Dennis Lee

The pandemic has made trips to the grocery store a slog. Prices feel high, lines feel long, and we’re all getting tired. The new model of shopping aims to change all of it.

This article by TechCrunch shows what Amazon is doing in its physical stores to improve the grocery shopping process, and it definitely feels futuristic. Currently if you visit an Amazon grocery store, you swipe yourself in with the Amazon app on your phone, and you go shopping as usual. As you go through the store and place items in your cart, cameras and shelf sensors figure out what you’re putting in your grocery cart, and Amazon compiles a virtual checkout cart for you as you go along. (I can’t tell how this makes me feel.) When you’re done shopping, Amazon charges you for what it’s logged in your cart.

Now Amazon has announced that it will license this system, called Just Walk Out, to other grocers. Instead of using an Amazon account, all shoppers will need to do is swipe a credit card at the entrance. While this sounds like a pretty big adjustment, Amazon claims that current grocery stores only need a few weeks to be retrofitted with the technology.

By Luke Dormehl

The world of farming is changing rapidly. Whether it’s CRISPR editing for improving crop yields, smart scarecrows, or robot weeding machines, this sector continues to transform at a breakneck speed.

But rather than simply being capable of driving from point A to point B, the Monarch Tractor promises to carry out any function a farmer might use a tractor for, interfacing with other tractor attachments, along with carrying out assessments on crop health and more. Depending on the mode, they can work autonomously, controlled in a fleet by farmers on the ground, or tailing other drivers in a shadow mode. It’s an impressive piece of tech.

“The Monarch Tractor is fully autonomous, but it also works with existing tractor drivers, as well as interfacing with existing implements,” Praveen Penmesta, founder and CEO of Monarch, told Digital Trends. “We didn’t want to change the appearance [too much from the traditional vehicle so] that the farming community didn’t recognize it as a tractor. However, we wanted to make the Monarch Tractor adaptive so that it can grow with the farmer. We wanted to ensure our compact tractor could implement any attachment and have it work fully electrically like the tractor, and maintain balance and productivity.”

by Oregon Health & Science University

A decade after the birth of the first primates born with the aid of a gene therapy technique designed to prevent inherited mitochondrial disease, a careful study of the monkeys and their offspring reveals no adverse health effects.

Led by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University, the study published Dec. 8 in the journal Human Reproduction.

The new study generally bolsters the scientific basis for mitochondrial replacement therapy in human clinical trials, with an important caveat: Researchers found varying levels of carryover maternal mitochondrial DNA that had preferentially replicated and accumulated within some internal organs, although not enough to cause health effects.