Science of the Future
Below is the complete archive of related articles sorted by date.
AI personhood? European Parliament under fire for proposing recognizing legal status of robots
Over 150 experts in AI, robotics, commerce, law, and ethics from 14 countries have signed an open letter denouncing the ...
Viewpoint: Universe started with a bang, will end with a frigid ‘slow, gradual death’
When will our universe reach the point of maximum entropy? And what other possibilities exist for our universe in the ...
Biohacking can work wonders on machines, but on humans? Not so much.
We can hack our technologies, and even our societies, so why not ourselves? Alas, things are not so straightforward. While ...
Kepler 452 b: Inhabitable ‘Earth 2.0’ could be statistical mirage, study shows
Some astronomers are questioning the existence of what might be the most Earth-like planet yet found outside the solar system, based ...
Transhumanism could push human evolution into hyperdrive. Should we embrace it?
Some people believe that we can enhance human life through embracing biotechnology and genetic engineering, but should we? ...
Travel to Mars: Can gene therapy help us clear deadly radiation hurdle?
An international group of researchers has come up with a new plan to help astronauts survive high-level radiation in space ...
Can humans reproduce in space? NASA wants to know
If the thought of conceiving in space or the potential of one day giving birth there seem unimaginable and far-fetched ...
About phosphorous and why extraterrestrial life may be a long shot
Phosphorus is an essential element for life — but that there was enough of it for life to start on ...
Implantable ‘neural lace’: How we may be able to stimulate our brain to regain youthful functions
[Elon] Musk stated publicly that given the current rate of A.I. advancement, humans could ultimately expect to be left behind—cognitively, ...
Futurist Jamie Metzl: Through gene editing ‘we will increasingly direct our own evolutionary process’
In this talk from last month's South by Southwest (SXSW), an annual conglomerate of film, interactive media, and music festivals, futurist Jamie ...
Stanford biologist Drew Endy: We need transparency when synthesizing humans
Perhaps more than anyone else working in synthetic biology, [researcher Drew] Endy has tried to hold the community to account ...
Searching for life in the universe: ‘We humans are probably not special’
The "exoplanet" revolution of the last 20 years has shown us that the universe is awash in alien worlds. More ...
Rewriting life’s code: Researchers want to synthesize the entire human genome
[Researcher George] Church is one of the leaders of an initiative called the Genome Project-Write, or GP-Write, which is organizing ...
Fighting malaria with ivermectin: What if we made our blood poisonous to mosquitoes?
Imagine this: A pesky mosquito sips some of your blood. Hours later, the blood-sucker drops dead, poisoned by the very ...
Improved ‘brains’ grant robots dexterity that could soon rival humans
It might not look that special, but the robot above is, according to a new measure, the most dexterous one ...
Building an Alzheimer’s early warning system through artificial intelligence
[A flat white box attached to the wall] knows when [David Graham] gets out of bed, gets dressed, walks to ...
Recording and playing back dreams isn’t here yet, but may be on the way
[W]hat if you could record your dreams, and play them back for analysis, or even share them with friends? Theoretically, ...
What makes us human? If your brain is frozen after death, information might be uploadable into an artificial body
Are you longing for your brain and all its memories to be preserved for ever? That once fanciful idea seems ...
Is artificial intelligence a threat to our existence?
I found myself seated among a group of physicists, astrologists, historians, philosophers, technologists, and futurists of various varieties and pedigrees ...
Heart muscle patches: Reprogrammed blood cells might extend life of heart attack victims
Those who survive [a heart attack] are often left with permanent heart failure – a group which includes approximately 450,000 ...
Artificial intelligence poised to revolutionize farming
Computer vision specialist Blue River Technology has developed a solution for [pesticide risk], using advanced machine learning algorithms to enable ...
Humanzee: Creating lab-produced human-chimpanzee hybrids would be ‘profoundly ethical’
It is a bit of a stretch, but by no means impossible or even unlikely that a hybrid or a ...
How DARPA wants to create spies from genetically modified sea life
The US military wants to enlist fish and other sea life to help it track enemy submarines at sea. The ...
Dystopian ‘Black Mirror’ scenarios predict dark future for artificial intelligence
[A] new report by more than 20 researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, OpenAI, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that ...
Reinforcing the human heart: Integrating human cells, electronics and nanomaterials
Future of heart care: Cardiac patch that doesn't merely beat, but also provides monitoring and, if needed, electrical stimulation and ...
‘Unrandom selection’: CRISPR merged with AI (artificial intelligence) may change what it means to be human
Modern medicine and rapidly advancing technology have seen us greatly evolve from the early days of hunter-gatherers, and now the ...
Perfecting microbes to biomanufacture cells like computer chips
[Researcher Alec] Nielsen heads a startup called Asimov that is trying to automate the design of sophisticated genetic modifications. Its software, called ...
Pinpointing time of death for crime victims may be possible through our genes
Thanks to an extensive new survey of gene activity in human tissue after death, computational biologists have taken the first ...
