The world watched in horror Monday night while flames tore through the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. As fire consumed the roof and toppled its iconic central spire, it seemed as though the historic church could be lost forever – but it’s possible, thanks to cutting-edge imagining technology, that all hope may not be lost.
Month: April 2019
The dog-like robots from Boston Dynamics are back with another video, albeit this time the video is less focused on virality and more a demonstration of raw power. Behold, 10 robot dogs pulling a large truck: (Boston Dynamics/YouTube) Pretty intense, no? Don’t get too worried – these little guys aren’t coming to pull your
In what the Israeli media is calling a “world’s first,” scientists at Tel Aviv University have 3D printed a small heart using human tissue that includes vessels, collagen, and biological molecules – a breakthrough, according to Haaretz, that they hope could one day render organ donation obsolete. The technology is still many years out
Humanity could be on the verge of an unprecedented merging of human biology with advanced technology, fusing our thoughts and knowledge directly with the cloud in real-time – and this incredible turning point may be just decades away, scientists say. In a new research paper exploring what they call the ‘human brain/cloud interface’, scientists
Stratolaunch, the massive aircraft dreamed up by the late Paul Allen, flew for the first time on Saturday, becoming the largest plane by wingspan ever to take to the skies. Larger than Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose – which flew only once, in 1947- Stratolaunch lifted off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in the
Facebook said it accidentally hid bizarre and “inappropriate” messages inside “tens of thousands” of virtual-reality controllers, including “Big Brother is Watching” and “The Masons Were Here.” Nate Mitchell, the cofounder of Oculus, the Facebook-owned VR company, said on Twitter on Friday that the company inadvertently printed some unusual messages in its Touch controllers, handheld devices for
We are just days away from the final season of Game of Thrones, and the predictions just keep rolling in. Using artificial intelligence, students at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now put in their own two cents. During a recent seminar, these budding computer scientists created an algorithm that predicts which characters
A new type of air filter has the potential to work faster, cheaper and better than any other, killing virtually all airborne bacteria and viruses in a fraction of a second. It’s a germaphobes dream, and a bullish weapon against the spread of infectious diseases, some of which, like measles, can remain suspended in the air
A team of scientists says they’ve built a quantum computer that generates a superposition of several possible futures the computer could experience. The research, published Tuesday in Nature Communications, describes how this quantum system could help futuristic artificial intelligence learn much faster than it can today – and it could mean quantum computers are finally
One of the scariest – and most troubling – iPhone problems is when your phone will not charge. But don’t panic. There are some fairly mundane reasons why this might happen, and they’re generally easy to solve. On the other hand, keep in mind that to do something even as simple as charge your
When artificial intelligence systems start getting creative, they can create great things – and scary ones. Take, for instance, an AI program that let web users compose music along with a virtual Johann Sebastian Bach by entering notes into a program that generates Bach-like harmonies to match them. Run by Google, the app drew
What once seemed like the moonshot vision of tech billionaires and idealistic architects could soon become a concrete solution to several of the world’s most pressing challenges. At a United Nations roundtable on Wednesday, a group of builders, engineers, and architects debuted a concept for an affordable floating city. Unlike instances in the past
Scientists have figured out how to genetically alter bacteria to churn out super-strong spider silk. Pound for pound, spider silk is much stronger than steel, but farming spiders is incredibly inefficient, according to a press release – so finding a way to mass produce the material could lead to super-strong fabrics and perhaps even next-generation
Some want to keep a clean record for future employers while others are merely following their therapist’s orders. In any case, there are plenty of reasons to take a break from Facebook. Before you do something you might regret, though, remember there is a way to deactivate your account without deleting it for good.
A prolific cybersecurity research firm says it has managed to make Tesla’s self-driving feature veer off course by sticking three small stickers on the road pavement. Keen Lab, a two-time honoree of Tesla’s “bug bounty” hall of fame program, said in a research paper on Saturday that it found two ways to trick Autopilot’s lane
A team from NASA and MIT has created a new type of airplane wing — and it could make air travel far more efficient. In a paper published in the journal Smart Materials and Structures on Monday, the researchers describe how they built an airplane wing from hundreds of identical, lightweight cube-like structures, all bolted
It’s difficult to remember a time when Google did not oversee, organize and mine every aspect of our existence, but in 2004, its new email service seemed so powerful that it couldn’t be real. Gmail’s announced features were mind-bending: a gigabyte’s worth of storage that blew away other services by 100 times. And it