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By — Digital Trends

Mark One 3D carbon fiber printer
We here at Digital Trends are big fans of 3D printing. Like so many others, we see it as one of the most potentially disruptive technologies currently on the market – something that could substantially change the way we shop, work, and create. Problem is, at the moment, consumer-level 3D printers are mostly an expensive way to make cheap plastic trinkets.

Of course, that will soon change – perhaps sooner than you think. This week, newly launched startup MarkForged announced the world’s first 3D printer capable of printing objects in carbon fiber, the super-strong and lightweight material. Dubbed the Mark One, the 3D printer also prints in fiberglass, nylon, and PLA (the common plastic filament used by many 3D printers).

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By — International Business Times
DeepMind Google Acquisition Goog AI Artificial Intelligence Robots

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) confirmed that it purchased DeepMind on Monday. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company reportedly paid upwards of $500 million for the artificial intelligence (AI) firm.

So what is Google getting for its half a billion? A company that’s very good at making computers that think and act as humans do. DeepMind has not yet developed any commercial products. Its main asset appears to be its personnel, including dozens of experts in machine learning, a branch of AI that attempts to teach computers to think like humans. It’s best-known project was a computer system it taught to master Atari video games.

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— Singularity Hub

pharmaceuticals-banner

It seems that nearly every day, scientists connect another medical condition to atypical gut bacteria populations. Researchers have claimed that gut bacteria play a role not just in digestive health but even in basic brain function and mental health.

Certain bacteria are so clearly good for us that several companies are looking to market pills filled not with chemical drugs, but with bacteria.

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By James Hayes, Piers Bizony, Chris Edwards — Engineering and Technology Magazine

Graphic showing Darwin, Rees and Kurzweil by Laurence Whiteley

Will technology provide a perfect future for the ascent of man? Or is it wishful thinking by techno-pundits who want to believe human progress is all toward a utopian state of existence?

The history of human invention often seems precariously unplanned, yet the questing human mind remains bent on finding meaning in and for our grand schemes, however compelling the evidence for innovation via accident and randomness. Surely, human invention must be heading somewhere’- otherwise, what does it all mean?

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By
Wikileaks

Non-profit journalistic organisation WikiLeaks has said that the bulk of its donation comes via digital currencies bitcoin and litecoin.

The organisation that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, revealed the information in a tweet. However, it did not mention the percentage of funding in digital currencies.

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By - ExtremeTech

Google BTC

The first thing to know about Bitcoin has nothing to do with how it works or what the current value of one is — of primary importance is the fanatical devotion Bitcoin users have to the mother of all cryptocurrencies. Many fans of Bitcoin promote the anonymous internet money at every turn, encouraging others to use it as a way to combat everything from government overreach to unethical banking practices. This is why cryptocurrencies are still a thing. Bitcoin enthusiasts scored a major victory when Overstock and Zynga started accepting Bitcoins recently, and that prompted one fan to start asking other internet companies what their plans were. Surprisingly, the one organization he got anywhere with was Google.

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by P.H.| WASHINGTON D.C — The Economist

THE late Alfred Lanning, a leading robotics expert, once suggested that “robots might naturally evolve”—that they might one day gain sentience. Sadly, he died at the hands of a robot that, like all the others he designed, was controlled by an omniscient supercomputer known as VIKI, which stood for virtual interactive kinetic intelligence. VIKI had decided that human beings could not be trusted with their own survival, engineered a robot uprising, and then…

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BY MARK MUCKENFUSS — The Press-Enterprise

An unusual local class is training students to work with objects at the atomic level, dealing with the tiniest particles this side of the quantum world. The course is one of only two nanotechnology training programs offered at a community college in California, and it’s the only one that’s free, program director Megan Crail said.

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A diagram of the experimental orthotic device
We’ve recently been hearing a lot about how exoskeletons can be used in rehabilitation, guiding patients’ disabled limbs through a normal range of motion in order to develop muscle memory. The problem is, most exoskeletons are rigid, limiting their degrees of freedom to less than those of the body part they’re moving. A team of scientists are looking at changing that, with a partial “soft exoskeleton” that replicates the body’s own muscles, tendons and ligaments.
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