Impact Lab – Page 605 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

More than 100 million Alexa devices have been sold

January 12, 2019

More than 100 million devices with Amazon’s Alexa assistant pre-installed have been sold, the company said Friday.

The new metric, revealed by Amazon devices SVP Dave Limp in an interview with The Verge, showcases just how quickly the company has crammed the voice assistant into disparate hardware devices and shoved them out the door. The company did not distinguish further how many of these items were Amazon-built Echo devices and how many were designed by third-party OEMs.

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3D Printer, Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine

Patient receives 3D-printed rib implant in breakthrough procedure

January 11, 2019

3D printing made some big advances in the medical domain last year, and it seems like that trend isn’t going to slow down any time soon. Proving that point is an impressive procedure recently carried out in Bulgaria, in which a patient received one of the first 3D-printed ribs as part of a potentially lifesaving operation. It demonstrated a new approach to create rib implants, using a process called fused deposition modeling (FDM), which is cheaper in both machine and material costs than other similar attempts.

“[The] patient, Ivaylo Josifov, was diagnosed with a rib deformation,” Mateusz Sidorowicz, director of marketing at 3DGence, the company which made the 3D printer, told Digital Trends. “The doctors were concerned that the deformity may progress, and decided to replace the rib with an implant. Unfortunately, traditional implants — made from titanium, for example — are very expensive. Also, the titanium itself is not a perfect material for replacing ribs.”

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2019 CES, Bitcoin, Crazy Stuff, Great New Product, Home Technology, Science & Technology News

Weird CES: The bizarre things we didn’t expect to see

January 11, 2019

The Consumer Electronics Show is one of the biggest technology events of the year where brand new devices and products are shown off to the world, sometimes for the very first time. As such, you’ll see some of the coolest and most exciting things at CES.

However, at CES 2019 we saw some things that were a little…strange. Some of them were cool, some of them were useful, and some of them could even make the world a better, safer place. But they were all a little weird and inevitably caused many CES 2019 attendees pause and scratch their heads.

We know not everyone can attend CES, so we’ve rounded up some of the weirdest things we saw as we wandered the show floor. Check out our strange CES 2019 roundup below.

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Human Behavior, Ideas, New Viewpoints

How to want what you’ve got in a world of infinite choice

January 10, 2019

“Choose things that are good enough, and do not worry about whether they’re the best.”

Psychologist Barry Schwartz is best known for his immensely popular TED Talk and his book The Paradox of Choice. He recently joined Ryan Hawk, host of The Learning Leader Show, to discuss what having too much of a good thing means for us, and how to stay engaged in an ever-changing, digitized world.

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Alzheimer's Disease, Analysis, Health & Fitness, Human Behavior

New research says men who marry intelligent women live longer

January 10, 2019

New research has shown that if a man wants to live a long healthy life, marrying a smart woman will go a long way in fulfilling this desire. Besides increasing longevity, having an intelligent wife can negate the chances of a man catching dementia. The right partner will definitely help enrich a person’s life.

However, intelligence is not the only criteria for a happy relationship. Compatibility is another key factor. Just like the old adage says ‘do not judge a book by its cover,’ so too a person’s outward appearance should not be the yardstick for the selection of a partner. Younger people are generally attracted to the physical aspects of a person and sometimes fail to look beyond that. This often results in bad relationships or marriages in the later years. Choosing mind over matter can, therefore, have great benefits for both.

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Automation, Automobiles, Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News, Transportation

This self-driving ‘hotel on wheels’ will take you to your destination in style

January 10, 2019

The “Uber for everything” boom in tech has led to plenty of on-demand solutions for everyday life, but one problem we didn’t even know existed is apparently mobile hotel rooms. A new concept for a rolling room just won an award for its forward thinking, but will it ever become a reality? We have out doubts.

The concept is called the Autonomous Travel Suite, or ATS for short. It comes from the mind of Steve Lee of the Aprilli Design Studio and it’s largely based on the self-driving vehicle technology of the future. The idea here is that instead of riding along in a car-like seat while a computer takes you to your destination, you’re actually free to move around the over-sized cabin.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Big Problems, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Artificial intelligence can’t save us from human stupidity

January 9, 2019

The Guardian view on the future of AI: great power, great irresponsibility.

Looking over the year that has passed, it is a nice question whether human stupidity or artificial intelligence has done more to shape events. Perhaps it is the convergence of the two that we really need to fear.

Artificial intelligence is a term whose meaning constantly recedes. Computers, it turns out, can do things that only the cleverest humans once could. But at the same time they fail at tasks that even the stupidest humans accomplish without conscious difficulty.

At the moment the term is mostly used to refer to machine learning: the techniques that enable computer networks to discover patterns hidden in gigantic quantities of messy, real-world data. It’s something close to what parts of biological brains can do. Artificial intelligence in this sense is what enables self-driving cars, which have to be able to recognise and act appropriately towards their environment. It is what lies behind the eerie skills of face-recognition programs and what makes it possible for personal assistants such as smart speakers in the home to pick out spoken requests and act on them. And, of course, it is what powers the giant advertising and marketing industries in their relentless attempts to map and exploit our cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities.

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3D Printer, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Medicine, Science & Technology News

Scientists find a way to 3D print one pill for all that ails you

January 9, 2019

Multiple medications with different release times—all in one pill.

Last year, the FDA approved a 3D-printed pill for the first time. And now, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a method to make 3D printing medicine even better. NUS Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Assistant Professor Soh Siow Ling, with the help of PhD student Sun Yajuan, created a cheap, simple way to prompt a 3D printer to create multiple medications with different release formulas—all in one pill.

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

This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task

January 9, 2019

Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.” Clever girl!

But in fact this occurrence, far from illustrating some kind of malign intelligence inherent to AI, simply reveals a problem with computers that has existed since they were invented: they do exactly what you tell them to do.

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Science & Technology News

The most amazing Artificial Intelligence milestones so far

January 8, 2019

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the hot topic of the moment in technology, and the driving force behind most of the big technological breakthroughs of recent years.

In fact, with all of the breathless hype we hear about it today, it’s easy to forget that AI isn’t anything all that new. Throughout the last century, it has moved out of the domain of science fiction and into the real world. The theory and the fundamental computer science which makes it possible has been around for decades.

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Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine, Science & Technology News

Goodbye surgery? Scientists just made eye drops that dissolve cataracts

January 8, 2019

It could mean a cheap, painless way to restore vision to thousands.

Most of us take our vision for granted. As a result, we take the ability to read, write, drive, and complete a multitude of other tasks for granted. However, sight is not so easy for everyone. Indeed, for many people, simply seeing is a struggle.

There are more than 285 million people worldwide who have vision problems. According to the Fred Hollows Foundation, an estimated 32.4 million people around the world are blind. Ultimately, 90% of these people live in developing countries, and more than half of these cases of blindness are caused by cataracts. Indeed, cataracts are the leading cause of blindness in the world.

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Brain, brain hacking, brain-computer interfaces, Engineering

Brains of 3 people have been successfully connected, enabling them to share thoughts

January 8, 2019

Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people to share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game.

The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds.

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