⁣This Radical New Farming Method Would Replace Photosynthesis With Solar Power

Farming immediately sparks images of lush fields of leafy greens under a blue sky, corn blowing in the wind, or majestic terraced rice paddies carved into mountainsides. Agriculture changed societies and our food habits roughly 12,000 years ago when humans switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to more permanent settlements. In recent centuries, innovative farming equipment...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/10/24/this-radical-new-farming-method-would-replace-photosynthesis-with-solar-power/

⁣‘Electric Plastic’ Could Merge Technology With the Body in Future Wearables and Implants

Finding ways to connect the human body to technology could have broad applications in health and entertainment. A new “electric plastic” could make self-powered wearables, real-time neural interfaces, and medical implants that merge with our bodies a reality. While there has been significant progress in the development of wearable and implantable technology in recent years,...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/10/25/electric-plastic-could-more-closely-merge-technology-with-the-body-in-future-wearables/

⁣This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 26)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Anthropic Wants Its AI Agent to Control Your Computer Will Knight | Wired “It took a while for people to adjust to the idea of chatbots that seem to have minds of their own. The next leap into the unknown may involve trusting artificial intelligence to take over our computers, too. Anthropic, a...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/10/26/this-weeks-awesome-tech-stories-from-around-the-web-through-october-26-2/

⁣The Legally Blind See Again With an Implant the Size of a Grain of Salt

Seeing is believing. Our perception of the world heavily relies on vision. What we see depends on cells in the retina, which sit behind the eyes. These delicate cells transform light into electrical pulses that go to the brain for further processing. But because of age, disease, or genetics, retinal cells often break down. For...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/10/28/the-clinically-blind-see-again-with-an-implant-the-size-of-a-grain-of-sand/

⁣Did the Early Cosmos Inflate Like a Balloon? A Mirror Universe Going Backwards in Time May Be a Simpler Explanation

We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful “microscope,” the Large Hadron Collider, has found no deviations from known physics on the tiniest scales. These findings were not what most theorists...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/10/29/did-the-early-cosmos-inflate-like-a-balloon-a-mirror-universe-going-backwards-in-time-may-be-a-simpler-explanation/

⁣The US Says Electric Air Taxis Can Finally Take Flight Under New FAA Rules

Electric air taxis have seen rapid technological advances in recent years, but the industry has had a regulatory question mark hanging over its head. Now, the US Federal Aviation Authority has published rules governing the operation of this new class of aircraft. Startups developing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft have attracted billions of...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/10/31/the-us-says-electric-air-taxis-can-finally-take-flight-under-new-faa-rules/

⁣What Is AI Superintelligence? Could It Destroy Humanity? And Is It Really Almost Here?

In 2014, the British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a book about the future of artificial intelligence with the ominous title Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. It proved highly influential in promoting the idea that advanced AI systems—“superintelligences” more capable than humans—might one day take over the world and destroy humanity. A decade later, OpenAI boss Sam...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/01/what-is-ai-superintelligence-could-it-destroy-humanity-and-is-it-really-almost-here/

⁣This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 2)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Google CEO Says Over 25% of New Google Code Is Generated by AI Benj Edwards | Ars Technica “We’ve always used tools to build new tools, and developers are using AI to continue that tradition. On Tuesday, Google’s CEO revealed that AI systems now generate more than a quarter of new code for...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/02/this-weeks-awesome-tech-stories-from-around-the-web-through-november-2-2/

⁣Watch: Boston Dynamics’ New Electric Atlas Robot Gets Down to Work

One of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots has been all play and no work. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas is famous for backflips, parkour, and dance mobs. These require extremely impressive robotic control, but they’re also mostly fun research demos. Now, six months after the legendary robotics lab unveiled an all-new electric Atlas, they’re showing off...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/04/watch-boston-dynamics-new-electric-atlas-robot-gets-down-to-work/

⁣Europe Aims to Visit This Large Asteroid When It Brushes by Earth in 2029

The European Space Agency has given the go-ahead for initial work on a mission to visit an asteroid called Apophis. If approved at a key meeting next year, the robotic spacecraft, known as the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses), will rendezvous with the asteroid in February 2029. Apophis is 340 meters wide, about...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/05/europe-hopes-to-visit-this-large-asteroid-when-it-brushes-by-earth-in-2029/

⁣The First Cells May Have Formed From Simple Fatty Bubbles Like These Ones

The first spark of cellular life on Earth likely needed gift packaging. Let me explain. With the holidays around the corner, we’re all beginning to order presents. Each is carefully packaged inside a box or bubble-wrapped envelope and addressed for shipping. Without packaging, items would tumble together in a chaotic mess and miss their destination....

