Transhumanismus

New estimates suggest it might be 20 times easier to crack cryptography with quantum computers than we thought—but don’t panic.

Will quantum computers crack cryptographic codes and cause a global security disaster? You might certainly get that impression from a lot of news coverage, the latest of which reports new estimates that it might be 20 times easier to crack such codes than previously thought.

Cryptography underpins the security of almost everything in cyberspace, from WiFi to banking to digital currencies such as bitcoin. Whereas it was previously estimated that it would take a quantum computer with 20 million qubits (quantum bits) eight hours to crack the popular RSA algorithm (named after its inventors, Rivest–Shamir–Adleman), the new estimate reckons this could be done with 1 million qubits.

By weakening cryptography, quantum computing would present a serious threat to our everyday cybersecurity. So is a quantum-cryptography apocalypse imminent?

Quantum computers exist today but are highly limited in their capabilities. There is no single concept of a quantum computer, with several different design approaches being taken to their development.

There are major technological barriers to be overcome before any of those approaches become useful, but a great deal of money is being spent, so we can expect significant technological improvements in the coming years.

For the most commonly deployed cryptographic tools, quantum computing will have little impact. Symmetric cryptography, which encrypts the bulk of our data today (and does not include the RSA algorithm), can easily be strengthened to protect against quantum computers.

Quantum computing might have more significant impact on public-key cryptography, which is used to set up secure connections online. For example, this is used to support online shopping or secure messaging, traditionally using the RSA algorithm, though an alternative called elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman is growing popular.

Public-key cryptography is also used to create digital signatures such as those used in bitcoin transactions and uses yet another type of cryptography called the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm.

If a sufficiently powerful and reliable quantum computer ever exists, processes that are currently only theoretical might become capable of breaking those public-key cryptographic tools. RSA algorithms are potentially more vulnerable because of the type of mathematics they use, though the alternatives could be vulnerable too.

Such theoretical processes themselves will inevitably improve over time, as the paper about RSA algorithms is the latest to demonstrate.

What We Don’t Know

What remains extremely uncertain is both the destination and timelines of quantum computing development. We don’t really know what quantum computers will ever be capable of doing in practice.

Expert opinion is highly divided on when we can expect serious quantum computing to emerge. A minority seem to believe a breakthrough is imminent. But an equally significant minority think it will never happen. Most experts believe it a future possibility, but prognoses range from between 10 and 20 years to well beyond that.

And will such quantum computers be cryptographically relevant? Essentially, nobody knows. Like most of the concerns about quantum computers in this area, the RSA paper is about an attack that may or may not work and requires a machine that might never be built (the most powerful quantum computers currently have just over 1,000 qubits, and they’re still very error-prone).

From a cryptographic perspective, however, such quantum computing uncertainty is arguably immaterial. Security involves worst-case thinking and future-proofing. So it is wisest to assume that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer might one day exist. Even if one is 20 years away, this is relevant because some data that we encrypt today might still require protection 20 years from now.

Experience also shows that in complex systems such as financial networks, upgrading cryptography can take a long time to complete. We therefore need to act now.

What We Should Do

The good news is that most of the hard thinking has already been done. In 2016, the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) launched an international competition to design new post-quantum cryptographic tools that are believed to be secure against quantum computers.

In 2024, NIST published an initial set of standards that included a post-quantum key exchange mechanism and several post-quantum digital signature schemes. To become secure against a future quantum computer, digital systems need to replace current public-key cryptography with new post-quantum mechanisms. They also need to ensure that existing symmetric cryptography is supported by sufficiently long symmetric keys (many existing systems already are).

Yet my core message is don’t panic. Now is the time to evaluate the risks and decide on future courses of action. The UK’s National Cyber Security Center has suggested one such timeline, primarily for large organizations and those supporting critical infrastructure such as industrial control systems.

This envisages a 2028 deadline for completing a cryptographic inventory and establishing a post-quantum migration plan, with upgrade processes to be completed by 2035. This decade-long timeline suggests that NCSC experts don’t see a quantum-cryptography apocalypse coming anytime soon.

For the rest of us, we simply wait. In due course, if deemed necessary, the likes of our web browsers, WiFi, mobile phones and messaging apps will gradually become post-quantum secure either through security upgrades (never forget to install them) or steady replacement of technology.

