131624188
submission
pacopico writes:
A startup called Variant Bio has quietely been going around the world for the past couple of years, looking for genetic outliers. We're talking about people with super high metabolisms, amazing eyesight, the ability to hold their breaths for really long times. Variant wants to sequence their DNA and come up with a new class of drugs based off these traits found among isolated, indigenous people. The whole business is sort of the opposite of 23andMe or Ancestry where you sequence a ton of people and hope something interesting pops out. Instead, you're going to the obviously interesting spots and then trying to strike deals to get the DNA and turn the interesting genes into the basis of drugs. Tons of ethical and moral questions but very sci-fi and at the frontiers of bio-tech.
118957496
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pacopico writes:
GitHub's CEO Nat Friedman traveled to Svalbard in October to stash Linux, Android and 6,000 other open source projects in a permafrost-filled, abandoned coal mine. It's part of a project to safeguard the world's software from existential threats and also just to archive the code for posterity. As Friedman says, “If you told someone 20 years ago that in 2020, all of human civilization will depend on and run on open source code written for free by volunteers in countries all around the world who don’t know each other, and it’ll just be downloaded and put into almost every product, I think people would say, ‘That’s crazy, that’s never going to happen. Software is written by big, professional companies.' It’s sort of a magical moment. Having a historical record of this will, I think, be valuable to future generations.” GitHub plans to open several more vaults in other places around the world and to store any code that people want included.
115152150
submission
pacopico writes:
Aerospace technology has gotten better. The price of rocket launches has come down. So much so that a group of space friends in Silicon Valley now think it's possible to create their own settlement on the moon for less than $3 billion. They've formed a non-profit called the Open Lunar Foundation that looks to begin launching probes to the lunar surface and then to start work on a habitat. The idea is to build a settlement in the spirit of open-source technology where data and hardware designs can be shared and where policies around the settlement are shaped by people all over the world rather than a particular nation state or billionaire. So far the team is small and working off a few million dollars, but there's an all-star cast of advisors, including former astronauts, NASA heads and aerospace execs.
110581028
submission
pacopico writes:
There's a very weird trend going on in Silicon Valley right now where tech giants like Apple, Facebook and Twitter are raiding university neuroscience labs. They're hiring people who do pretty esoteric research on animal brains and putting them in their AI divisions. According to this Bloomberg Businessweek story, part of the reason is simply that the scientists tend to be good at dealing with large amounts of data. But the bigger deal is that these researchers specialize in things like auditory and visual function and even brain/machine interfaces and are being tapped to build new products based on the brain.
109781698
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pacopico writes:
Two years ago, New Zealand started what might be the most radical visa program ever invented. It's called the Global Impact Visa. As Bloomberg Businessweek writes, "You can live in New Zealand or not, do business in New Zealand or not, and stay in New Zealand at the end of the visa term or not. The main requirements are that you’re an interesting person with good intentions and good ideas and that you know lots of other interesting people with good intentions and good ideas."
To get the visa, you're vetted by four people. Then, you go live in a yurt village for a week with the other people who have gotten into the program. The whole idea is to come up with business ventures that might bring an enlightened form of capitalism to the world. In a really weird twist, two Americans and an Ethiopian started this thing, which has been a hit so far but not without plenty of controversy.
105867978
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pacopico writes:
Every year, DJI hosts a robotics competition called Robomasters. It draws in hundreds of engineering students from around the world for two weeks of all out robotics mayhem. The students build and then control robotic vehicles that blast away at each other with rubber bullets, while drones strafe from overhead. Bloomberg Businessweek did a short doc on the competition and everything that goes with it, including a reality TV show, an anime series and final battle attended by thousands of people at a stadium in Shenzhen. The Chinese teams usually do the best, and the winners get some money and sometimes a job offer at DJI — all part of the country's quest to dominate the robotics industry in the years to come.
104391910
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pacopico writes:
Humans have been spotting UFO-like objects for hundreds of years. But, in the late 1920s, an obscure engineer/artist named Alexander Weygers actually designed a flying saucer and later patented the craft. Bloomberg Businessweek spent two years reporting on the strange tale of Weygers, uncovering a Da Vinci type figured who lived on the outskirts of Silicon Valley in a house he built from recycled materials. Weygers was an engineer, sculptor, photographer, wood carver, tax evader and generally weird dude who lived off the land for decades. He became convinced the military stole his flying saucer design and built the vehicles, and there's some evidence he might be right. Weygers was largely forgotten until an art collector became obsessed with his story and found out everything there was to know about the guy. Overall, he's a symbol of a different, purer time in Silicon Valley.
