2020 – Page 88 – Impact Lab

Engineering, Robotics, Science & Technology News, Stem cells

Scientists build “first living robots” from frog stem cells

January 29, 2020

“It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”

A team of researchers have built what they claim to be the first living robots. The “xenobots,” they say, can move, pick up objects, and even heal themselves after being cut.

The team is hoping the biological machines could one day be used to clean up microplastics in the ocean or even deliver drugs inside the human body, The Guardian reports.

To build the robots, the team used living cells from frog embryos and assembled them into primitive beings.

“These are novel living machines,” research co-lead Joshua Bongard, robotics expert at the University of Vermont, said in a statement. “They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”

Continue reading… “Scientists build “first living robots” from frog stem cells”

Environment, Green Friendly, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says over 300 companies have agreed to help plant one trillion trees

January 29, 2020

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2020

KEY POINTS

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Thursday that over 300 companies have joined his latest initiative to plant 1 trillion trees by the end of the decade.
President Donald Trump announced U.S. government support for the initiative on Tuesday.
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg criticized the initiative in her keynote speech at the WEF on Tuesday for not doing enough to counter climate change.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose known for badgering tech executives to be more civic-minded, said Thursday that over 300 companies have joined his latest initiative to plant one trillion trees by the end of the decade.

“Nobody’s against trees,” he said in an interview with “Squawk on the Street” co-host Sara Eisen from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The tree is also a bipartisan issue.”

Continue reading… “Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says over 300 companies have agreed to help plant one trillion trees”

AI, Amazon.com, communication, Science & Technology News

Amazon’s AI automatically dubs videos into other languages

January 28, 2020

Ever wish you could automatically dub foreign film dialogue into another tongue? Amazon is on the case. In a paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers from the tech giant detailed a novel “speech-to-speech” pipeline that taps AI to align translated speech with original speech and fine-tune speech duration before adding background noise and reverberation. They say that it improves the perceived naturalness of dubbing and highlights the relative importance of each proposed step.

As the paper’s coauthors note, automatic dubbing involves transcribing speech to text and translating that text into another language before generating speech from the translated text. The challenge isn’t simply conveying the same content of the source audio, but matching the original timbre, emotion, duration, prosody (i.e., patterns of rhythm and sound), background noise, and reverberation.

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Clothing, Great New Product, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News

Levi’s found a way to make hemp feel like cotton, and it could have big implications for your wardrobe

January 28, 2020

Denim icon Levi Strauss & Co. debuted garments made from a soft hemp-cotton blend in March, and head of innovation Paul Dillinger said he expects 100% cottonized-hemp products in about five years.

Hemp uses significantly less water and chemicals than cotton during cultivation. Levi’s has found a way to soften hemp using far less water than was previously used.

Dillinger said the long-term goal is to incorporate sustainable cotton blends by using fibers such as hemp into all of its products.

With the legalization of hemp in the United States last December, the industry has been exploding: Reports and Data estimates it’ll be worth $13.03 billion by 2026. While you’ve probably noticed hemp-derived CBD products everywhere, hemp also has major implications for sustainable clothing and denim icon Levi Strauss & Co. has made significant progress in making this happen.

Continue reading… “Levi’s found a way to make hemp feel like cotton, and it could have big implications for your wardrobe”

Healthcare, Latest Trend, Medicine, Robotics, Science & Technology News

Will robots make doctors obsolete? Nothing could be further from the truth

January 28, 2020

“Doctor, will they replace you with a robot?”

The question takes me by surprise but I suppress my instinct to laugh.

His life has been marked by mental illness and cancer. The first diagnosis presented after a series of missed opportunities as he cycled through woeful visits that ignored his symptoms. Finally, one doctor listened and his life changed.

In retrospect, his cancer was just waiting to be found by the first person to seriously entertain the notion that mental illness often coexists with physical illness. Fortunately, the cancer was amenable to a cure.

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Employment, Futurist, Science & Technology News, Tom Frey

The future of jobs is already here

January 27, 2020

One of the great challenges of the business world is predicting which jobs will grow and which will disappear. Several companies and institutions are working to solve this great mystery, including the World Economic Forum (WEF), an international organisation that “involves society’s leaders of politics, business, culture and other spheres in shaping global, regional and industrial agendas.”At the end of 2018, this organisation published the Future of Jobs Report, which analysed the trends predicted for the 2018–2022 period in 20 economies and 12 different industrial sectors.

“The increased demand for new roles will compensate for the decreased demand for others,” noted Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF, in the preface to the forecast document. The German economist is optimistic about the predictions because, although five million jobs will disappear, another 133 million new ones will emerge.The technological revolution will change business models in all industries.

A phenomenon that the Davos World Forum has already dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution. High-speed mobile internet, artificial intelligence, big data analysis, cloud-storage of information, augmented and virtual reality, and others factors will spearhead the adoption of new technologies by businesses. They will also change the dynamics of work, the competences required of workers and the gender gap in industry.

