https://futurism.com/videos/the-future-is-here-robots-can-now-3d-print-themselves
Why Futurism has a cultural blind spot
We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace
In early 1999, during the halftime of a University of Washington basketball game, a time capsule from 1927 was opened. Among the contents of this portal to the past were some yellowing newspapers, a Mercury dime, a student handbook, and a building permit. The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items “dumb.”
Such disappointment in time capsules seems to run endemic, suggests William E. Jarvis in his book Time Capsules: A Cultural History. A headline from The Onion, he notes, sums it up: “Newly unearthed time capsule just full of useless old crap.” Time capsules, after all, exude a kind of pathos: They show us that the future was not quite as advanced as we thought it would be, nor did it come as quickly. The past, meanwhile, turns out to not be as radically distinct as we thought.
In his book Predicting the Future, Nicholas Rescher writes that “we incline to view the future through a telescope, as it were, thereby magnifying and bringing nearer what we can manage to see.” So too do we view the past through the other end of the telescope, making things look farther away than they actually were, or losing sight of some things altogether.
A novel dementia treatment will flood people’s brains with a low-risk version of a key gene.
No one knows for certain what causes Alzheimer’s disease. But one fact about the condition has gained nearly irrefutable status. Depending on what versions of a gene called APOE you inherit, your risk of the brain disorder can be half the average—or more than 12 times as high.
Sometimes called “the forgetting gene,” APOE comes in three common versions, called 2, 3, and 4. Type 2 lowers a person’s risk, 3 is average, and 4 increases the chance dramatically. The risk is so great that doctors avoid testing people for APOE because a bad result can be upsetting, and there’s nothing to do about it. There’s no cure, and you can’t change your genes, either.
Well, today you can’t. But doctors in New York City say that beginning in May, they will start testing a novel gene therapy in which people with the unluckiest APOE genes will be given a huge dose to their brain of the low-risk version.
Today’s influencer economy can be explained by a 19th century economic theory
At the end of the 19th century, American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen said that people take their cues about what to consume from the social class immediately above their own. They want things just beyond their reach.
A new paper in the journal Communication, Culture and Critique shows how this theory explains some dynamics of the influencer economy and the rules that govern Instagram. In it, researchers Emily Hund and Lee McGuigan at the University of Pennsylvania investigate the mechanics of “a shoppable life.” The term describes the contemporary phenomenon of influencers marketing their lifestyles, then selling aspects of it, like the beauty products they use or elements of their home’s decor, through nearly seamless technological infrastructure, and the finding that more and more commercial opportunities rise with the way people present themselves and interact with each other.
One influencer told the researchers that a favorite part of her job is getting freebies, like a new set of furniture, from brands that want to be promoted in her channels. “They’re things that I love and never could have afforded on my own, and it’s going to bring a lot of value to the blog, so I’m excited about those just for that reason.”
Continue reading… “Today’s influencer economy can be explained by a 19th century economic theory”
The big American robot push
In a challenge to the narrative of a declining American advantage in the global tech race, U.S. factories are installing record numbers of robots — and elite universities, endowed with huge new contributions, are adding vast centers to study artificial intelligence.
Why it matters: As we have reported previously, China has a massive global lead in the absolute number of new factory robots, and is pouring large sums into developing AI. But the twin U.S. trendlines — a surge in university research spending and the spike in robots — suggest a still-robust competition to dominate technologies of the future.
The perfect pair of pants is just a 3D body scan away
LIKE SO MANY women, Meghan Litchfield dreaded shopping for jeans. There were the garden-variety complaints: inconsistent sizing between brands, the way back pockets stretched or sagged, the humiliation of walking into a dressing room with half a dozen options only to walk out empty-handed. Even the best candidates were ill-fitting. Most of the time, she’d buy jeans one size up to fit her hips, then ask a tailor take them in at the waist.
Litchfield, formerly a vice president at GoPro, figured there must be a way to shop that wasn’t so demoralizing. Instead of taking off-the-rack clothes to the tailor, what if she could buy her clothes tailor-made? And what if she could make that happen for other women, too?
A solution arrived late last year with Redthread, the startup Litchfield created to make bespoke clothing for anyone with a smartphone. Customers choose an item from Redthread’s website, fill out a “fit quiz,” and capture a series of full-body photos with their phone. Redthread pulls 3D measurement data from those photos and, combined with a customer’s fit preferences, creates a made-to-order item.
