Hans Noordsij, a Dutch Tesla driver, uploaded a Dec. 27 dashcam video that dramatically shows the new radar processing capacity of Tesla’s Autopilot and resulting auto-breaking, DarkVision Hardware reports. The system’s radar saw ahead of the car in front and tracked two cars ahead on the road. Note the audible warning a second or so before the accident.

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December 27, 2016

Swiss researchers have succeeded in measuring changes in strong magnetic fields with unprecedented precision, they report in the open-access journal Nature Communications. The finding may find widespread use in medicine and other areas.

In their experiments, the researchers at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, which is operated jointly by ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, magnetized a water droplet inside a magnetic resonance imaging… read more

Apple’s first paper on artificial intelligence, published Dec. 22 on arXiv (open access), describes a method for improving the ability of a deep neural network to recognize images.

To train neural networks to recognize images, AI researchers have typically labeled (identified or described) each image in a dataset. For example, last year, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers developed a deep-learning method to recognize images taken at regular… read more

University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have discovered a rare and powerful type of immune cell in the meninges (protective covering) of the brain that are activated in response to central nervous system injury — suggesting that these cells may play a critical role in battling Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, meningitis, and other neurological diseases, and in supporting healthy mental functioning.

By harnessing the power of the cells, known as… read more

An international team of 63 scientists in 14 clinical departments have identified a unique “breathprint” for 17 diseases with 86% accuracy and have designed a noninvasive, inexpensive, and miniaturized portable device that screens breath samples to classify and diagnose several types of diseases, they report in an open-access paper in the journal ACS Nano.

As far back as around 400 B.C., doctors diagnosed some diseases by smelling a patient’s exhaled… read more

German scientists have discovered a strategy for removing amyloid plaques — newly forming clumps in a brain with Alzheimer’s disease that are created by misfolded proteins that clump together and damage nerve cells.

The scientists from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Munich and the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) Munich took aged microglia cells (the  scavenger cells of the brain’s… read more

By interfacing brain cells with graphene, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have differentiated a single hyperactive Glioblastoma Multiforme cancerous astrocyte cell from a normal cell in the lab — pointing the way to developing a simple, noninvasive tool for early cancer diagnosis.

In the study, reported in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the researchers looked at lab-cultured human brain astrocyte cells taken from a… read more

Harvard researchers have developed a method for automatically designing actuators that enable fingers and knees in a soft robot to move more organically, a robot arm to move more smoothly along a path, or a wearable robot or exoskeleton to help a patient move a limb more naturally.

Designing such actuators is currently a complex design challenge, requiring a sequence of actuator segments, each performing a different motion. “Rather… read more

Salk Institute scientists have extended the average lifespan of live mice by 30 percent, according to a study published December 15 in Cell. They did that by rolling back the “aging clock” to younger years, using cellular reprogramming.

The finding suggests that aging is reversible by winding back an animal’s biological clock to a more youthful state and that lifespan can be extended. While the research does not yet apply… read more

A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School investigators has identified a pathway that appears to underlie the apparent ability of the diabetes drug metformin to both block the growth of human cancer cells and extend the lifespan of the C.elegans roundworm.

That finding implies that this single genetic pathway may play an important role in a wide range of organisms — including humans.

“We… read more

Cornell University engineers have invented a new kind of robotic hand with a human’s delicate sense of touch.

Scenario: you lost part of your arm in a car accident. That artificial arm and hand you got from the hospital lets you feel and pick up things — even type on a keyboard. But not with the same sensitivity as a real hand. Now, an artificial prosthesis can… read more

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have achieved a “major breakthrough” that allows people to control a robotic arm in three dimensions, using only their minds. The research has the potential to help millions of people who are paralyzed or have neurodegenerative diseases.

The open-access study is published online today in Scientific Reports, a Nature research journal.

College of Science and Engineering, UMN | Noninvasive EEG-based control of a robotic… read more

While they have a speech-ready vocal tract, primates can’t speak because they lack a speech-ready brain, contrary to widespread opinion that they are limited by anatomy, researchers at Princeton University and associates have reported Dec. 9 in the open-access journal Science Advances.

The researchers reached this conclusion by first recording X-ray videos showing the movements of the different parts of a macaque’s vocal anatomy — such as the tongue,… read more

In a three-year study of a severely brain-injured woman’s remarkable recovery, doctors measured aspects of brain structure and function before and after recovering communication, a first — raising the question: could other minimally responsive or unresponsive chronic-care patients also regain organized, higher-level brain function?

Challenging what neurologists thought was possible, the pioneering study by Weill Cornell Medicine scientists was published Dec. 7 in Science Translational Medicine.

It… read more

By Tom Garner, Research Fellow, School of Creative Technologies, University of Portsmouth

If you want to make predictions for the future, you need to find the trajectory of events in the past. So to work out what shape digital technology will likely take next year, we should look back to the major developments of 2016.

