Innovation Watch
By David Forrest | THE FUTURE IS HERE innovationwatch.com
Young American Men Are Choosing Video Games Over Work in Staggering Numbers
New research has found a surprising culprit for the serious decline in working hours among young American men over the last 15 years: video games.<p>The …
Labor EconomicsNew law paves way for companies to mine asteroids
Mining companies pull valuable material out of the earth and sell it. That’s their job, and while there’s plenty of controversy over where, when, and …
Space ExplorationArctic heat is becoming more common and persistent
Warmer air and water is fueling a negative feedback loop — temperatures rising faster than rest of the world<p>The Arctic is a bastion of cold, blustery weather. But in the latest sign of how quickly changes are happening, new research published this week shows that the Arctic has seen more frequent …
Climate ChangeDoes Silicon Valley have a moral responsibility to stop developing robots?
The debate about the impact of new technology, particularly AI, on society continues to rage.<p>Last month, for example, the current front runner to replace Jerry Brown as Californian Governor in 2018, Gavin Newsom – traditionally one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal supporters – warned graduating …
Silicon Valley25 Fossil Fuel Companies Produced Half Of Global Emissions In The Last 30 Years
Thanks, guys.<p>In the years since the world first started considering climate change as a major existential threat, it’s tended to focus on what governments can do about the problem. Through big meetings in Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Paris, governments have negotiated what they can do to quell greenhouse …
ClimateTesla is building the world’s biggest battery. Here’s how it will work.
Get amped to learn about lithium-ion energy storage!<p>By the end of the year, the state of South Australia will be home to the world’s biggest battery, if Elon Musk and Tesla make good on an ambitious commitment. The battery installation will be hooked up to a 99-turbine wind farm (which is still …
BatteriesFormer NASA Climate Chief Warns That Earth Could Become “Practically Ungovernable”
Water World<p>Simply fixating on the potential negative effects of climate change instead of focusing on efforts to combat it will not help our planet. …
Climate ChangeIf the US really wants to go to Mars, Elon Musk knows how to bring down the price
“Our nation will return to the moon and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,” US vice president Mike Pence, newly ensconced as the head of the National Space Council, said last week in a speech at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.<p>The only problem? The US government’s plan to do this relies on …
Elon MuskCompeting in a world of sectors without borders
Digitization is causing a radical reordering of traditional industry boundaries. What will it take to play offense and defense in tomorrow’s …
InnovationA new generation of giant rockets is about to blast off
It’s been 44 years since the mighty Saturn V last thundered skyward from a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The towering rocket, generating enough power to lift 269,000 pounds into orbit, had been the workhorse of the Apollo moon missions.<p>Later this year, SpaceX plans to launch its …
SpaceX3D-printed silicone heart beats like the real thing
Advanced 3D printing and manufacturing techniques that can produce soft machines could save a lot of lives in the future. They could be used to make not just soft robots for search and rescue, but also temporary organs for people on the transplant waiting list, like the artificial heart created and …
MedicineAI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?
Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language. Then they stopped it.<p>Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”<p>Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”<p>To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense …
Artificial IntelligenceBlockchain Could Make the Insurance Industry Much More Transparent
While Edward Lloyd is largely credited with commercializing the insurance industry, with the creation of his namesake firm, Lloyd’s, over 330 years ago, the original concept of spreading risk (or “mutualizing”) goes back even further. Hundreds of years before Lloyd’s was formed, Chinese merchants …
InsuranceRobotic landers could start mining the moon as early as 2020
A permanent robotic mining outpost on the moon could be on the cards as early as 2020. The Florida-based company Moon Express has raised over $45 …
Space Exploration60 Countries’ Digital Competitiveness, Indexed
It is barely 20 years since Sergey Brin and Larry Page registered the domain name google.com, and only 10 years since Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco and introduced the iPhone. Yet in this short period, digital technologies have upended our world. We introduced the Digital Evolution …
InnovationGoogle’s Next Design Project? Artificial Intelligence
“In the early days of graphical user interfaces, people had to invent scroll bars and menus. What is the scroll bar of AI? We don’t know yet.”<p>We’re living in the wild west of artificial intelligence, with products and companies popping up so quickly that we’ve had little time to understand what it …
Artificial IntelligenceRobots and AI are going to make social inequality even worse, says new report
Rich people are going to find it easier to adapt to automation<p>Most economist agree that advances in robotics and AI over the next few decades are likely to lead to significant job losses. But what’s less often considered is how these changes could also affect impact social mobility. A new report …
EqualityEvery AI Powerhouse Wanted This Whiz Kid. He's Taking Them On Instead
In the summer of 2013, as Matthew Zeiler was close to finishing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at New York University, he seemed to have every tech giant in the palm of his hand. Zeiler had left an internship with a Google AI group a few weeks earlier when he got a call from an unknown number …
Machine LearningNew stacked solar cell absorbs energy from almost the entire solar spectrum
Most traditional solar cells aren’t able to convert long-wavelength photons into electricity. A team of researchers led by Matthew Lumb at The George …
Clean EnergyCRISPR used to build a biological hard drive out of live bacteria
Hard drives will one day seem as primitive as punch cards or floppy disks, and it may turn out that the medium that replaces them was inside us all …
DNAAI and ‘Enormous Data’ Could Make Tech Giants Like Google Harder to Topple
Another week, another record-breaking AI research study released by Google—this time with results that are a reminder of a crucial business dynamic …
Machine LearningPhotos: Life inside of China’s massive and remote bitcoin mines
Taking advantage of the cheap and plentiful hydroelectric power that an army of computers require, bitcoin mining is spreading in remote parts of China’s Sichuan province. In dark and isolated warehouses, bitcoin mining machines hum along solving equations to produce the highly valued …
BitcoinNew lip-sync tech generates scary-accurate video using audio clips
I’m not saying you should be afraid of the future, but… okay, that’s exactly what I’m saying. A group of researchers from the University of Washington has developed a method to take an audio clip of someone speaking and generate a frighteningly realistic lip-synced video with it.<p>I’m afraid, very …
Filmmaking10 Disruptive Artificial Intelligence Startups That are NOT In Silicon Valley
You don't need Stanford or MIT to build amazing AI.<p>As I was heading from Atlanta to San Francisco to talk about investing in artificial intelligence at MobileBeat, it struck me how artificial intelligence may be the buzzword of this year. Every startup seems to need the "AI accessory" in their …
Silicon ValleyAn Oil Giant Will Invest $1 Billion in Clean Energy
Royal Dutch Shell sees a future filled with electric cars and solar plants, particularly in the developing world — and to make it a reality, the …
Renewable EnergyChina’s Central Bank Has Begun Cautiously Testing a Digital Currency - MIT Technology Review
China’s central bank is testing a prototype digital currency with mock transactions between it and some of the country’s commercial banks.<p>Speeches …
BitcoinBill Gates: Artificial Photosynthesis Can Produce Clean Fuel for the Cars of Tomorrow
Artificial Photosynthesis<p>Photosynthesis is an essential natural process that keeps not just plants, but just about everything else on Earth alive — …
EnergyThe World May Be Headed for a Fragmented ‘Splinternet’
The rulings on online speech are coming down all over the world. Most recently, on June 30, Germany passed a law that orders social media companies …
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