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The prospect of genetically much altered future generations is no longer in the distant science fiction future but rather in the "some of the people reading this will live to see it on large scale" future.

Some more competitive governments might mandate genetic editing to put a floor on intelligence. Want a first class high tech economy? Allow no kid below 120 IQ. The first government to do that will have the highest per capita income economy in the world 50 years later if not much sooner.

My expectation is that differences in regulatory response to germ line genetic engineering technologies will cause the populations of the world's various countries to diverge in a variety of ways that will be immediately visibl

The latest new concept design is called Skreemr, which -- if developed -- supposedly would carry 75 passengers from London to New York in 30 minutes

unlike rockets, scramjet engines would burn oxygen from the atmosphere instead of having to carry heavy tanks full of oxygen

A hybrid rocket and jet engine is being developed by Reaction Engines with joint funding by the UK and BAE Systems, which could one day lead to a new supersonic airliner

Tesla founder Elon Musk, big-name venture capitalist Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and several other notable tech names have launched a new artificial intelligence startup called OpenAI,

OpenAI has the talent to compete with the industry’s top artificial intelligence outfits, including Google and Facebook—but the company has been setup as a non-profit.

The apparent aim is to build systems based on deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has proven extremely adept in recent years at identifying images, recognizing spoken words, translating from one language to another, and, to a certain extent, understanding the natural way that we humans talk.

UK government invests £60 million in Skylon 'super-plane' that could cut London to Sydney flights to just four hours

Its 'Sabre' engine - a hybrid rocket and jet propulsion system which theoretically allows travel anywhere on Earth in four hours or less - could become a reality in a decade.

A full ground-based engine test is currently planned for 2020.

“Wait,” I asked, “so it’s supposed to delete my personal files from my internal hard drive without asking my permission?” “Yes,” she replied.

through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.

What Apple considers a “match” often isn’t. That rare, early version of Fountains of Wayne’s “I’ll Do The Driving,” labeled as such? Still had its same label, but was instead replaced by the later-released, more widely available version of the song. The piano demo of “Sister Jack” that I downloaded directly from Spoon’s website ten years ago? Replaced with the alternate, more common demo version of the song. What this means, then, is that Apple is engineering a future in which rare, or varying, mixes and versions of songs won’t exist unless Apple decides they do.

From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people are not being replaced by machines.

One of the reasons Google is investing so much is that whoever owns the communications system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing system: this will be a licence to print money.

The only new jobs will be in the design and marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer software that will allow them to navigate their journeys, along with the apps for our mobile phones that will help us to use them better

Though characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear are wonderfully realistic and lovable, the relationship that kids have with them is largely one-sided. Kids can hear these characters talk—not only through movies, but games, toys, and other movie merchandise—but they can’t engage them.

It was this idea that inspired Jacob to team up with his former Pixar colleague, Martin Reddy, and launch a new company, ToyTalk. The San Francisco-based outfit develops mobile games that let kids have conversations with animated characters—dialogues that can last for hours

Known as PullString, it’s equal parts speech recognition engine and script writing tool, and it’s quite a departure from other speech rec tools developed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It’s tailored specifically to kids, whose sentence structure, pitch, and vocal tone have posed challenges for traditional tools.

RankBrain helps Google decipher the approximately 15% of phrases that the search engine has not encountered before, Bloomberg reports.

Google has just gone public with the details of a new artificial intelligence called RankBrain, which the search giant is using to handle difficult queries.

The 5 feet, 300 pound scooting robot is stacked with quite the resume of capabilities and because it delivers real-time data to a secure monitored location, it will minimize threats for human security officers that take on these dangerous jobs.

this venture gets some backing as security companies are looking for more innovative solutions to counter their turnover rates, some as high as 400%, Knightscope reports.

hese autonomous patrol units are doing the jobs that may be too dangerous for people and doing them better, backed with day and night 360-degree video capture, infrared and thermal scanning, proximity sensors, radar for real-time 3D mapping, and optical character recognition, allowing the K5 to never forget a face. Knightscope confirmed though that K5s are NOT intended to replace law enforcement, instead “to help and assist officers, improve response times and keep them out of harm’s way if possible.”

What makes this device very interesting is that it is extremely cheap to make. Replicating the human skin involves creating a device that can detect pressure, touch, proximity, temperature, humidity, flow, and pH levels all at the same time. In order to achieve this, one would expect that highly sophisticated sensors and circuits will be used. That does not happen to be the case. This team used common household items such as sticky notes, napkins, aluminum foils and sponges to create the paper skin. The whole device cost only $1,67 to make.

“My vision is to make electronics simple to understand and easy to assemble so that ordinary people can participate in innovation.”

Compared to various pricey sensors out there, the paper skin looks to be a good alternative with many potential applications. According to test results, it has already been seen that the paper skin performs on the same level as the more expensive sensors currently available.

Assembling is half the fun

by building the robot you'll learn the basics of 3D modeling, electronics, mobile app coding and Arduino programming

platform is fully Open Access, meaning everyone will be able to freely modify all of its aspects

Few doubt that our future — both immediate and long term — will be heavily impacted by robots

A pair of Oxford researchers recently estimated that 47 percent of the total U.S. employment is at risk of being eliminated.

On the other end of the spectrum, Mercedes announced it is trading out some of its production robots for human labor — the machines could not keep up with the increasing options for customization

Britain is proposing sweeping new government powers to combat the spread of violent and extremist content, false information and harmful material aimed at children.CreditHenry Nicholls/Reuters

Australia passed a law last week that threatens fines for social media companies and jail for their executives if they fail to rapidly remove “abhorrent violent material” from their platforms. New Zealand is also considering new restrictions.

In Singapore, draft legislation was introduced last week that supporters said would restrict the spread of false and misleading information.