Inside the very big, very controversial business of dog cloning

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Recently born clones share an incubator.

Barbra Streisand is not alone. At a South Korean laboratory, a once-disgraced doctor is replicating hundreds of deceased pets for the rich and famous. It’s made for more than a few questions of bioethics.

The surgeon is a showman. Scrubbed in and surrounded by his surgical team, a lavalier mike clipped to his mask, he gestures broadly as he describes the C-section he is about to perform to a handful of rapt students watching from behind a plexiglass wall. Still narrating, he steps over to a steel operating table where the expectant mother is stretched out, fully anesthetized. All but her lower stomach is discreetly covered by a crisp green cloth. The surgeon makes a quick incision in her belly. His assistants tug gingerly on clamps that pull back the flaps of tissue on either side of the cut. The surgeon slips two gloved fingers inside the widening hole, then his entire hand. An EKG monitor shows the mother’s heart beating in steady pulses.

Continue reading… “Inside the very big, very controversial business of dog cloning”

Can emotional AI make Anki’s new robot into a lovable companion?

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Known for its hyperactive toys, the company spent years developing technologies to tackle its greatest challenge yet–subtlety.

If there’s a robot uprising anytime soon, it seems unlikely to start in our living rooms. Robotic vacuums like Roomba sell well because they are so handy. But other types of home robots–pets and companions from Sony’s Aibo robo-pooch to the recently shuttered Kuri (backed by Bosch)–have flopped due to both prices and expectations that have been set unreasonably high.

If any company can eventually bring us a domestic robot like Rosie from The Jetsons, Anki is a good bet. Started by three Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute graduates in 2010, the company has racked up over $200 million in venture funding. More important, it’s attracted customers. Anki has already sold 1.5 million robots by taking what it sees as the easiest route into the home: toys. The star is a manic little bulldozer-looking bot called Cozmo that drives around a tabletop and plays simple games with light-up cubes it carries about. Cozmo was the best-selling toy (by revenue) on Amazon in the U.S., U.K., and France in 2017, according to one analysis.

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Humanity confronts a defining question: How will AI change us?

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What will happen when we’ve built machines as intelligent as us? According to the experts this incredible feat will be achieved in the year 2062 – a mere 44 years away – which certainly begs the question: what will the world, our jobs, the economy, politics, war, and everyday life and death, look like then?

Fortunately, Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at UNSW has done the research for us.

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Why we hate using email but love sending texts

Working At A Starbucks Coffee Shop in Connecticut

They both allow us to stay in touch, but while email often attracts ire, text messaging is more popular than ever. Is the way we choose to communicate saying more than we might think?

Around 15 years ago, I was working at my part-time job at an electronics store at the mall. One of my colleagues asked me if I “use text messages.”

“I’m addicted,” she said wide-eyed. “They’re so much fun.”

At that time, most people were still using old feature phones with LED screens and plastic keypads. I don’t remember what the character limits were, but it was certainly fewer than a tweet, and it took about 12 years to finally type out what you wanted to say. They were slow, very expensive, and long enough to write about a quarter of a haiku. I genuinely thought it was a dumb, flash-in-the-pan gimmick that wouldn’t last long.

How wrong I was.

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Artificial intelligence can now help write Wikipedia pages for overlooked scientists

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The tech could be used to increase the representation of women scientists on Wikipedia.

Quicksilver discovers scientists who should have Wikipedia articles about them and writes a first draft.

Plenty of prominent scientists have Wikipedia pages. But while checking to see if someone specific has a Wikipedia page is a quick Google search away, figuring out who should be on Wikipedia but isn’t—and then writing an entry for him or her—is much trickier.

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The rise of an “Assassination Marketplace” shows the dark side of decentralized networks

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Right now, there’s an online bidding war over whether or not Donald Trump will die before the year is out. All a would-be assassin has to do is stake a whole bunch of money on “yes” and they’d make a fortune.

