lagniappe Labs, though it’s not clear whether the round has closed yet and who else participated.

Hot commodity: Anchor Labs opted to raise funds after acquisition talks with Coinbase didn’t end in a deal. In November, Coinbase unveiled its own plans to provide custody services to institutional investors.

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Continue reading “Andreessen Horowitz invests in in digital custody startup Anchor Labs” »

The MIT Technology Review has released a list of technologies it believes will make the most impact over the next 12 months, including smarter cities, genetic fortune telling and “babel fish” earphones.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s magazine has published the annual list online in its March/April 2018 issue, and based its contents on the innovations that will shape the coming year.

“What Tech Review looks for when selecting the list is to identify what will have a profound effect on our lives,” said a statement from the institution, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Continue reading “MIT predicts 10 breakthrough technologies of 2018” »

Ann Donnelly was utterly confused the first time she examined her protein. On all counts, it behaved like an enzyme—a protein catalyst that speeds up biological reactions in cells. One could argue that enzymes, sculpted by eons of evolution, make life possible.

There was just one problem: her protein wasn’t evolved. It wasn’t even “natural.” It was, in fact, a completely artificial construct made with random sequences of DNA—something that’s never existed in nature before.

Donnelly was looking at the first artificial enzyme. An artificial protein that, by all accounts, should not be able to play nice with the intricate web of biochemical components and reactions that support life.

Continue reading “Enzyme Designed Entirely From Scratch Opens a World of Biological Possibility” »