Since 2013, the U.S. and governments in Europe and Asia have been locked in a constant battle to equip supercomputers with more processing power to claim the ever-shifting title of world's fastest mega-machine. The U.S. relinquished its place at the top of the pile last June, but reclaimed it a year later when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed to get its Summit supercomputer online.

The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.

Dyson has a lengthy list of air purifiers, but it's reportedly considering developing a model that's not quite anything it's ever created before. According to Bloomberg, the company has lodged patents for a wearable air purifier that will double as a pair of headphones. Wearable purifiers are already a thing, especially for countries like China where air pollution gets so bad it can increase the chances of getting stroke or cancer. However, they mostly come in the form of necklaces and, in some cases, scarves or masks.

It's not all about speedy transit, Elon Musk also wants to build sewers. At the National League of Cities' City Summit on Thursday, the billionaire said he wants the Boring Company to "do tunneling for like water transport, sewage, electrical," according to Forbes. "We're not going to turn our noses up at sewage tunnels. We're happy to do that too."

Injuries can't heal without a constant influx of blood's key ingredient—oxygen. A new flexible sensor developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, can map blood-oxygen levels over large areas of skin, tissue and organs, potentially giving doctors a new way to monitor healing wounds in real time. "When you hear the word oximeter, the name for blood-oxygen sensors, rigid and bulky finger-clip sensors come into your mind," said Yasser Khan, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley.

As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about when it comes to artificially intelligent machines being able to perform many tasks faster and better than humans can, potentially stealing our jobs in the future, and presenting what some technologists worry is an existential threat to humanity, now it appears AI will soon be able to match humans at being, well, human, too.

As rumored, Samsung showed off a prototype of a folding display today. Folded, it’s a smartphone. Unfolded, it’s a tablet. Neat! Less neat: The company sort of went out of its way to not really show very much. A prototype was onstage for about 45 seconds, and it was deliberately backlit to be intensely silhouetted. They “disguised the elements of the design” to keep secret whatever secret sauce they have.

A regular shop-bought mushroom has been turned into an electricity generator in a process scientists hope will one day be used to power devices. The “bionic mushroom” was covered with bacteria capable of producing electricity and strands of graphene that collected the current. Shining a light on the structure activated the bacteria’s ability to photosynthesise, and as the cells harvested this glow they generated a small amount of electricity known as a “photocurrent”.

The goal of AI is not to replace doctors, it's to optimize physician performance, releasing them from menial tasks and providing alternative assessments.

Futuristic-looking bendable tablets and smartphones have captured our imagination for years. Whether it’s the folding tablets found in Westworld or the many book-like slates with foldable pages in Microsoft’s future vision videos, a phone that folds out into a much larger device is dreamlike. Samsung is now trying to make these wild concepts a reality.

(Phys.org)—A small team of entrepreneurs affiliated with Skipping Rocks Lab has started a crowdfunding effort to mass-market a consumable water bottling device that produces what they call the Ooho!—a spherical blob of water held in a thin membrane that is small enough to be popped into the mouth.

The European Commision has pledged that the EU will cut greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Realistically, everyone will need to get stuck in to actually hit that target but at the moment, the prospects don't look fantastic: to halt climate change, the UN has said "unprecedented change" will be required, both on a social and on a global level . However, Spanish company Ingelia may have the key to at least part of the solution: after developing an industrial process to produce a biocarbon called "biochar" which can be used as a much cleaner energy source to traditional coal.

Cars and traffic signals are talking to each other, leaving the driver — if there even is one — out. Top automakers including Volkswagen, Honda (HMC), Ford (F) and BMW (BMWYY) are experimenting with technology that allows cars and traffic lights to communicate and work together to ease congestion, cut emissions and increase safety.

Mitsubishi has developed a new indoor lighting system that mimics blue skies, sunrises and sunsets. The company hopes the system will prove popular in offices and homes that lack natural light. BBC Click's Dan Simmons finds out more.

Electric-vehicle maker Workhorse announced today that it has begun initial production of a 100-mile range electric delivery truck called the NGEN-1000. The truck is meant to replace diesel-powered delivery trucks, but this vehicle weighs less than half of what a comparable internal combustion van usually weighs.

Arizona-based electric vehicle startup Atlis Motor Vehicles claims that it achieved “a full charge in 12 minutes, 35 seconds” of a prototype battery pack that it believes is scalable for its upcoming electric pickup truck. The company describes this as “the test of their first large-scale prototype pack used a public DC fast charge station,” but the prototype was only a 3 kWh pack.

A device which zaps your tongue with electricity sounds more like some cruel and unusual torture method than it does something folks might do for enjoyment. But you’d be wrong — at least when it comes to the electric tongue zapper created by researchers at Meiji University in Japan. They’ve been working on technology they call “unlimited electric gum,” able to electrically simulate flavor sensations when a person chews a stick of specially created “gum.”

A new lightweight substance is as strong as wood yet lacks its standard vulnerabilities to fire and water. To create the synthetic wood, scientists took a solution of polymer resin and added a pinch of chitosan, a sugar polymer derived from the shells of shrimp and crabs. They freeze-dried the solution, yielding a structure filled with tiny pores and channels supported by the chitosan. Then they heated the resin to temperatures as high as 200 degrees Celsius to cure it, forging strong chemical bonds.