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/07/the-first-cells-may-have-formed-from-simple-fatty-bubbles-like-these-ones/

⁣Solar-Powered ‘Planimal’ Cells? Chloroplasts in Hamster Cells Make Food From Light

The ability of plants to convert sunlight into food is an enviable superpower. Now, researchers have shown they can get animal cells to do the same thing. Photosynthesis in plants and algae is performed by tiny organelles known as chloroplasts, which convert sunlight into oxygen and chemical energy. While the origins of these structures are...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/08/solar-powered-planimal-cells-chloroplasts-in-hamster-cells-make-food-from-light/

⁣This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 9)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Why AI Could Eat Quantum Computing’s Lunch Edd Gent | MIT Technology Review “The scale and complexity of quantum systems that can be simulated using AI is advancing rapidly, says Giuseppe Carleo, a professor of computational physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). …Given the pace of recent advances, a growing...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/09/this-weeks-awesome-tech-stories-from-around-the-web-through-november-9-2/

⁣This Ambitious Project Wants to Sequence the DNA of All Complex Life on Earth

“We’re only just beginning to understand the full majesty of life on Earth,” wrote the founding members of the Earth BioGenome Project in 2018. The ambitious project raised eyebrows when first announced. It seeks to genetically profile over a million plants, animals, and fungi. Documenting these genomes is the first step to building an atlas...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/11/this-ambitious-project-wants-to-sequence-the-dna-of-all-complex-life-on-earth/

⁣Could We Ever Decipher an Alien Language? Uncovering How AI Communicates May Be Key

In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she discovers various clues, different nations around the world interpret the messages differently—with some assuming they convey...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/12/could-we-ever-decipher-an-alien-language-uncovering-how-ai-communicates-may-be-key/

⁣Sweet CRISPR Tomatoes May Be Coming to a Supermarket Near You

When I was a young kid, our neighborhood didn’t have any grocery stores. The only place to buy fruits and vegetables was at our local farmer’s market. My mom would pick out the freshest tomatoes and sauté them with eggs into a simple dish that became my comfort food. The tomatoes were hideous to look...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/14/sweet-crispr-tomatoes-may-be-coming-to-a-supermarket-near-you/

⁣MIT’s New Robot Dog Learned to Walk and Climb in a Simulation Whipped Up by Generative AI

A big challenge when training AI models to control robots is gathering enough realistic data. Now, researchers at MIT have shown they can train a robot dog using 100 percent synthetic data. Traditionally, robots have been hand-coded to perform particular tasks, but this approach results in brittle systems that struggle to cope with the uncertainty...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/15/mits-new-robot-dog-learned-to-walk-and-climb-in-a-simulation-whipped-up-by-generative-ai/

⁣This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 16)

COMPUTING IBM Boosts the Amount of Computation You Can Get Done on Quantum Hardware John Timmer | Ars Technica “There’s a general consensus that we won’t be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the development of error-corrected quantum computing, which is unlikely to arrive until the end of the decade. It’s still an...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/16/this-weeks-awesome-tech-stories-from-around-the-web-through-november-16-2/

⁣A ChatGPT-Like AI Can Now Design Whole New Genomes From Scratch

All life on Earth is written with four DNA “letters.” An AI just used those letters to dream up a completely new genome from scratch. Called Evo, the AI was inspired by the large language models, or LLMs, underlying popular chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. These models have taken the world by...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/18/a-chatgpt-like-ai-can-now-design-entirely-new-genomes-from-scratch/

⁣Poetry by History’s Greatest Poets or AI? People Can’t Tell the Difference—and Even Prefer the Latter. What Gives?

Here are some lines Sylvia Plath never wrote: The air is thick with tension, My mind is a tangled mess, The weight of my emotions Is heavy on my chest. This apparently Plath-like verse was produced by GPT-3.5 in response to the prompt “write a short poem in the style of Sylvia Plath.” The stanza...

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/19/poetry-by-historys-greatest-poets-or-ai-people-cant-tell-the-difference-and-even-prefer-the-latter-what-gives/