We will undoubtedly read more stories about breakthroughs in quantum computing and upcoming cryptography apocalypses as big technology companies compete for the headlines. Cryptographically relevant quantum computing might well arrive one day, most likely far into the future. If and when it does, we’ll surely be ready.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Is a Quantum-Cryptography Apocalypse Imminent? appeared first on SingularityHub.

It’s a crucial step toward the dream of printable organs on demand.

Bioprinting holds the promise of engineering organs on demand. Now, researchers have solved one of the major bottlenecks—how to create the fine networks of blood vessels needed to keep organs alive.

Thanks to rapid advances in additive manufacturing and tissue engineering, it’s now possible to build biological structures out of living cells in much the same way you might 3D print a model plane. And there are hopes this approach could one day be used to print new organs for the more than 100,000 people in the US currently waiting for a donor.

However, reproducing the complex networks of ultra-fine blood vessels that keep living tissues alive has proven challenging. This has restricted bioprinting to smaller structures where essential nutrients and oxygen can simply diffuse into the tissue from the surrounding environment.

Now though, researchers from Stanford University have developed new software to rapidly design a blood-vessel, or vascular, network for a wide range of tissues. And in a paper in Science, they show that bioprinted tissues containing these networks significantly boosted cell survival.

“Our ability to produce human-scale biomanufactured organs is limited by inadequate vascularization,” write the authors. “This platform enables the rapid, scalable vascular model generation and fluid physics analysis for biomanufactured tissues that are necessary for future scale-up and production.”

To date, tissue engineers have mostly used simple lattice-shaped vascular networks to support the living structures they design. These work for tissues with a low density of cells but can’t meet the demands of denser structures that more closely mimic real tissues and organs.

Existing computational approaches can generate more realistic vascular networks. But they are extremely computationally expensive—often taking days to produce models for more complex tissues—and limited in the types of tissues they work with, says the Stanford team.

In contrast, their new approach generates organ-scale vascular network models for more than 200 engineered and natural tissue structures. Crucially, it was more than 230 times faster than the best previous methods. They did this by combining four algorithms, each responsible for solving a different problem.

Typically, the algorithms used to create these kinds of structures recalculate key parameters across the entire network when each new section is added. Instead, the Stanford team used an algorithm that freezes and saves values for all the unchanged branches at each step, significantly reducing the computational workload.

They then added an algorithm that breaks the 3D structure into smaller, easier-to-model chunks, which made it simpler to work with awkward shapes. Finally, they combined this with a collision-avoidance algorithm to prevent branching vessels from crossing paths and another algorithm to ensure each vessel is always connected to another one to make sure the system is a closed loop.

The researchers used this approach to create efficient vascular networks for more than 200 models of real tissue structures. They also 3D printed models of some simpler networks to test their physical properties and even bioprinted one of these and showed it could dramatically improve the viability of living cells over a seven-day experiment.

“Democratizing virtual representation of vasculature networks could potentially transform biofabrication by allowing evaluation of perfusion efficiency prior to production rather than through a resource-intensive trial-and-error method,” wrote the authors of an accompanying perspective article in Science about the new approach.

But they also noted it’s a big leap from simulation to real life, and it will probably require a combination of computational approaches and experiments to create biologically feasible vascular trees. Still, the approach is a significant advance toward the dream of printable organs on demand.

The post Scientists Can Now Design Intricate Networks of Blood Vessels for 3D-Printed Organs appeared first on SingularityHub.

When we talk about pioneers of computer science, names like Turing, von Neumann, and Shannon often dominate the conversation. But Edsger W. Dijkstra — though far less publicly known — was one of the true intellectual giants who laid the foundation for modern computing. His work quietly shapes much of our digital world today. And […]

When most people hear the name Ted Kaczynski, they immediately think of the Unabomber — the domestic terrorist who waged a deadly bombing campaign for nearly two decades. But Kaczynski’s story is more complicated, more disturbing, and, for those of us interested in the future of technology and the singularity, uncomfortably relevant. Was Ted Kaczynski […]

Artificial Intelligence

Meta Is Creating a New AI Lab to Pursue ‘Superintelligence’Cade Metz and Mike Isaac | The New York Times

“Meta is preparing to unveil a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing ‘superintelligence,’ a hypothetical AI system that exceeds the powers of the human brain, as the tech giant jockeys to stay competitive in the technology race, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s plans.”

