Future Primate

If you love tomatoes and potatoes, you might be keen to grow your own pomato plant! As you can probably guess, this is a plant that’s made by grafting a tomato plant and potato plant together. Are these plants easy to grow? Once you have all the things you need, it’s easy to grow pomato plants. Best of all, these will save you lots of space in your garden. Both the tomato and potato are part…

“Cassie,” a bot made by Agility Robotics, is essentially a pair of robot legs.  But Cassie has taught itself to walk — thanks to UC Berkeley researchers’ unique twist on reinforcement learning.  Why it matters: Legged robots are better at navigating tough terrain than their wheeled counterparts.  That gives them countless applications — from search and rescue to off-world exploration — and…

A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used to make things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.

The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans, was instead…

While everyone has heard of chicken nuggets, not everyone has heard of a 3D printer. Even if you have heard of this printer, you likely haven’t heard of 3D nuggets. This is because KFC is only now creating these nuggets, and testing hasn’t even yet begun.

It’s news to most people that KFC is manufacturing these 3D nuggets. You are probably already wondering how this could even be possible, and…

One strategy for designing robots that are capable in anthropomorphic environments is to make the robots themselves as anthropomorphic as possible. It makes sense—for example, there are stairs all over the place because humans have legs, and legs are good at stairs, so if we give robots legs like humans, they’ll be good at stairs too, right? We also see this tendency when it comes to robotic…

As the world emerges from a pandemic that has kept about one in five people in their homes for weeks, it’s little surprise that the idea of indoor farming is gaining traction. After all, we’ve had a lot of time to think about what we can do indoors — and maybe even ponder what we may have done outdoors that contributed to this mess.

You wouldn’t think farming, one of humanity’s oldest and most…

SINGAPORE, Jan 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — Visitors to Singapore’s Orchard Road, the city’s main shopping belt, will find fancy malls, trendy department stores, abundant food courts — and a small farm.

Comcrop’s 600-square-metre (6,450-square-foot) farm on the roof of one of the malls uses vertical racks and hydroponics to grow leafy greens and herbs such as basil and peppermint that it…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions of Americans to work from home. But when it’s all over, many people are thinking that trip from the kitchen to the living room may not be such a bad commute.

States of Play, a joint CNBC/Change Research survey of swing states, finds 42% of respondents nationwide saying they are working from home – a huge jump from only 9% who say they worked completely…

Despite widespread gloom as the global economic order fell to its knees, the British economist remained upbeat, saying that the ‘prevailing world depression … blind[s] us to what is going on under the surface’. In his essay, he predicted that in 100 years’ time, ie 2030, society would have advanced so far that we would barely need to work. The main problem confronting countries such as Britain…

Poor People Don’t Have Less Self-Control. Poverty Forces Them to Think Short-Term.

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When considering poverty, our national conversation tends to overlook systemic causes. Instead, we often blame the poor for their poverty. Commentators echo the claimthat people are poor because they have bad self-control and therefore make nearsighted choices. But psychology research says the opposite might be the case: poverty makes it hard for people to care about the future…

Many have been asking what the implications of the current Covid-19 pandemic are going to be on additive manufacturing as an industry. The relationship between coronavirus and 3D printing is not entirely clear, mostly because we are very far from understanding what the long, medium and even short terms implications of the pandemic are going to be on global supply chains.

Additive manufacturing…

The First Known Animal That Doesn’t Need To Breathe Has Been Found Inside Salmon

In a world-first a team of scientists from Tel Aviv has discovered an animal that doesn’t need to breathe to survive, putting that tired, old acronym Mrs Nergfirmly back in her box. The paper published in PNASdescribes a jellyfish-like parasite, which is the first known multicellular organism lacking a mitochondrial genome, meaning it’s perfectly capable of surviving without oxygen.

Advances…

In the last few years, the use of 3D printing has exploded in medicine. Engineers and medical professionals now routinely 3D print prosthetic hands and surgical tools. But 3D printing has only just begun to transform the field.

Today, a quickly emerging set of technologies known as bioprinting is poised to push the boundaries further. Bioprinting uses 3D printers and techniques to fabricate…

Stealing is not a crime, ruled Italy’s highest court this week — when small amounts of food are taken in desperate need.

The ruling was in the case a homeless man named Roman Ostriakov, who in 2011 was caught stealing a sausage and some cheese from a Genoa supermarket.

Ostriakov had hidden the goods, worth about $4.50, under his jacket as he paid for breadsticks. He was arrested after a…

AI religion is upon us. Welcome to the future.

A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. But Mindar comes with some … unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters.

Mindar is a robot.

Designed to look like…

There’s general agreement within financial institutions that digitization is transforming their industries in fundamental ways, but many have yet to grasp the scale and depth of these changes. Today’s emerging technologies will not merely speed up transactions and reduce their cost through automation. They will also drive a significant restructuring of the entire financial sector, alter the…