Microsoft wants Cortana to be the Alfred to your Batman — handling your communications and attending to your needs. We get up close and personal with one of the most human-like artificial-intelligence interfaces ever made.
A new story on how coming technology may change our attitudes on the death penalty. This story was a feature on Vice yesterday, as well as Motherboard:.
This is the story of the most important biological discovery of the last 10 years. Will it be used for good, or evil, or everything in between?
Renewable energy boom will mean vastly cheaper electricity
Renewable energy, combined with prolific battery storage, will soon result in vastly cheaper electricity — and solar power that’s less expensive than what fossil fuel-based power plants can produce.
Additionally, solar power with lithium-ion and flow-battery storage systems will make the combination of renewable energy so inexpensive that it will surpass nuclear power and obviate the need for futuristic power sources such as fusion, according to Tesla CTO JB Straubel.
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“We have the technology to successfully integrate distributed, renewable energy with the grid to provide a reliable, seamless power source. That includes software that helps renewable-power providers better predict their output throughout the day and feed that information upstream to utilities so they can blend that power with their traditional generation portfolio…The real barrier to greater renewable use is less technological and more philosophical. People worry that connecting all these renewable sources to the grid will bring it down.” Read more
Knowledge is Power and soon it’s going to be free and available to all. #Awesome
As university students we often take for granted the massive luxury of having access to unprecedented amounts of scientific articles. But accessing journals and papers can be prohibitively expensive for individuals or small organizations.
In the coming decade, science will become increasingly open-sourced. This will further democratize science and pave the way for powerful innovation.
One of the most basic yet important surgical skills to keep a patient alive and intact may be closing wounds. It seems that doctors will now get the job done with more ease thanks to new, nontoxic surgical glue that instantly seals a bleeding wound and helps it heal without a scar or inflammation.
Lightweight composite metal foams like this one have been found effective at blocking X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation, and are capable of absorbing the energy of high impact collisions — holding promise for use in nuclear safety, space exploration, and medical technology applications (credit: Afsaneh Rabiei, North Carolina State University)
I sometimes wonder, How much data am I generating? Meaning: how much data do I generate just sitting there in a chair, doing nothing except exist as a cell within any number of global spreadsheets and also as a mineable nugget lodged within global memory storage systems — inside the Cloud, I suppose. (Yay Cloud!)
The SCiO is the world’s first spectrometer that fits in a pocket, and it can measure the molecular fingerprint of just about anything you see.