101825728
submission
pacopico writes:
First World View hung Google SVP Alan Eustace at the end of a balloon and then dropped him 135,908 feet back to Earth. Then, it send a KFC chicken sandwich to the edge of space. Now, World View has figured out how to get high-altitude balloons to sail winds in the stratosphere and travel for thousands of miles. They're being used to take detailed pictures of the Earth, send communications to far off places and learn more about the weather. This strange company was founded by two people who lived in Biosphere 2, and they say they're doing all this balloon work to get people to think differently about the planet. In a few years, they plan to send people up to the edge of space in a capsule and let them hang out for a couple hours, while they sip cocktails and reflect on life or something like that.
100584100
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pacopico writes:
Neural nets and deep learning are all the rage these days, but their rise was anything but a sudden happening. A handful of determined researchers scattered around the globe spent decades developing neural nets while most of their peers thought they were mad. An unusually large number of these academics — including Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun and Richard Sutton — were working at universities in Canada. Bloomberg Businessweek has put together an oral history of how Canada brought them all together, why kept chasing neural nets in the face of so much failure and why their ideas suddenly started to take off. There's also a documentary featuring the researchers and Prime Minster Justin Trudeau that tells more of the story and looks at where AI technology is heading — both the good and the bad. Overall, it's a solid primer for people wanting to know about AI and the weird story of where the technology came from but might be kinda basic for hardcore AI folks.
100376976
submission
pacopico writes:
A start-up in California called Saildrone has built a fleet of robotic sailboats that are gathering tons of data about the oceans. The saildrones rely on a hard, carbon-fiber sail to catch wind and solar panels to power all of their electronics and sensors. From a Businessweek story, "Each drone carries at least $100,000 of electronics, batteries, and related gear. Devices near the tip of the sail measure wind speed and direction, sunlight, air temperature and pressure, and humidity. Across the top of the drone’s body, other electronics track wave height and period, carbon dioxide levels, and the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. Underwater, sensors monitor currents, dissolved oxygen levels, and water temperature, acidity, and salinity. Sonars and other acoustic instruments try to identify animal life." So far, they've been used to find sharks, monitor fisheries, check on climate change and provide weather forecasts. Saildrone just raised $90 million to build a fleet of 1,000 drones, which it thinks will be enough to measure all of the world's oceans.
93927751
submission
pacopico writes:
A New Zealand company called Soul Machines has built a disturbingly lifelike virtual baby powered by artificial intelligence software. According to a Bloomberg story, the baby has learned to read books, play the piano and draw pictures. The work is built off the research of Mark Sagar, the company's CEO, who is on a quest to mimic human consciousness in a machine. Sagar used to work at Weta creating lifelike faces for films like King Kong and Avatar and is now building these very realistic looking virtual avatars and pumping them full of code that not only handles things like speech but that also replicates the nervous system and brain function. The baby, for example, has virtual dopamine receptors that fire when it feels joy from playing the piano. What could go wrong?
92142773
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pacopico writes:
Elon Musk and SpaceX kicked off the New Space era with low-cost, reusable rockets. But now there's something just as dramatic brewing with really, really cheap rockets and really, really cheap satellites. Bloomberg has just profiled Peter Beck, a self-taught rocket engineer from New Zealand, who has built a $5 million rocket that will be taking cubesats from Planet Labs and others to space in the next few weeks. The story talks about a new type of computing shell being built around the Earth and all the players trying to fill it up.
85070185
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pacopico writes:
Most people think of the Mojave Desert as a wasteland located somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. For decades, though, Mojave has served as something of an engineering playground for people in the automotive and aerospace industries. Bloomberg has produced a documentary that looks at what's taking place with these engineers in 2016. There's a dude trying to make a flying car, Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, a group called Hackrod using AI software to make a car chassis and the hacker George Hotz taking his self-driving car along the Las Vegas strip for the first time. One of the cooler parts of the show has a team of students from UCSD sending up a rocket with a 3D printed engine — the first time any university team had pulled something like this off. Overall, it's a cool look at the strange desert rat tinkerers.
82234755
submission
pacopico writes:
A start-up out of Denver called Boom Technology has just come out of stealth mode, talking up their supersonic jet. It would carry 40 passengers and travel at Mach 2.2. The company claims that it's about 30 percent more fuel efficient than the Concorde and, based on this, it could get its prices down to the equivalent of a business class seat on long haul flights. At Mach 2.2, a trip from New York to London would take 3.4 hours. Boom is meant to start test flights next year out of John Denver's old hangar.
77749665
submission
pacopico writes:
It's taken more than 80 years, but someone has finally overtaken Thomas Edison as America's top inventor. The dude is named Lowell Wood, and he was once behind the infamous "Star Wars" space laser project and a protege of Edward Teller. Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days and has become the right hand inventor for Bill Gates and his philanthropic endeavors. He's making efficient nuclear reactors, universal vaccines and anti-concussion football helmets. Quite the life.
