Impact Lab – Page 550 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Entertainment, Human Behavior, Latest Trend, Music, Science & Technology News

How K-Beauty conquered the West

August 16, 2019

Kimchi, K-pop, and K-dramas. Welcome to Hallyu 2.0, in which everyone in the West is losing their minds over all things Korean.

Playing a starring role is a glorious onslaught of Korean beauty products, with the K-Beauty market now valued at over $13 billion, and $7.2 billion of which is from facial skin care alone. Serums, acids, oils, cushion compacts, CC creams, BB creams, masks that bubble on your face, masks to sleep in, volcanic clay, and snail slime are seeing improbably explosive popularity, and they’ve done so with accessible pricing and cute packaging that has grown women reaching for panda face masks.

“What people don’t see is the amount of government support and PR that drives interest.”

Jude Chao, director of marketing for BeautyTap and somewhat of an oracle on K-Beauty (who also happens to have excellent skin) believes in empowering the masses with education on K-Beauty ingredients. (Her blog, Fifty Shades of Snail, is a solid starting point if you’re overwhelmed by the 12,000 active brands on the market, the proliferation of which Chao believes is no coincidence.)

Continue reading… “How K-Beauty conquered the West”

Big Problems, Climate Change, new technology, Science & Technology News

Scientists cook up new recipes for taking salt out of seawater

August 16, 2019

As populations boom and chronic droughts persist, coastal cities like Carlsbad in Southern California have increasingly turned to ocean desalination to supplement a dwindling fresh water supply. Now scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) investigating how to make desalination less expensive have hit on promising design rules for making so-called “thermally responsive” ionic liquids to separate water from salt.

Ionic liquids are a liquid salt that binds to water, making them useful in forward osmosis to separate contaminants from water. (See Berkeley Lab Q&A, “Moving Forward on Desalination”) Even better are thermally responsive ionic liquids as they use thermal energy rather than electricity, which is required by conventional reverse osmosis (RO) desalination for the separation. The new Berkeley Lab study, published recently in the journal Nature Communications Chemistry, studied the chemical structures of several types of ionic liquid/water to determine what “recipe” would work best.

Continue reading… “Scientists cook up new recipes for taking salt out of seawater”

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

AI is getting more in touch with your emotions

August 16, 2019

EmoNet, a neural network model, was accurately able to pair images to 11 emotion categories.

The EmoNet research study demonstrates how AI can measure emotional significance.

Artificial intelligence might one day start communicating our emotions better than we do. EmoNet, neural network model developed by researchers at the University of Colorado and Duke University, was accurately able to classify images into 11 different emotion categories.

A neural network is a computer model that learns to map input signals to an output of interest by learning a series of filters, according to Philip Kragel, one of the researchers on the study. For example, a network trained to detect bananas would learn features unique to them, such as shape and color.

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Agriculture, DaVinci Institute, Futurist, Science & Technology News, Tom Frey

Brighter future for ag: Vertical underground farms, driverless tractors

August 16, 2019

Futurist Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute told InfoAg attendees that agriculture is “soon to become the coolest profession on Earth.”

ST. LOUIS — Futurist Thomas Frey says we’re entering a period of unprecedented opportunity.

Why?

“Because humanity is going to change more in the next 20 years than in all history,” he told the audience at InfoAg, an agriculture technology conference in St. Louis.

Certainly, 2019 is a down economic year for agriculture, but the InfoAg organizers wanted to offer a glimpse into brighter future for the industry. That’s why they invited Frey of the DaVinci Institute to the conference.

“We want you to sit back, think about the future and maybe think about things a little bit differently than you have before — think about a brighter future and maybe some interesting things you haven’t thought of before, said Paul Schrimpf, PrecisionAg editor.

Continue reading… “Brighter future for ag: Vertical underground farms, driverless tractors”

Batteries, Elon Musk, Energy, Science & Technology News, Solar Power, Tesla

Tesla’s Megapack battery is big enough to help grids handle peak demand

August 16, 2019

A new industrial storage product coming as the company’s lost its lead in home solar

Tesla announced a new massive battery today called Megapack that could replace so-called “peaker” power plants, which provide energy when a local electrical grid gets overloaded. Tesla says that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) will deploy several Megapacks at Moss Landing on Monterrey Bay in California, which is one of four locations where the California utility plans to install more cost-effective energy storage solutions.

Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy at a time, and it’s possible to string enough Megapacks together to create a battery with more than 1 GWh of energy storage, Tesla says. The company says this would be enough energy to power “every home in San Francisco for six hours.” Telsa will deliver the Megapacks fully assembled, and they include “battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC main breaker and controls.” Tesla says the Megapack takes up 40 percent less space, requires a tenth of the parts to build, and can be assembled 10 times as fast as alternative energy storage solutions.

Continue reading… “Tesla’s Megapack battery is big enough to help grids handle peak demand”

DNA, Genes, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

In a 1st, doctors in U.S. use CRISPR tool to treat patient with genetic disorder

August 16, 2019

Victoria Gray, 34, of Forest, Miss., volunteered for one of the most anticipated medical experiments in decades: the first attempt to use the gene-editing technique CRISPR to treat a genetic disorder in the U.S.