Continue reading… “The perfect pair of pants is just a 3D body scan away”
Android is helping kill passwords on a billion devices
IT’S MORE IMPORTANT than ever to manage your passwords online, and also harder to keep up with them. That’s a bad combination. So the FIDO Alliance—a consortium that develops open source authentication standards—has pushed to expand its secure login protocols to make seamless logins a reality. Now Android’s on board, which means 1 billion devices can say goodbye to passwords in more digital services than seen before.
On Monday, Google and the FIDO Alliance announced that Android has added certified support for the FIDO2 standard, meaning the vast majority of devices running Android 7 or later will now be able to handle password-less logins in mobile browsers like Chrome. Android already offered secure FIDO login options for mobile apps, where you authenticate using a phone’s fingerprint scanner or with a hardware dongle like a YubiKey. But FIDO2 support will make it possible to use these easy authentication steps for web services in a mobile browser, instead of having the tedious task of typing in your password every time you want to log in to an account. Web developers can now design their sites to interact with Android’s FIDO2 management infrastructure.
Continue reading… “Android is helping kill passwords on a billion devices”
Device spots cancer in a single blood drop
A new ultrasensitive diagnostic device could allow doctors to detect cancer quickly from a droplet of blood or plasma, report researchers.
The device could lead to timelier interventions and better outcomes for patients.
The “lab-on-a-chip” for liquid biopsy analysis detects exosomes—tiny parcels of biological information tumor cells produce to stimulate tumor growth or metastasize.
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Magic Leap wants to build AR “Layers” over the entire earth
Augmented reality startup Magic Leap wants to merge the digital and the physical worlds.
In October, CEO Rony Abovitz first shared the idea of the “Magicverse,” a series of digital layers that would exist in AR over the physical world.
On Saturday, the company elaborated on the concept with a blog post and new interview — and its vision of the future is one in which the line between the physical and digital realms blurs until it almost disappears.
Continue reading… “Magic Leap wants to build AR “Layers” over the entire earth”
OGarden Smart grows fresh veggies year-round in your house
This curious rotating garden boasts automatic watering and space for up to 90 plants at any given time.
If you like the idea of growing your own vegetables indoors all year round, then you should check out the new and improved OGarden Smart. It’s a rotating Ferris wheel of sorts that can hold up to 60 plants at various stages of growth. The wheel turns steadily, dipping the roots into water at the bottom and exposing the plants steadily to a 120 watt LED in the center.
Seedlings are started in handy seed cups filled with organic soil and fertilizer, 30 of which can fit into the incubator located below the rotating upper part. These are also automatically watered, and all you have to do is ensure the water reservoir stays full. (It can go up to 10 days and a warning will pop up if you forget.)
Once they sprout, the cups go into the wheel and grow until they’re ready to be harvested. The entire process takes 30-40 days, after which the seed cups and plant roots can be composted, and the gap in the wheel filled with a new seedling.
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Scientists find first evidence of huge Mars underground water system
The first evidence for a planet-wide underground water system will help aid future missions in our hunt for life on Mars.
Mars wasn’t always a dusty, barren planet.
Previous modeling has demonstrated the planet was once overflowing with water that eventually retreated under the surface. But new research details the first direct geological evidence for a “planet-wide groundwater system” explaining Mars’ watery history and providing new sites for future missions to hunt for signs of life.
The revelations come via some plucky Mars geologists and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter. The spacecraft, launched in 2003, circles the planet and is fitted with a number of high-resolution cameras constantly snapping images of the Martian surface. Researchers at the University of Utrecht, led by Francesco Salese, pored over these images, intently studying 24 deep craters in Mars’ northern hemisphere looking for signs that water once flowed there.
Continue reading… “Scientists find first evidence of huge Mars underground water system”
No, Data is not the new oil
“Data is the new oil” is one of those deceptively simple mantras for the modern world. Whether in The New York Times, The Economist, or WIRED, the wildcatting nature of oil exploration, plus the extractive exploitation of a trapped asset, seems like an apt metaphor for the boom in monetized data.
Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Previously he worked on Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed its targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year.
The metaphor has even assumed political implications. Newly installed California governor Gavin Newsom recently proposed an ambitious “data dividend” plan, whereby companies like Facebook or Google would pay their users a fraction of the revenue derived from the users’ data. Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes laid out a similar idea in a Guardian op-ed, and compared it to the Alaskan Permanent Fund, which doles out annual payments to Alaskans based on the state’s petroleum revenue. As in Alaska, the average Google or Facebook user is conceived as standing on a vast substratum of personal data whose extraction they’re entitled to profit from.
