Harvesting water from air and fog sounds sci-fi but will be rich areas for tech-savvy entrepreneurs and funders in the years ahead.
Total recall
The emergency room of Paris’s Saint-Joseph Hospital now offers patients trips to other worlds, while they have their wounds stitched up or burns cleaned and salved. Patients can don new VR gear and take a guided tour to distant lands, play music, or engage in a range of engaging activities, taking their minds away from pain and anxiety. Initial research...
Trendpost
VR has been used to reduce awareness of dental pain, but this is among the very first use in hospital situations. Trials also are under way to use VR to help people reduce the use of prescription pain medications, to curb the widespread overuse of opioids.
Breeding robots
Chip-maker NVIDIA has developed a deep-learning system that allows a robot to learn to carry out a task, just by watching what a person does. Developers trained a series of neural networks, arrays of computer memory units that mimic the way human brain cells work, to carry out certain tasks around perception, structuring a program of instructions, and then carrying...
Trendpost
Robots that can learn by observation and presage seamless human-machine partnerships everywhere, from factory floors to space stations.
Gas Attack: Recession, Inflation, Market Meltdown
Surging prices at gas pumps, hitting just as the travel season kicks off, is a trigger that will set off economic and equity market ripple effects that will crunch consumer spending, push inflation higher and pressure the Fed to aggressively raise interest rates. Over the past two weeks, the average price per gallon of gas in the U.S. jumped 10...
World without water: Saudi Arabia, then South Africa, now Israel.
With Israel’s five-year drought not abating, the government has said it will add two more desalination plants to the current brace of five along the Mediterranean and build out its water pipeline distribution network. The new plants may be used in part to pump up the rapidly disappearing Sea of Galilee, which is Israel’s main source of fresh water. The...
The latest plastic substitute
Plastic is indispensable. It’s also expensive and complicated, both to make and to recycle. So, chemists at the University of Colorado have come up with a plastic that mimics all the features we love – durability, strength, and light weight – while solving the “trash factor” that have made waste plastics a scourge of the Earth. The team created...
Researchers get first clear look at anti-aging enzyme
The telomerase enzyme has been touted as the body’s anti-aging warrior. It repairs the ends of chromosomes, called “telomeres”, after DNA replication. Telomeres shorten as we age, making them both a cause and a benchmark of aging. Because telomerase thwarts, or at least slows that process, it’s been likened to the plastic tips on shoelaces that keep the laces, or,...
The genes that trigger major clinical depression
More than 200 scientists working in the worldwide Psychiatric Genomics Consortium have identified a combination of 44 genetic variations that seem to underlie major clinical depression, a malady affecting an estimated 350 million people worldwide. The researchers compared genomes of 135,000 people suffering from the illness, with 344,000 people not having the condition. Of the 44 culprits the study found,...