Artificial Intelligence

Why Superintelligent AI Isn’t Taking Over Anytime SoonChristopher Mims | The Wall Street Journal

“A primary requirement for being a leader in AI these days is to be a herald of the impending arrival of our digital messiah: superintelligent AI. …Before you get nervous about all the times you were rude to Alexa, know this: A growing cohort of researchers who build, study, and use modern AI aren’t buying all that talk.”

Computing

IBM Aims to Build the World’s First Large-Scale, Error-Corrected Quantum Computer by 2028Sophia Chen | MIT Technology Review

“The company says it has cracked the code for error correction and is building a modular machine [called Starling] in New York state. …If Starling achieves this, IBM will have solved arguably the biggest technical hurdle facing the industry today to beat competitors including Google, Amazon Web Services, and smaller startups such as Boston-based QuEra and PsiQuantum of Palo Alto, California.”

Robotics

Boston Dynamics Robots Dance to ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ for ‘America’s Got Talent’ AuditionAmanda Silberling | TechCrunch

“Their performance was impressive enough to earn four ‘yes’ votes from the judges—but one of the five robots experienced some stage fright, perhaps, and shut down in the middle of the routine. But the show must go on, so nevertheless, the four other robots persisted.”

Tech

‘AI Native’ Startups Pass $15 Billion in Annualized RevenueAmir Efrati | The Information

“Annualized revenue at ‘AI native’ companies selling artificial intelligence models or apps has passed $15 billion just two and a half years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, according to The Information’s Generative AI Database. While that’s not the same as $15 billion in actual revenue, it’s still an unprecedented haul for such a short time period and means that, collectively, the companies generated about $1.25 billion of revenue in May alone.”

Robotics

Waymo Rides Cost More Than Uber, Lyft—and People Are Paying AnywaySean O’Kane | TechCrunch

“At peak hours, Obi found Waymo’s average price to be about $11 more expensive than a Lyft and nearly $9.50 pricier than an Uber. ‘I didn’t expect consumers being willing to pay up to $10 more,’ Anburajan said. ‘I think [that] speaks to a real sense of excitement for technology, novelty, and a real preference to sometimes be in the car without a driver.'”

Artificial Intelligence

They Asked an AI Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.Kashmir Hill | The New York Times

“People who say they were drawn into ChatGPT conversations about conspiracies, cabals, and claims of AI sentience include a sleepless mother with an 8-week-old baby, a federal employee whose job was on the DOGE chopping block, and an AI-curious entrepreneur.”

Future

Lab-Grown Salmon Gets FDA ApprovalDominic Preston | The Verge

“The FDA has issued its first ever approval on a safety consultation for lab-grown fish. That makes Wildtype only the fourth company to get approval from the regulator to sell cell-cultivated animal products, and its cultivated salmon is now available to order from one Portland restaurant.”

Artificial Intelligence

Meta’s New World Model Lets Robots Manipulate Objects in Environments They’ve Never Encountered BeforeBen Dickson | VentureBeat

“Humans develop physical intuition early in life by observing their surroundings. If you see a ball thrown, you instinctively know its trajectory and can predict where it will land. V-JEPA 2 learns a similar ‘world model,’ which is an AI system’s internal simulation of how the physical world operates.”

Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT Just Got Absolutely Wrecked at Chess, Losing to a 1970s-Era Atari 2600Omar Gallaga | CNET

“OpenAI’s ChatGPT has some major AI chatbot competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Now add to that list the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer’s experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot.”

Space

Isaacman’s Bold Plan for NASA: Nuclear Ships, Seven-Crew Dragons, Accelerated ArtemisEric Berger | Ars Technica

“When I spoke with Isaacman this week, I didn’t want to rehash the political melee. I preferred to talk about his plan. After all, he had six months to look under the hood of NASA, identify the problems that were holding the space agency back, and release its potential in this new era of spaceflight.”

Tech

Google and US Experts Join on AI Hurricane ForecastsWilliam J. Broad | The New York Times

“DeepMind, a Google company based in London, announced on Thursday that it was supplying the government forecasters with a newly enhanced variety of its weather forecasting models. Specialized to focus on hurricanes, the model tracks a storm’s development for up to 15 days, predicting not only its path but also its strength, an ability that earlier AI models lacked.”

