South By South West, an annual festival that should be high up on priority if you are interested in tech and future, music and film. Latest news and the pioneers in the field will be there.
Hope this weekly wrap-up sparks great conversations!
The annual SXSW was held in Austin this week, which is one of the ultimate festivals to go to. Ive been wanting to go for years but it's way to expensive if you dont travel for business purpose. I have a goal to be able to go there in 2018.
Haven't heard of it? Well you should definitely put that on the map travel destination if you are into tech, film and music. Its a massive festivals and the whole of California camp in Austin for a week to participate and get an update on the latest news in the field and where we are heading. If you are working on something, this is the best place to go to show case. Luckily many of the talks were live streamed so if you have some time, go watch a few!
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Space
China unveils working on a rocket that will land people on the moon by the early 2020s
Their announcement comes shortly after the US announced plans to fly two private citizens around the Moon by late 2018, under private aerospace company SpaceX.
China is working to develop a new spaceship that can both fly in low-Earth orbit and land on the moon.
NASA release the first images of the Trappist-1s planets
The Earth Like planet was discovered by the Kepler telescope as part of its K2 mission.
AI
At the SXSW he announced for the masses that the singularity will take place in 2045 and human level intelligence will be reached by 2029. For people who's been diving into Ray Kurzweils material this is nothing new, but now it seems to have been picked up by the masses as its been all over the news.
The Singularity happens when the Artificial Intelligence in machines surpass human intelligence.
He us super optimistic, and so am I :)
Sustainable Energy
We can officially collect solar energy without solar panels.
Science has now figured out a molecular "leaf" that can harvest sun power.
The molecular leaf is the most efficient method of carbon reduction to date.
Lab Grown Chicken by Memphis Meats, one of the many startups focusing on lab grown meat production. The firm's approach to what it calls “clean meat” is to culture animal cells in the lab, feed them nutrients until they grow into pieces large enough to cook and eat. Fried chicken might never be guilt-free. But you may soon be able to remove at least part of the remorse the next time you chow down, because it might not have required a single bird to be harmed.
Biology
Scientist are fully close to creating a fully human genome by the end of the year.
Prior to this announcement, the team had been able to completely synthesize one of yeast’s 16 chromosomes. And now they have discovered 5 more. They say they’re on track to finish the remaining ten chromosomes to form a completely synthetic genome by the end of this year.
DNA-editing
“What if a cell’s DNA could be edited just like the text of a document so that you could actually erase letters, you could erase whole sentences, [you could] replace sentences, and you could do things that would enable scientists to change the mutations that might cause genetic disease, make changes that allow us to understand the function of DNA and different kinds of organisms and perhaps, enable us to really direct the way that organisms are evolving on the planet?”
Watch Jennifer Doudna's talk at SXSW
Medicine
It's now possible to detect cancer through a blood test.
It screens the DNA through dying blood cells which then detects tumor and where it is.
Nanotech gets smaller and smaller, so the nano boots get better and better. Swimming in your bloodstream and entering molecules and cells. Pretty amazing. Read a detailed article about it here.
Assisted suicide? This roller coaster will make you die blissful.
Please make these ambulance drones mainstream asap!
Fashion-tech
The Levis and Google collaboration has been released. It's a smart denim jacked where you can answer calls and lower the volume and etc..
The future of wearable is no more devices but its smart clothes.
Automation
An AI just completed 360 000 hours of finance work in seconds.
In June, JP Morgan Chase & Co, the biggest bank in US, started implementing a program called COIN, which is short for Contract Intelligence. COIN runs on a machine learning system that’s powered by a new private cloud network that the bank uses.
The Bank has more than 240 000 employees, some of those employees are lawyers and loan officers who spend a total of 360,000 hours each year. Now, the company has managed to cut the time spent on this work down to a matter of seconds using machine learning.
Here is the weekly sum-up video of this weeks happenings by Singularity Hub!