News

Our dreams have many purposes, changing across the lifespan

Dreams differ not only across a single lifetime or a single night, they also differ dramatically across historical epochs. The dreams of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and indeed the dreams of most peoples of the ancient world, were viewed as direct portals into the spirit world and the realm of the ancestors and gods. Ancient peoples (and traditional peoples even today) often experienced dreams as the place to conduct a transaction with a spirit being who could significantly help or hinder you in your daily affairs.

Deadly superbug just got scarier – it can mysteriously thwart last-resort drug

First test of drone air traffic control to happen in Switzerland this year

Vision-improving nanoparticle eyedrops could end the need for glasses

Could the development of eyesight-improving eyedrops help eliminate the need for glasses? Quite possibly, suggests new research coming out of Israel’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center and Bar-Ilan University. A team of ophthalmologists at these institutes have invented and tested “nanodrops” which, combined with a laser process, reportedly results in improvements in both short- and long-sightedness.

We Need Breakthrough Business Models, Not Breakthrough Technology

When humanity encounters a shiny new technology and senses its potential, we usually glibly assume that the world will instantaneously jump aboard and surf the resulting wave of change.

Predicting e-sports winners with Machine Learning

Video game/E-sports streaming is a huge and ever rising market. In the world championship of League of Legends (LoL) last year, one semifinal attracted 106 million viewers, even more than the 2018 Super Bowl. Another successful example is Twitch, where thousands of players broadcast their gameplay to millions of viewers.

Self-Driving Truck Encounters the Unexpected, Then Reaches a Milestone

Starsky Robotics engineers tested and developed the autonomous-driving system, which has been installed in the Freightliner Cascadia for more than a year, and had spent a full week conducting dry runs on the stretch of County Road 833 in southern Florida, just north of the Everglades. They had plotted every conceivable contingency and every imaginable edge-case scenario.

Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scientists

Why humans learn faster than AI for now

In 2013, DeepMind Technologies, then a little-known company, published a groundbreaking paper showing how a neural network could learn to play 1980s video games the way humans do by looking at the screen. These networks then went on to thrash the best human players.

Heredity Beyond the Gene

The idea that genes encode all the heritable features of living things has been a fundamental tenet of genetics and evolutionary biology for many years, but this assumption has always coexisted uncomfortably with the messy findings of empirical research. The complications have multiplied exponentially in recent years under the weight of new discoveries.