Amazon hopes to export goods worth $10 billion from India by 2025
Jeff Bezos said Amazon will invest another $1 billion in India to help 10 million Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs) sell online amid nationwide protests by neighbourhood shopkeepers against his visit and the competition watchdog ordering a probe into ecommerce platforms.
Amazon, which has invested more than $5 billion in India since 2013, said its latest programme will help SMBs participate in India’s rapidly growing ecommerce and that it hopes to export locally made goods worth $10 billion from the country by 2025.
“Our goal is, don’t forget, to make sure that more people can participate in the prosperity of India,” Bezos told the audience at an Amazon event in New Delhi.
By 2030, AI is predicted to add +$15 trillion to the global GDP thanks largely to solving data issues according to PwC. Lending money used to be a tricky business but time consumers and technology is changing. Banks and other industries are struggling to cope with the changing consumer demand, but a few are getting it right.
It’s realistic, but can it walk and talk like a human?
On Friday we wrote about Samsung’s mysterious “artificial human” project Neon, speculating that the company was building realistic human avatars that could be used for entertainment and business purposes, acting as guides, receptionists, and more.
Researchers foresee myriad benefits for humanity, but also acknowledge ethical issues
Be warned. If the rise of the robots comes to pass, the apocalypse may be a more squelchy affair than science fiction writers have prepared us for.
Researchers in the US have created the first living machines by assembling cells from African clawed frogs into tiny robots that move around under their own steam.
One of the most successful creations has two stumpy legs that propel it along on its “chest”. Another has a hole in the middle that researchers turned into a pouch so it could shimmy around with miniature payloads.
“These are entirely new lifeforms. They have never before existed on Earth,” said Michael Levin, the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. “They are living, programmable organisms.”
New York (CNN Business)The world’s already huge debt load smashed the record for the highest debt-to-GDP ratio before 2019 was even over.
In fact, it broke that record in the first nine months of last year. Global debt, which comprises borrowings from households, governments and companies, grew by $9 trillion to nearly $253 trillion during that period, according to the Institute of International Finance.
That puts the global debt-to-GDP ratio at 322%, narrowly surpassing 2016 as the highest level on record.
More than half of this enormous number was accumulated in developed markets, such as the United States and Europe, bringing their debt-to-GDP ratio to 383% overall.
There are plenty of culprits. Countries like New Zealand, Switzerland and Norway all have rising household debt levels, while the government debt-to-GDP ratios in the United States and Australia are at all-time highs.
The lightweight VR glasses offer HDR visuals without the dreaded “screen-door” effect.
At CES 2020, companies were hard at work promoting a fresh wave of groundbreaking technology that will soon be available for you to demo.
This includes legendary Japanese electronics corporation Panasonic, which will be offering attendees a first-look at its compact VR eyeglasses, which are capable of displaying ultra high definition visuals that remove the dreaded “screen-door” effect from images, offering truly natural in-headset visuals.
Bone scan databases offer scientists new ways to study human remains. But some worry they could be misused.
Ten years ago, it wasn’t possible for most people to use 3D technology to print authentic copies of human bones. Today, using a 3D printer and digital scans of actual bones, it is possible to create unlimited numbers of replica bones — each curve and break and tiny imperfection intact — relatively inexpensively. The technology is increasingly allowing researchers to build repositories of bone data, which they can use to improve medical procedures, map how humans have evolved, and even help show a courtroom how someone died.
But the proliferation of faux bones also poses an ethical dilemma — and one that, prior to the advent of accessible 3D printing, was mostly limited to museum collections containing skeletons of dubious provenance. Laws governing how real human remains of any kind may be obtained and used for research, after all — as well as whether individuals can buy and sell such remains — are already uneven worldwide. Add to that the new ability to traffic in digital data representing these remains, and the ethical minefield becomes infinitely more fraught. “When someone downloads these skulls and reconstructs them,” says Ericka L’Abbé, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, “it becomes their data, their property.”