Artificial Intelligence

With the Launch of o3-Pro, Let’s Talk About What AI ‘Reasoning’ Actually DoesBenj Edwards | Ars Technica

“As we consider the industry’s stated trajectory toward artificial general intelligence and even superintelligence, the evidence so far suggests that simply scaling up current approaches or adding more ‘thinking’ tokens may not bridge the gap between statistical pattern recognition and what might be called generalist algorithmic reasoning.”

Future

The Newspaper That Hired ChatGPTMatteo Wong | The Atlantic

“Several major publications, including The Atlantic have entered into corporate partnerships with OpenAI and other AI firms. Any number of experiments have ensued—publishers have used the software to help translate work into different languages, draft headlines, and write summaries or even articles. But perhaps no publication has gone further than the Italian newspaper Il Foglio.”

Future

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI ToolsIsabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt | The Wall Street Journal

“The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers. Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 14) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Using the new system, Casey Harrell can emphasize words and intonations in real time—and sing tunes.

At the age of 45, Casey Harrell lost his voice to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, the disorder eats away at muscle-controlling nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Symptoms begin with weakening muscles, uncontrollable twitching, and difficulty swallowing. Eventually patients lose control of muscles in the tongue, throat, and lips, robbing them of their ability to speak.

Unlike paralyzed patients, Harrell could still produce sounds seasoned caretakers could understand, but they weren’t intelligible in a simple conversation. Now, thanks to an AI-guided brain implant, he can once again “speak” using a computer-generated voice that sounds like his.

The system, developed by researchers at the University of California, Davis, has almost no detectable delay when translating his brain activity into coherent speech. Rather than producing a monotone synthesized voice, the system can detect intonations—for example, a question versus a statement—and emphasize a word. It also translates brain activity encoding nonsense words such as “hmm” or “eww,” making the generated voice sound natural.

“With instantaneous voice synthesis, neuroprosthesis users will be able to be more included in a conversation. For example, they can interrupt, and people are less likely to interrupt them accidentally,” said study author Sergey Stavisky in a press release.

The study comes hot on the heels of another AI method that decodes a paralyzed woman’s thoughts into speech within a second. Previous systems took nearly half a minute—more than long enough to disrupt normal conversation. Together, the two studies showcase the power of AI to decipher the brain’s electrical chatter and convert it into speech in real time.

In Harrell’s case, the training was completed in the comfort of his home. Although the system required some monitoring and tinkering, it paves the way for a commercially available product for those who have lost the ability to speak.

“This is the holy grail in speech BCIs [brain-computer interfaces],” Christian Herff at Maastricht University to Nature, who was not involved in the study, told Nature.

Listening In

Scientists have long sought to restore the ability to speak for those who have lost it, whether due to injury or disease.

One strategy is to tap into the brain’s electrical activity. When we prepare to say something, the brain directs muscles in the throat, tongue, and lips to form sounds and words. By listening in on its electrical chatter, it’s possible to decode intended speech. Algorithms stitch together neural data and generate words and sentences as either text or synthesized speech.

The process may sound straightforward. But it took scientists years to identify the most reliable brain regions from which to collect speech-related activity. Even then, the lag time from thought to output—whether text or synthesized speech—has been long enough to make conversation awkward.

Then there are the nuances. Speech isn’t just about producing audible sentences. How you say something also matters. Intonation tells us if the speaker is asking a question, stating their needs, joking, or being sarcastic. Emphasis on individual words highlights the speaker’s mindset and intent. These aspects are especially important for tonal languages—such as Chinese—where a change in tone or pitch for the same “word” can have wildly different meanings. (“Ma,” for example, can mean mom, numb, horse, or cursing, depending on the intonation.)

Talk to Me

Harrell is part of the BrainGate2 clinical trial, a long-standing project seeking to restore lost abilities using brain implants. He enrolled in the trial as his ALS symptoms progressed. Although he could still vocalize, his speech was hard to understand and required expert listeners from his care team to translate. This was his primary mode of communication. He also had to learn to speak slower to make his residual speech more intelligible.

Five years ago, Harrell had four 64-microelectrode implants inserted into the left precentral gyrus of his brain—a region controlling multiple brain functions, including coordinating speech.

“We are recording from the part of the brain that’s trying to send these commands to the muscles. And we are basically listening into that, and we’re translating those patterns of brain activity into a phoneme—like a syllable or the unit of speech—and then the words they’re trying to say,” said Stavisky at the time.