An Australian-first trial is creating ‘green’ hydrogen gas made from renewables to power Sydney homes. Energy company Jemena has partnered with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) in a $15 million trial to convert excess solar and wind power into hydrogen gas, which will be stored and used in Jemena’s New South Wales gas network.

Anna Du was walking along Castle Island’s beach in South Boston when she noticed plastic scattered on the shoreline. She reached down to pick it up, and quickly realized there was many more tiny pieces than she could handle. “When I realized how many pieces there were, it seemed impossible,” says Du, who was in sixth grade at the time.

“IT’S CHEATING.” That’s the response you’ll hear from self-proclaimed music purists talking about technological innovation in song creation. Sampling, synthesizers, drum machines, Auto-Tune—all have been derided as lazy ways to make chart-topping hits because they take away the human element. (With apologies to Vanilla Ice, Gary Numan, Prince, and T-Pain.)

Imagine being stuffed into a crowded train car and noticing a less crowded one just down the platform. You’d probably want to move over as soon as possible. Particles that follow this balancing act—known as osmosis—spontaneously move from an area of high concentration to one of low concentration. Now, scientists have used this tendency to create a power-producing membrane that can harvest electric current from nothing but salty water.

Las Vegas isn't the first place that springs to mind as a sustainable agriculture hub. But the city could soon become a major purveyor of fresh greens, thanks to a new $30 million vertical farming facility. At 215,000 square feet, it's one of the largest indoor vertical farms in the US. The facility is home to Oasis Biotech, a startup that transformed a vacant Las Vegas industrial property into a center for hydroponic farming — a process of growing plants without soil to conserve water and speed up the maturation process.

It may be possible in the future to screen patients for Alzheimer’s disease using an eye exam. Using technology similar to what is found in many eye doctors’ offices, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have detected evidence suggesting Alzheimer’s in older patients who had no symptoms of the disease. Their study, involving 30 patients, is published Aug. 23 in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology.

A team of scientists at the University of Akron in Ohio is working to solve one of the most pressing issues humanity will face in the future: access to fresh, clean drinking water. To do that, the team is developing a prototype water harvester that can essentially produce up to 10 gallons per hour of drinking water from thin air. "Every human should be entitled to fresh water," Dr. Josh Wong, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Akron, told Business Insider. "Not just the 0.1%"

Plane maker Boeing is actively working on technology that would remove the need for two pilots in the cockpits of its passenger jets. Existing European aviation rules state that passenger planes with more than 20 seats must have a minimum of two pilots in the cockpit. But Steve Nordlund, a vice president at Boeing, said autonomous technology that would allow for a reduction in on-board crew was being developed at a “good speed”.

Dethleffs came up with an innovative new camper concept built for electric cars. It has its own battery pack, electric motors, and solar panels to reduce the load on the vehicle towing it. The idea is pretty simple: towing a camper reduces the efficiency and the range of your vehicle, electric car or not, but by adding its own power to the trailer, it mitigates the impact that the trailer has on the overall range.

When You Wu was growing up in China, officials would shut off water to his community for half a day each week in the name of conservation. The experience contributed to Wu's interest in the scarcity of water, which he chose to study more in-depth after moving to the United States 10 years ago. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, now 28, has developed a robot that can find leaks in water pipes. As the robot moves with the water through a pipe, its "hands" touch the pipe and feel the suction forces caused by leaks, Wu told Business Insider.

Engineers at the University of British Columbia have developed a new ultrasound transducer, or probe, that could dramatically lower the cost of ultrasound scanners to as little as $100. Their patent-pending innovation—no bigger than a Band-Aid—is portable, wearable and can be powered by a smartphone.

Four years later, the patent landscape demonstrates that Alice has become a train wreck for innovation. To be successful, patent practitioners must show the PTO, courts, and Congress the importance of our clients’ innovations and explain why the type of technology should not dictate whether there is enforceability.

Another Silicon Valley mogul has come out in favor of universal basic income — and this one is actually putting his money where his mouth is to fund a study to see how it works, which makes his optimism on the subject all the more encouraging. Sam Altman is the 32-year-old president of Y Combinator, which has helped fund the likes of Airbnb, Reddit, and Dropbox.

A new lab-grown meat startup called Meatable is taking on the industry's key hurdle by coming up with a way to make truly slaughter-free meat without relying on cow fetus blood, or "serum." The Dutch startup partnered with Cambridge and uses proprietary stem cell technology for faster production.

A little after 7pm ET tonight, a Virgin Atlantic 747 will take off from Orlando, Florida, bound for London's Gatwick airport. This flight will be the first to use a blend of jet fuel and fuel made from industrial waste gas from a steel mill in China. This waste-gas fuel will displace some of the petroleum-based jet fuel that usually fills up a commercial jet's tanks.

This week, during an event at SXSW in Austin, a startup called ICON unveiled an amazing project, a house that could be 3-D printed for just $4,000. With the new method that the company has developed, they are able to print a 650-square-foot house out of cement in less than 24 hours. In contrast, it could take a human roughly 20 days to complete the same project.

If you walk in on someone exercising with with a VR headset on on, they might look pretty ridiculous. Perhaps you’d silently judge them for what might seem like random, awkward movements. If this describes you, a study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise may make you regret that snap judgment: The findings suggest that VR can actually play a powerful role in exercise performance, helping people push through physical discomfort.