Tag: Internet

Impact Lab > Internet
People Making a Difference, Robotics, Robots

The Cannibal Machines Are Coming—and They’re Evolving Without You

For decades, we’ve been focused on building smarter robot minds. Now, scientists have unlocked the next frontier: bodies that grow, heal, and scavenge.

In a stunning leap out of Columbia University, researchers have created robots that can physically rebuild themselves—not in a factory, but in the wild, using parts from their surroundings or even other robots. Dubbed “Robot Metabolism,” this new form of machine autonomy marks the beginning of self-sustaining, self-improving machines that blur the line between design and evolution.

Continue reading… “The Cannibal Machines Are Coming—and They’re Evolving Without You”
Health, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, New Discoveries, new technology

Plastic’s Replacement Is Alive—and It’s Spinning

The age of dead materials may be coming to a close. In a quietly radical experiment at the University of Houston, scientists have figured out how to grow a material strong enough to rival plastic—not from oil, but from living bacteria. And not just any bacteria. These microscopic workers are being trained, spun, and coaxed into building a future where plastic is obsolete.

At the heart of this breakthrough is bacterial cellulose—a naturally occurring biopolymer that’s strong, flexible, and fully biodegradable. Until now, it’s been treated more like a scientific curiosity than a global solution. But researcher Maksud Rahman and his team just changed that by teaching bacteria to spin stronger, smarter versions of this material in a rotating culture chamber that behaves more like a bioreactor than a petri dish.

Continue reading… “Plastic’s Replacement Is Alive—and It’s Spinning”
People Making a Difference, Space Flight

The Sky Is Thinking: Φsat-2 Ushers in the Era of Autonomous Earth Surveillance

While most satellites dutifully beam raw data back to Earth for humans to analyze, Φsat-2 has a different job: thinking.

Launched in August 2024, this compact cubesat—roughly the size of a shoebox—quietly crossed a major threshold this year. It didn’t just start sending images back to Earth. It began making decisions. Real decisions. About what matters, what doesn’t, and what needs our attention now.

Orbiting 510 kilometers above us, Φsat-2 is equipped with AI powerful enough to sift through cloud-covered landscapes, ignore unusable images, and zero in on wildfire zones, oil spills, marine traffic, and even earthquake aftermath. It doesn’t wait for instructions. It triages. It prioritizes. It edits reality before we even see it.

Continue reading… “The Sky Is Thinking: Φsat-2 Ushers in the Era of Autonomous Earth Surveillance”
Health, Health & Fitness, Healthcare

Electric Healing: 3D-Printed Implants That Rewire the Spine

The spinal cord used to be a one-way street: once severed, there was no coming back. Nerve damage meant paralysis. Game over.

But a new innovation out of Ireland is rewriting that script—with electricity, nanomaterials, and a 3D printer.

Scientists at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences have developed an experimental implant that doesn’t just sit passively in the body—it channels electric signals directly into damaged spinal tissue, coaxing neurons to regrow.

Yes, regrow.

This isn’t a support brace or a painkiller. It’s a smart scaffold—a neural bootloader—engineered to speak the language of the nervous system and kickstart biological repair from within.

Continue reading… “Electric Healing: 3D-Printed Implants That Rewire the Spine”
Architecture

Concrete Goes Blue: How Seaweed and AI Are Cracking Cement’s Dirtiest Secret

It’s hard to overstate the paradox of cement: it holds up our buildings, our bridges, our entire civilization—yet it also quietly poisons the process. Pound for pound, producing cement releases almost as much CO₂ as the material itself weighs. It’s an unavoidable chemistry problem baked into the modern world.

Until now.

A team of scientists at the University of Washington, working in partnership with Microsoft, has taken an unexpected detour through the ocean—and come back with powdered seaweed as a concrete additive that radically alters the equation.

This isn’t just a quirky material swap. It’s the beginning of a full-blown materials intelligence revolution—where biology meets AI to rewrite what we think infrastructure should be made of.

Continue reading… “Concrete Goes Blue: How Seaweed and AI Are Cracking Cement’s Dirtiest Secret”
Google

The Death of Google Search: Why Google’s Results Are Now Worse Than Its Competitors

If you’re wondering if Google search is not as good as it used to be, you’re not alone. Try searching for anything meaningful these days—a product review, a technical question, even basic factual information—and you’ll likely find yourself swimming through a sea of AI-generated spam, affiliate marketing garbage, and Reddit threads that somehow rank higher than actual expert sources. Want proof? Try doing the same search on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Searx, or even Yandex. The results are often vastly different, and increasingly, they’re better.

What you’re witnessing isn’t just your imagination or nostalgia for simpler times. It’s the documented collapse of what was once the internet’s most trusted gatekeeper, and the cause isn’t some inevitable decay of the web. It’s corporate panic, greed, and a series of deliberate decisions that prioritized short-term revenue over the very quality that made Google indispensable in the first place.

Continue reading… “The Death of Google Search: Why Google’s Results Are Now Worse Than Its Competitors”
Artificial Intelligence, brain hacking, brain-computer interfaces, Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Crime

Our fear of artificial intelligence – Is it for all the wrong reasons?

Fear of AI 11

People in Britain are more scared of the artificial intelligence embedded in household devices and self-driving cars than in systems used for predictive policing or diagnosing diseases. That’s according to a survey commissioned by the Royal Society, which is billed as the first in-depth look at how the public perceives the risks and benefits associated with machine learning, a key AI technique.

Continue reading… “Our fear of artificial intelligence – Is it for all the wrong reasons?”

Breakthrough Thinking, Education, Future, Futurist, Tom Frey

Inside the Mind of a Futurist – Secret Process for Understanding the Future Revealed

Thinking about the future matters t65r

On April 10-14 the newly launched DaVinci Tech Academy will be hosting an intensive week-long workshop called “Inside the Mind of a Futurist.” Throughout this event, Michael Cushman and I will be unveiling a number of unusual processes for probing into the future.

This course has been designed for corporate executives, planners, strategists, influential thinkers, and those who aspire to take on that kind of role in the future. Continue reading… “Inside the Mind of a Futurist – Secret Process for Understanding the Future Revealed”

Analysis, Big Problems, Google, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Google searches put vulnerable consumers at risk

Keyboard_typing

You may be able to ask Google questions you would never ask aloud and the search engine will silently offer you the answers. But, ou can’t think of Google as an oracle for anonymous searches. Sometimes, the most intimate questions a person is asking—about health worries, relationship woes, financial hardship—are the ones that set off a chain reaction that can have troubling consequences both online and offline.

Continue reading… “Google searches put vulnerable consumers at risk”

Analysis, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News, Wearables

Wearable usage in the U.S. will jump almost 60% in 2015

wearable

We will continue to see double-digit growth in the number of Americans using wearable devices over the next several years, according to eMarketer’s first wearables forecast. In 2015, 39.5 million US adults 18 and over will use wearables, including smartwatches and fitness trackers. That’s a jump of 57.7% over 2014. While penetration among US adults is just 16.0% this year, eMarketer expects that to double by 2018, to 81.7 million users.

Continue reading… “Wearable usage in the U.S. will jump almost 60% in 2015”

Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
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By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.