And the past year’s developments point to a 2017 shaped by the… read more

By Susan Schneider

Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet and the oldest civilizations could be billions of years older than us. But even on Earth, Homo sapiens may not be the most intelligent species for that much longer.

The world Go, chess, and Jeopardy champions are now all AIs. AI is projected to outmode many human professions within the next few decades.… read more

By Martin Archer, Space Plasma Physicist, Queen Mary University of London

I’m very excited about seeing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which tells the tale summarised in the original Star Wars’ opening crawl. This is the story of how the rebels stole the plans to the original “Death Star” – a space station the size of a small moon with a weapon powerful enough to destroy… read more

By Brent Ziarnick, Peter Garretson, Everett Dolman, and Coyote Smith

President-elect Donald Trump often says that Americans no longer dream and must do so again. Nowhere can dreams be more inspiring and profitable than in space. But today, expanding space enterprise is not foremost on the minds of Americans or military strategists. As a recent CNN special showed, defense thinkers feel embattled in space, focused on protecting our… read more

By Jonathan Roberts, Professor in Robotics, Queensland University of Technology

The latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One [opens Friday Dec. 16], introduces us to a new droid, K-2SO, the robotic lead of the story.

Without giving away too many spoilers, K-2SO is part of the Rebellion freedom fighter group that are tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star, the… read more

about the event | The New York Times Global Leaders Collective
Leading thinkers gather to discuss the future of markets & tech impact.

The New York Times will host the Global Leaders Collective on November 28-29, 2016 — a group of CEOs, executives & innovators leading companies in the world luxury space.

The summit brings together the best thinking from diverse industries, to navigate the dramatic… read more

I just caught up with Season 3 of Black Mirror, the dystopian science-fiction British television series on Netflix. I found the six episodes riveting, but often sort of nightmarish. Think high-tech, R-rated Twilight Zone.

Spoiler alert: the following mentions some things that are not immediately revealed in the episodes, similar to the trailers below (but does not give away endings).

I found… read more

Ray Kurzweil will be presenting along with key experts in a variety of fields at the International Monetary Fund’s New Economy Forum held in Washington, DC to discuss: the future of work & jobs, the impact of automation and rapidly advancing tech on the economy, plus other financial and exploratory issues. The first part of the event is a panel round table. Later, he gives a talk in part two.… read more

By Christian Schroeder, Lecturer in Environmental Science & Planetary Exploration, University of Stirling. Disclosure statement: Christian Schroeder is a NASA Mars Exploration Rover Athena Science Team collaborator. University of Stirling provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

Mars is the future. It’s after all NASA’s current overarching goal to send humans to the Red Planet. But even as early as the 1950s, aerospace engineer… read more

Dear readers,

Here for your enjoyment is the short story “The Greatest Story Ever Written,” written by my daughter, Amy Kurzweil. Her fiction here is influenced by Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, although less ominous.

Amy starts her story with this quote from the play from Ionesco: “After all, perhaps it is we who need saving. Perhaps we are the abnormal ones.”

My daughter is a… read more

In the movie “Lo and Behold, Reveries Of The Connected World,” released today, legendary documentarian Werner Herzog discovers and explores the internet in a series of ten impressionistic vignettes.

These range from internet pioneers (Leonard Kleinrock, Robert Kahn,  Danny Hillis), AI/roboticists (Sebastian Thrun, Tom Mitchell, “Raj” Rajkumar, Joydeep Biswas), and Mars explorers (with Elon Musk — Herzog volunteered to go) to dystopians — how a solar flare could… read more

By Paul Werbos, PhD

This week (starting August 15), the immediate risk to our lives through cyberblitzkrieg has suddenly risen dramatically, due to new events in cyberspace. If a cyberblitzkrieg on electric power and other critical infrastructure does occur, the level of damage would be comparable in general to the kind of damage we feared at the height of the Cold War, when something like half the world could… read more

By Jodi Schiller

For those of us working in virtual and augmented reality, our days are spent thinking of better and better ways to create more lifelike virtual worlds. It’s easy for us to believe that one day we will be living in a sim indecipherable from “base” reality — or even more likely, that we’re already living in one.

This year at Burning Man, the… read more

By Steve Mann, Brett Leonard, David Brin, Ana Serrano, Robin Ingle, Ken Nickerson, Caitlin Fisher, Samantha Mathews, Ryan Janzen, Mir Adnan Ali, Ken Yang, Pete Scourboutakos, Dan Braverman, Sarang Nerkar, Keram Malicki-Sanchez, Zack P. Harris, Zach A. Harris, Jesse Damiani, Edward Button

The Human Augmentation Code was presented at the VRTO Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference + Expo, June 25–27, 2016 by Steve Mann,… read more

By John Rousseau

The future of human consciousness will be a hybrid affair. We will live and work in a ubiquitous computing environment, where physical reality and a pervasive digital layer mix seamlessly according to the logic of software and the richness of highly contextual data. This is mixed reality (MR) — and it will soon simply be reality: projected onto our mind’s eye, always on, always connected, and… read more