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Automation, Military, military drones, Science & Technology News, Weapons

Amazing : Meet the robot tank Estonia and Singapore built to deter Russia

January 27, 2020

Flexible and deadly.

Key point: Armed robots are becoming the norm of future warfare. The question is how long humans will stay in the loop.

An Estonian company has teamed up with a Singaporean firm and joined the expanding global race to develop robotic fighting vehicles.

More and more firms are developing armed unmanned ground vehicles, some as private ventures and others in response to formal government programs. But it’s unclear how quickly armies might actually field meaningful numbers of tank-like ground robots.

News broke in June 2019 that Estonia’s Milrem Robotics and Singapore’s ST Engineering had tested a new UGV. “The companies demonstrated the UGV during a live-fire exercise held in Tapa, Estonia,” Estonian World reported.

“The new UGV is armed with a 40-millimeter automatic grenade launcher and a 12.7-millimeter heavy machine gun,” according to Estonian World.

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Analysis, Employment, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

Average IT salary hits record $113,639 in US due to these certifications

January 27, 2020

US tech employees lead the global pack thanks to a mix of certifications, job skills and tenure, according to a new report.

The average annual salary for IT professionals worldwide is $89,732—the highest yet found by Global Knowledge’s yearly report. The report is the largest worldwide study of professionals in the tech community and has been conducted every year for more than a decade.

IT professionals earned an average of $5,000 more in 2019 than in 2018, with the main reason being improved job performance, the report found.

This increase in both salaries and performance quality indicates that more people are taking steps to progress their professional development, resulting in better performance and more compensation, according to the report.

Continue reading… “Average IT salary hits record $113,639 in US due to these certifications”

Cancer, DNA, Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

Scientists might have accidentally cured cancer

January 26, 2020

Research Into Cancer Conducted At The Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute

New treatment for killing cancer cells may have accidentally been discovered by a group of British scientists, according to reports.

Cardiff University’s research team found a T-Cell that attaches itself onto human cancers, and kills them while ignoring healthy cells. Although in its early stages of development, the treatment successfully destroys bone, lung, breast, colon, prostate, and other cancers, The Telegraph reported. (RELATED: Alex Trebek Announces He Was Diagnosed With Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer)

Originally, researchers were only looking for immune cells that were capable of fighting bacteria, before they discovered the T-Cell virus. Their findings were made available on Monday.

“There’s a chance here to treat every patient,” Professor Andrew Sewell of Cardiff University told the BBC. “Previously nobody believed this could be possible. It raises the prospect of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ cancer treatment, a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population.”

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Law Enforcement, new technology, Science & Technology News

AI can help find illegal opioid sellers online. And wildlife traffickers. And counterfeits.

January 26, 2020

Tablets suspected by the Drug Enforcement Administration to be fentanyl. Don Emmert/Getty Images

The government is investing in an AI-based tool that could help catch illegal opioid sales on the internet. But the same approach could find lots of other illicit transactions.

An estimated 130 people die from opioid-related drug overdoses each day in the United States, and 2 million people had an opioid use disorder in 2018. This public health crisis has left officials scrambling for ways to cut down on illegal sales of these controlled substances, including online sales.

Now the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, is investing in an artificial intelligence-based tool to track how “digital drug dealers” and illegal internet pharmacies market and sell opioids (though online transactions are likely not a large share of overall illegal sales).

New AI-based approaches to clamping down on illegal opioid sales demonstrate how publicly available social media and internet data — even the stuff you post — can be used to find illegal transactions initiated online. It could also be used to track just about anything else, too: The researcher commissioned by NIDA to build this tool, UC San Diego professor Timothy Mackey, told Recode the same approach could be used to find online transactions associated with illegal wildlife traffickers, vaping products, counterfeit luxury products, and gun sales.

Continue reading… “AI can help find illegal opioid sellers online. And wildlife traffickers. And counterfeits.”

Economy, Housing, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Why Manhattan’s skyscrapers are empty

January 27, 2020

Approximately half of the luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold.

In Manhattan, the homeless shelters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are vacant.

Such is the tale of two cities within America’s largest metro. Even as 80,000 people sleep in New York City’s shelters or on its streets, Manhattan residents have watched skinny condominium skyscrapers rise across the island. These colossal stalagmites initially transformed not only the city’s skyline but also the real-estate market for new homes. From 2011 to 2019, the average price of a newly listed condo in New York soared from $1.15 million to $3.77 million.

But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times.

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Coworking, Employment, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Why people thrive in coworking spaces

January 26, 2020

Coworking started as a fringe trend that was expected to fade as fast as it emerged. Several years later, the popularity of coworking has continued to grow rapidly.

Currently, there are over 14,400 coworking spaces all over the world.

It is estimated that by 2022, coworking spaces will be the workplace of choice for about 5.1 million people.

The increasing popularity of coworking spaces has been fueled largely by the increasing number of freelancers and remote workers.

NOTE: Anyone interested in learning more about coworking or leased offices at the DaVinci Institute in Westminster, Colorado, go to Colony Workspace and request a tour.

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