Digital bone repositories already exist around the world, and while viewing those bones in a computer environment is often an option, most such repositories keep the underlying data — which could be used to print new, physical bone replicas — private. The repositories that do make the data open access typically only include human remains that are older than 100 years because of the legal issues surrounding the potential to identify a person from their remains, as well as the value of the data their remains might yield.
Researchers with ETHzurich have successfully used plastic to create lightweight gold that retains its purity, according to a recent announcement from the institution. The lightweight gold is ideally suited for products like jewelry and watches — things that would benefit from a reduction in weight without a loss in gold purity or beauty.
The gold found in jewelry is made with metallic alloys that help reduce the weight, though some pieces of jewelry may still be too heavy to suit some buyers. The newly created 18-carat gold replaces the metallic alloy elements with a ‘matrix of plastic,’ reducing the density from a typical 15 g/cm3 to 1.7 g/cm3.
This living organism was designed by a supercomputer and assembled in the labSam Kriegman, UVM
Robots are made to mimic living creatures, and as smart as they’re becoming, we can still look at them and understand that they aren’t “living” in any real sense. But that line is now beginning to blur. Researchers at the University of Vermont and Tufts University have essentially created new creatures from frog cells, complete with programmable behaviors.
The new living robots are made of skin and heart cells taken from frog embryos, assembled into stable forms designed by a supercomputer and set loose in a Petri dish. The skin cells work to give the little critters their shape – which kind of resembles a blob with four “legs” – while the heart cells push them around with every pump.
“These are novel living machines,” says Joshua Bongard, co-lead researcher on the project. “They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”
Airborne lasers can be used offensively or defensively.
The Chinese military put out notice it wants airborne laser pods.
The pods could be used offensively or defensively, against aircraft or even missiles.
Airborne lasers, moving at light speed, could end dogfighting as we know it.
China’s military is soliciting would-be suppliers for a new airborne laser weapon. Notices on a government website invited defense contractors to provide information on an airborne laser attack pod. Depending on the level of power, the pod could be used to defend a friendly aircraft from incoming missile threats or destroy enemy aircraft and ground targets. Laser weapons are the next revolution in aerial warfare and could make dogfighting obsolete.
While Elon Musk and Waymo get all the attention — and regulations — autonomous vehicles for farming face fewer tech barriers and could be just as important
Between 2009 and 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on autonomous vehicles for its Waymo subsidiary, which have so far roamed more than 10 million miles of city streets — though none of those miles have yet involved a paying customer. Tesla, which builds the data collection it uses to improve its autonomous technology into every vehicle it sells, lost more than $1 billion as a company last year alone. In pursuit of viable self-driving cars, the companies have had to navigate a web of regulation that varies from state to state, apply for permits, and risk getting banned from roads if they fail to follow the rules. Neither of their self-driving technologies is ready to be set loose on public streets without a human safety driver behind the wheel or navigating previously approved routes.
But Zack James faced few barriers when he started his autonomous tractor company in 2017. His roughly 200-pound tractors are closer in size to a riding lawn mower (and about half the weight) than they are to traditional combines and sprayers, and the open metal frame vehicles work together in a swarm. After coming up with the concept while in law school at the University of Michigan, it took James about a month to fabricate the first prototype, which he soon tested on a family field in Crown Point, Indiana, standing by in case the tractor encountered an obstacle it couldn’t yet navigate.
Instead of sleek Teslas or robot Ubers, the first truly driverless vehicles are more likely to look like James’ tractors: rolling placidly over a cornfield at a max speed of 7 mph.
In 2100, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be among the world’s largest countries.
In 1950, four European countries were still among the world’s largest
In 2020, half of the 10 most populous countries in the world will be in Asia
By 2100, five African countries will be among the world’s most populous
In the 21st century so far, populous countries and strong population growth were most often associated with Asia – but this view of the world will have to change in the future, data by the United Nations and Pew Research Center shows.