For the first time, doctors in the U.S. have used the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to treat a patient with a genetic disorder.

“It is just amazing how far things have come,” says Victoria Gray, 34, of Forest, Miss. “It is wonderful,” she told NPR in an exclusive interview after undergoing the landmark treatment for sickle cell disease.

Gray is the first patient ever to be publicly identified as being involved in a study testing the use of CRISPR for a genetic disease.

Continue reading… “In a 1st, doctors in U.S. use CRISPR tool to treat patient with genetic disorder”

Human Behavior, Report, Robots, Science & Technology News

Robot racism? Yes, says a study showing humans’ biases extend to robots

August 15, 2019

“Robots And Racism,” a study conducted by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory in New Zealand and published by the country’s University of Canterbury, suggests people perceive physically human-like robots to have a race and therefore apply racial stereotypes to white and black robots.

Have you ever noticed the popularity of white robots?

You see them in films like Will Smith’s “I, Robot” and Eve from “Wall-E.” Real-life examples include Honda’s Asimo, UBTECH’s Walker, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, and even NASA’s Valkyrie robot. All made of shiny white material. And some real-life humanoid robots are modeled after white celebrities, such as Audrey Hepburn and Scarlett Johansson.

The reason for these shades of technological white may be racism, according to new research.

Continue reading… “Robot racism? Yes, says a study showing humans’ biases extend to robots”

Brain, brain hacking, communication, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

Neuroscientists decode brain speech signals into written text

August 15, 2019

Study funded by Facebook aims to improve communication with paralysed patients

The study recording brain signals sent to trigger organ movement is considered a breakthrough.

When Stephen Hawking wanted to speak, he chose letters and words from a synthesiser screen controlled by twitches of a muscle in his cheek.

But the painstaking process the cosmologist used might soon be bound for the dustbin. With a radical new approach, doctors have found a way to extract a person’s speech directly from their brain.

The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how a person’s intention to say specific words can be gleaned from brain signals and turned into text fast enough to keep pace with natural conversation.

Continue reading… “Neuroscientists decode brain speech signals into written text”

Automobiles, Electric Automobile, Electric Vehicles, government, Science & Technology News

Automakers run into collision with Centre’s electric vehicle plan

August 15, 2019

Two- and three-wheeler manufacturers are stoutly resisting the government’s e-mobility plan. The government wants to ban internal combustion engine (ICE)-powered three- and two-wheelers (with an engine capacity of less than 150cc) by 2023 and 2025, respectively, and replace them with electric vehicles (EVs).

With the meeting between the NITI Aayog and auto industry executives ending in a stalemate on Friday, the two sides may continue to spar over the road map for e-mobility in one of the world’s most polluted countries..

Via Wap Business Standard

Biotech, DNA, Hot Issues, Latest News, Science & Technology News

Wait, What? The first human-monkey hybrid embryo was just created in China

August 14, 2019

Last week, news broke that a prominent stem cell researcher is making human-monkey chimeras in a secretive lab in China.

The story, first reported by the Spanish newspaper El País, has all the ingredients of a bombshell. First, its protagonist is the highly-respected Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish-born stem cell biologist at the Salk Institute in California known for his breakthroughs in anti-aging research. His other fascination? Human-animal chimeras, in which animal embryos are injected with human cells and further developed inside a surrogate animal’s body. Second, according to El País, Izpisúa Belmonte may have collaborated with monkey researchers in China to circumvent legal issues in the US and Spain, where research with primates is heavily regulated.

The news did not sit well with Chinese scientists, who are still recovering from the CRISPR baby scandal. “It makes you wonder, if their reason for choosing to do this in a Chinese laboratory is because of our high-tech experimental setups, or because of loopholes in our laws?” lamented one anonymous commentator on China’s popular social media app, WeChat.

Continue reading… “Wait, What? The first human-monkey hybrid embryo was just created in China”

brain hacking, facebook, privacy, Science & Technology News

Facebook is funding brain experiments to create a device that reads your mind

August 14, 2019

Big tech firms are trying to read people’s thoughts, and no one’s ready for the consequences.

In 2017, Facebook announced that it wanted to create a headband that would let people type at a speed of 100 words per minute, just by thinking.

Now, a little over two years later, the social-media giant is revealing that it has been financing extensive university research on human volunteers.

Today, some of that research was described in a scientific paper from the University of California, San Francisco, where researchers have been developing “speech decoders” able to determine what people are trying to say by analyzing their brain signals.

Continue reading… “Facebook is funding brain experiments to create a device that reads your mind”

Engineering, Health & Fitness, New Inventions, Science & Technology News

Scientists create contact lenses that zoom on command

August 14, 2019

Blink twice to get a closer look.

Nosebleed seats may soon be a thing of the past. Scientists at the University of California San Diego have created a prototype contact lens that is controlled by the eye’s movements. Wearers can make the lenses zoom in or out by simply blinking twice. A paper detailing the team’s findings was published this month in Advanced Functional Materials.

Continue reading… “Scientists create contact lenses that zoom on command”