On the hardware side, the next frontier for deep learning innovation will be in getting the performance, efficiency, and accuracy needed for inference at scale. But the newest battleground in software will be further optimization of neural networks—everything from quantization to pruning and beyond.

Musk said he plans to use his future Starlink satellite system to broadcast the mission.

A lot of military technology manages to be both awe-inspiring and vaguely terrifying, and so it is with the Molar Mic – this little microphone and speaker combination actually clips on to the wearer's back teeth.

Plans are underway for a new Jurassic Park-style attraction in Russia after an official claimed woolly mammoths will return to life in the wild within a decade. The regional government in Yakutia, Siberia, is supporting scientists seeking to clone the extinct species and bring it back to life using elephants as surrogate mothers. Experts hope to use similar techniques to make cave lions and extinct horses part of a new 'Ice Age' park.

Japan's Marbeni will no longer build coal power plants. Just 1,600 more plants to go.

3D-printed construction is portable and inexpensive, and could help build a safe barracks in a shorter time. With this in mind, the US Marine Corps Systems Command recently constructed a prototype concrete barracks in under two days with what it says is the world's largest 3D printer.

MIT professor Dina Katabi is building a gadget that can sit in one spot and track everything from breathing to walking, no wearables required.

The rise of machines, robots and algorithms in the workplace stands to create almost double the number of jobs for the global economy by the middle of the next decade than it puts at risk of being replaced. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), about 133m jobs globally could be created with the help of rapid technological advances in the workplace over the next decade, compared with 75m that could be displaced.

Don't worry, killer robots only came up twice.

Artificial Intelligence is a greater concern than antibiotic resistance, climate change or terrorism for the future of Britain, the incoming president of the British Science Association has warned. Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of physics and public engagement at the University of Surrey, said the unprecedented technological progress in AI was ‘happening too fast’ without proper scrutiny or regulation.

The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms. So how does it work and when will it be here?

The communications industry could use 20% of all the world’s electricity by 2025, hampering attempts to meet climate change targets and straining grids as demand by power-hungry server farms storing digital data from billions of smartphones, tablets and internet-connected devices grows exponentially. The industry has long argued that it can considerably reduce carbon emissions by increasing efficiency and reducing waste, but academics are challenging industry assumptions.

Arthur C Clarke’s concept of a space elevator could start to be realised by experiments beginning next month by a Japanese university and construction comp.

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday signed a bill requiring the state to source electricity from exclusively carbon-free sources by 2045, a move aimed at combating climate change that clashes with U.S. President Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel policies. The law makes California the largest global economy to commit to 100 percent clean energy. Hawaii is the only other U.S. state to set a similar goal.

It's a really important first step towards artificial general intelligence, algorithms that can do more than a single narrowly-defined task.

If you know your way around a chemistry lab, you could help humanity set up shop on Mars — and make some serious cash in the process. NASA is challenging people throughout the United States to come up with a new and efficient way to convert carbon dioxide into glucose, a simple sugar. CO2 dominates the thin atmosphere of Mars, and energy-rich glucose is a great fuel for microbe-milking "bioreactors" that could manufacture a variety of items for future settlers of the Red Planet, NASA officials said.

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang is running for U.S. president, and he's made the robot revolution a central pillar of his election campaign for the 2020 race. Yang is the founder of Venture for America, a nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs create jobs, and he was previously the CEO of education firm Manhattan Prep. A Democrat, he has said the rise of automation and artificial intelligence will soon render millions of American jobs obsolete. To prevent widespread unemployment, he's proposing monthly stipends of $1,000 for all citizens aged 18 to 64, no strings attached.

Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn’t have enough to do. He’d mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle, even the most productive among us couldn’t claim to be toiling for eight (or even five, sometimes three) full hours a day.