These not-quite death threats reportedly lodged against the president and other public figures, including Jeff Bezos, John McCain, and Betty White, can be found on Augur, a decentralized app recently launched by the nonprofit Forecast Foundation. Augur is a protocol through which people can create prediction markets, which are crowdsourced platforms where people stake cryptocurrency (in this case Ethereum and the Augur-specific token Reputation) on a prediction’s most likely outcome.

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Some Americans will get to vote via blockchain this November

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VOTING GOES MOBILE. The 2016 U.S. election was not exactly the most secure affair. Even though tech companies and lawmakers are still sorting out what happened, that’s not stopping West Virginia from thinking big and bold in 2018.

According to a CNN report published Monday, the state plans to let soldiers who are permanent residents of the state but are serving overseas vote via their smartphones using a blockchain voting app called Voatz. It will mark the first time U.S. citizens can vote via mobile app.

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Assassin drones are here. Now what?

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It was perhaps inevitable that would-be political assassins would turn to off-the-shelf drones.

Security forces check a nearby building after an explosion was heard while Maduro attended a ceremony in Caracas on August 4, 2018. Photo: JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images

A failed attack by explosives-laden drones on Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro could be a harbinger of a new era. Cheap, easy-to-use, remotely-piloted aerial vehicles aren’t just toys, anymore. They’re potential tools of assassination.

But don’t panic. This is not the first time assassins have adapted a new technology for nefarious ends. Politicians and their protectors have ways of coping.

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Gene editing technique allows silkworms to produce spider silk

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An analysis of transformed cocoons. Morphology of the WT-1, FibH+/-, FibH-/-, WT-2, MaSp1+/-, and MaSp1+/+ cocoons. Scale bar represents 1 cm. Credit: Jun Xu

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has succeeded in using a gene editing technique to get silkworms to produce spider silk. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes the technique they used and the quality of the silk produced.

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OpenAI creates Dactyl robot hand with “unprecedented” dexterity

Open AI — a non-profit started by Elon Musk — has found a way to programme a robot hand so that it can nimbly manipulate an object using human-like movements it has taught itself.

“We’ve trained a human-like robot hand to manipulate physical objects with unprecedented dexterity,” said OpenAI of its Dactyl system, which is shown in a video twisting a block into 50 different requested orientations.

Dactyl works by training the robot hand in a simulation and then transferring the knowledge gained there to the real world.

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The Army is buying microwave cannons to take down drones in mid-flight

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The high-powered microwave system would be mounted to an aircraft.

The US Army has a new plan for microwaving drones out of the sky. In a public solicitation last Friday, the agency announced its intention to purchase an airborne high-powered microwave system from Lockheed Martin, which is intended for use against drones. The weapon, which would be mounted to an airplane, would disable fixed-wing or quadcopter drones with a beam of focused radiation.

Drone countermeasures are particularly relevant in the wake of an apparent assassination attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro that was carried out by a pair of hexacopter drones rigged with remote-triggered explosives. Public video collected by Bellingcat indicates the attack was carried out by drones similar to DJI’s Matrice 600. Each drone was equipped with a kilogram of C4 explosive, according to a statement by Venezuelan security forces. The Matrice 600’s maximum carrying capacity is 5.5 kilograms.

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News flash:It’s about the skill set, not the suit or the degree

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High School failed me. As a high school dropout, I knew I was taking a risk by rejecting the ‘normal route’ and knew I always wanted to be in the business world. During one assignment in my computer class, I did not show up in a suit and tie for the presentation. The teacher docked me for not ‘dressing proper’, which I found puzzling. After all, this class was about desktop publishing – why should this be an issue? It should be about the substance of my work and not some preconceived, superficial notion about how I looked. For me, it has always been about the substance and not the suit.

The good news is that federal aid for colleges has reached its high-water mark. The bad news is that millions of young adults feel they have no choice but to enroll in a four-year University, something that brings with it an inordinate amount of debt for many students.

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