The Rise of the Robot Reporter

Jaclyn Paiser | The New York Times

“In addition to covering company earnings for Bloomberg, robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post and earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times.”

Penny-Sized Ionocraft Flies With No Moving Parts

Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum

“Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) thrusters, sometimes called ion thrusters, use a high strength electric field to generate a plasma of ionized air. …Magical, right? No moving parts, completely silent, and it flies!”

Making New Drugs With a Dose of Artificial Intelligence

Cade Metz | The New York Times

“…DeepMind won the [protein folding] competition by a sizable margin—it improved the prediction accuracy nearly twice as much as experts expected from the contest winner. DeepMind’s victory showed how the future of biochemical research will increasingly be driven by machines and the people who oversee those machines.”

Nano-Switches Made Out of Graphene Could Make Our Devices Even Smaller

Emerging Technology From the arXiv | MIT Technology Review

“For the first time, physicists have built reliable, efficient graphene nanomachines that can be fabricated on silicon chips. They could lead to even greater miniaturization.”

The Problem With Big DNA

Sarah Zhang | The Atlantic

“It took researchers days to search through thousands of genome sequences. Now it takes just a few seconds. …As sequencing becomes more common, the number of publicly available bacterial and viral genomes has doubled. At the rate this work is going, within a few years multiple millions of searchable pathogen genomes will be available—a library of DNA and disease, spread the world over.”

Fire (and Lots of It): Berkeley Researcher on the Only Way to Fix Cryptocurrency

Dan Goodin | Ars Technica

“Weaver said, there’s no basis for the promises that cryptocurrencies’ decentralized structure and blockchain basis will fundamentally transform commerce or economics. That means the sky-high valuations spawned by those false promises are completely unjustified. …To support that conclusion, Weaver recited an oft-repeated list of supposed benefits of cryptocurrencies and explained why, after closer scrutiny, he believed them to be myths.”

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