An AI upgrade for your brain, Elon Musk teases the Neural Lace
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Worried that AI’s one day could make us their pets Elon Musk is teasing a new brain-hacking tech. There’s no doubting that Elon Musk is one busy guy. Whether he’s trying to land on Mars with SpaceX, running Tesla, buying SolarCity, investing in the future of...
Carbon nanotube breakthrough promises faster, lower power processors
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Carbon nanotube transistors finally out perform their traditional silicon counterparts. The computing industry has long seen carbon nanotube transistors as something of a Holy Grail – promising not just faster performance but also lower power consumption than their silicon based equivalents. And it has long...
Scientists use swarms of nanobots to precisely target cancer
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to deliver drugs in situ within the human body precisely to the areas where they can do the most good will help doctors treat patients better and patients recover faster. Researchers from Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University have just...
World records set to tumble on Rio 2016’s nano-tech track
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The Rio 2016 running track is the fastest ever and records will fall. Love the Exponential Future? Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, connect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. The running track of the Olympic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro passed inspection...
Nanotech helps scientists create high definition colour holograms
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Scientists for the first time have created a technology that can display true, high resolution colour holograms but Hollywood holograms are still a way off. By carefully arranging nanoblocks to display pixels on a metasurface, researchers have demonstrated that they can manipulate incoming visible light...
Nano watermarks sort the fakes from the originals
New nanotechnology aims to put a dent in the $745 billion counterfeit goods market Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have developed a technique for embedding nanoscale photonic crystals into the glass face of a watch so that when it is exposed to UV light, the design...
Breakthrough lets researchers turn plants into electric circuits and connect them to the grid
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to turn plants into electric circuits could pave the way for a whole variety of biologically inspired electronics. A team of Swedish botanists and electrical engineers have unveiled a new method for growing and powering conductive wires inside living plants and integrating them with...
Nature, the world’s new factory
Nature has always been more efficient at making products than Man but now we’re harnessing it for our own ends Most people would agree we still have much to learn from nature. Nature is vastly more efficient at recycling and reusing matter than humans have been. The whole field and...
Worlds smallest molecular transistor reboots Moore’s Law
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Scientists have demonstrated a new 0.167nm transistor. It’s no secret that companies like Intel have been finding it increasingly difficult and, perhaps more pertinently, costly to keep pace with the expectations of Moore’s Law so it came as no surprise when in early 2016 a consortium...
In the future everything will be connected
In 400 years time our descendants will look back at our Age in the same way we look at the Stone Age Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius, by combining his observations of the laws of nature with his passion for mechanical invention he managed to conceive early versions of...
