“We’re considering the possibility that you can write software for living things with bio-code (aka DNA).”
May was a good month for miracles. During these first weeks in May, two separate teams working at two separate institutions announced that when it comes to creating life from scratch, well, there are a couple of new gods in town.
Veterinarians say these pet food home chefs do it for different reasons.
We not only obsess over what we eat. We also obsess over what our pets eat. While the pet food industry has started adding salmon, vegetables and other ingredients humans favor to its products, the store-bought stuff just doesn’t make the cut anymore for some owners. They’re skipping the pet food aisle altogether in favor of cooking up big batches of Fido’s meals.
The Greater Victoria Public Library allows patrons to check out passes to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the Royal B.C. Museum.
The dawn of the Internet spawned predictions of the demise of libraries, made irrelevant by technology that puts infinite amounts of information at almost everyone’s fingertips.
Researchers discovered a small molecule that inhibits an enzyme that degrades insulin.
Harvard researchers may have finally identified a chemical compound that could be used to study and treat diabetes after decades of searching. They have discovered a whole different method for maintaining insulin in the blood: by blocking the enzyme that breaks it down.
Scientists have used a low powered laser to activate and direct stem cells to grow teeth. It looks as if they did it right in the mouth (of a couple of species)! That’s a disruptive innovation compared to the way stem cells are typically grown and developed outside the body.
The app market continues to boom. According to the latest data from Distimo, via Ben Schachter at Macquarie Research, combined spending in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store, was up 83% year-over-year in April, hitting $1.4 billion.
Smart clothes and accessories will let us share thoughts and sensations as well as words
Fabled mathematicians Edward O. Thorp and Claude Shannon, of MIT, walked into a Las Vegas casino in August 1961. They intended to try their luck at roulette, a game in which players bet on where a whirling ball will land after falling from an outer stationary track onto an inner spinning wheel. But they weren’t typical gamblers.
Futurist Thomas Frey: Imagine stepping out of the shower in the morning, and rather than reaching for a towel, a swarm of thousands of flying drones will surround you and begin to dry you off.
Electric cars and robotic cars are moving to the market hand-in-hand.
Google’s new experimental fleet of robotic cars are electric. That’s important because as one of the leaders of developing the software and artificial intelligence that will move autonomous cars through the streets, Google is now also helping set the path for the hardware of the future industry, and it’s skewing that path toward electric vehicles.
Neural interfaces and prosthetics will do away with human disabilities.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it and that is exactly what Hugh Herr has done. At the age of 17, Herr was an accomplished mountaineer, but during an ice-climbing expedition he lost his way in a blizzard and was stranded on a mountainside for three days. By the time rescuers found him, both of his legs were frostbitten and had to be amputated below the knee. Once his scars healed, Herr spent months in rehab rooms trying out prosthetic legs, but he found them unacceptable: How could he climb with such clunky things? Surely, he thought, medical technologists could build replacement parts that wouldn’t slow him down.