When a police officer begins to raise a hand in traffic, human drivers realize that the officer is about to signal them to stop. But computers find it harder to work out people's next likely actions based on their current behavior. Now, a team of A*STAR researchers and colleagues has developed a detector that can successfully pick out where human actions will occur in videos, in almost real-time.

Volvo's latest autonomous concept car rethinks the role of the vehicle in our lives.

In a previous article of mine, I argued that self-driving vehicles were going to transform the transportation system beyond recognition. And while I stand by this statement, I don’t believe that I really went far enough in explaining just how disruptive self-driving technologies will be to society in and of itself. In truth, we’re about to witness one of the most transformative shifts in both appearance and function of our everyday reality in history.

A person with a brain chip can now pilot a swarm of drones — or even advanced fighter jets, thanks to research funded by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The work builds on research from 2015, which allowed a paralyzed woman to steer a virtual F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with only a small, surgically-implantable microchip. On Thursday, agency officials announced that they had scaled up the technology to allow a user to steer multiple jets at once.

In launching its own online service, the Berkeley-based upstart Rigetti aspires to be the Amazon of cloud-based quantum computing.

Machine learning and game theory help Carnegie Mellon assistant professor Fei Fang predict attacks and protect people. Fei Fang has saved lives. But she isn’t a lifeguard, medical doctor, or superhero. She’s an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in artificial intelligence for societal challenges.

California's green policy is so successful it needs to slow down for a bit.

As the environmental, animal welfare, and human health concerns involved with eating meat, dairy, and eggs have come to light in recent years, many Americans have begun embracing a plant-based diet. However, some are still skeptical as to whether swapping out meat and dairy for plants actually does THAT much to help our Earth. They wonder, does following a plant-based diet significantly reduce environmental impact as compared to eating in the traditional, meat-centric American way?

A British nuclear start-up company is developing a nuclear fusion rocket engine as a step towards revolutionising space travel. The UK company Applied Fusion Systems are currently filing a patent for a new nuclear fusion rocket engine, creating by turning a small fusion reactor into a rocket. This technology could be used to run from a compact nuclear fusion reactor, a development which could pave the way for high speed, interstellar space travel.

Elon Musk's new startup, Neuralink, is developing a technology called Neural Lace that could enable humans to upload and download information directly from a computer.

Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida is confident that issues with current VR headsets will be improved upon in the future. Speaking to The Independent at the IFA technology conference in Berlin last week, Yoshida outlined many of the common problems with early VR headsets like the company’s own PlayStation VR (PSVR), noting that the tech was “still evolving” at the moment.

A revolutionary new battery technology could allow electric cars to be fully charged in seconds, instead of the hours it currently takes. Developed by chemists at the University of Glasgow, the ‘flow battery’ contains a liquid filled with nano molecules that can release energy as either electrical power or hydrogen.

The shopping mall, the office block, suburbs, museums, Hollywood, the Gulf cities – air conditioning powered them all. But has the time come to turn it off?

A US study has tested out a suspicious object detection system based on ordinary wi-fi.

Experts from scores of countries are meeting to discuss ways to define and deal with “killer robots” — futuristic weapons systems that could conduct war without human intervention. The weeklong gathering that opened Monday is the second of its kind this year at U.N. offices in Geneva to focus on such lethal autonomous weapons systems and explore ways of possibly regulating them, among other issues.

After years of witnessing its homeless population skyrocket, Seattle has developed a controversial solution to alleviate the problem. Both the city and the larger region of King County plan to move forward with a proposal to build $12 million worth of prefabricated modular homes designed specifically for homeless residents. The decision is part of a growing trend of using modular construction — the process of building a unit off-site, then assembling it at a desired location — to address issues of housing affordability and land restrictions in urban communities with large populations of tech workers.

As access to cheap, plentiful energy dries up and the effects of climate change take hold, we are entering a new era of profound challenge ― and free market capitalism cannot dig us out. This is the conclusion of a report produced for the United Nations by Bios, an independent research institute based in Finland.