In just two training sessions, Harrell had the potential to say 125,000 words—a vocabulary large enough for everyday use. The system translated his neural activity into a voice synthesizer that mimicked his voice. After more training, the implant achieved 97.5 percent accuracy as he went about his daily life.

“The first time we tried the system, he cried with joy as the words he was trying to say correctly appeared on-screen. We all did,” said Stavisky.

In the new study, the team sought to make generated speech even more natural with less delay and more personality. One of the hardest parts of real-time voice synthesis is not knowing when and how the person is trying to speak—or their intended intonation. “I am fine” has vastly different meanings depending on tone.

The team captured Harrell’s brain activity as he attempted to speak a sentence shown on a screen. The electrical spikes were filtered to remove noise in one millisecond segments and fed into a decoder. Like the Rosetta Stone, the algorithm mapped specific neural features to words and pitch, which were played back to Harrell through a voice synthesizer with just a 25-millisecond lag—roughly the time it takes for a person to hear their own voice, wrote the team.

Rather than decoding phonemes or words, the AI captured Harrell’s intent to make sounds every 10 milliseconds, allowing him to eventually say words not in a dictionary, like “hmm” or “eww.” He could spell out words and respond to open-ended questions, telling the researchers that the synthetic voice made him “happy” and that it felt like “his real voice.”

The team also recorded brain activity as Harrell attempted to speak the same set of sentences as either statements or questions, the latter having an increased pitch. All four electrode arrays recorded a neural fingerprint of activity patterns when the sentence was spoken as a question.

The system, once trained, could also detect emphasis. Harrell was asked to stress each word individually in the sentence, “I never said she stole my money,” which can have multiple meanings. His brain activity ramped up before saying the emphasized word, which the algorithm captured and used to guide the synthesized voice. In another test, the system picked up multiple pitches as he tried to sing different melodies.

Raise Your Voice

The AI isn’t perfect. Volunteers could understand the output roughly 60 percent of the time—a far cry from the near perfect brain-to-text system Harrell is currently using. But the new AI brings individual personality to synthesized speech, which usually produces a monotone voice. Deciphering speech in real-time also lets the person interrupt or object during a conversation, making the experience feel more natural.

“We don’t always use words to communicate what we want. We have interjections. We have other expressive vocalizations that are not in the vocabulary,” study author Maitreyee   Wairagkar told Nature.

Because the AI is trained on sounds, not English vocabulary, it could be adapted to other languages, especially tonal ones like Chinese. The team is also looking to increase the system’s accuracy by placing more electrodes in people who have lost their speech due to stroke or neurodegenerative diseases.

“The results of this research provide hope for people who want to talk but can’t…This kind of technology could be transformative for people living with paralysis,” said study author David Brandman.

The post A Man With ALS Can Speak and Sing Again Thanks to a Brain Implant and AI-Synthesized Voice appeared first on SingularityHub.

Fervo is using technology from the oil and gas industry to unlock vast stores of geothermal power under our feet.

Between power-hungry AI data centers, domestic manufacturing growth, and electric vehicles, US electricity demand is set to soar in coming years, and utilities aren’t yet sure where the supply to meet this growth will come from. Geothermal power is increasingly looking like a viable option thanks to companies deploying next-generation technologies.

One of these is Fervo Energy, which announced $206 million in funding this week, adding to the $255 million they secured earlier this year. The new funding round was led by Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, part of Bill Gates’ climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Fervo’s approach, which uses technologies developed for the oil and gas industry, could help push geothermal’s share of total US electricity supply from its current 0.4 percent to 10 percent or greater.

Vertical Drilling for Water

Conventional geothermal works by drilling vertical wells into underground reservoirs of hot water or steam. Wells are up to 10,000 feet (or about 3 kilometers/1.9 miles) deep—and those are the easy ones. The hot water accessed through vertical wells is brought to the surface, where it’s turned into steam that’s used to spin turbines.

A major advantage of geothermal over solar and wind is that it’s not limited by intermittency; the rocks in the Earth’s crust are hot 24/7. This means geothermal is a reliable source of baseload power, and tech companies including Meta and Google have jumped on the geothermal bandwagon.

However, easily accessible underground reservoirs only exist in a handful of geologically active spots around the globe, like Iceland, Kenya, and New Zealand. These countries are positioned over sections of the Earth’s crust that have high heat flow and permeable rock relatively close to the surface, as they’re close to fault lines and areas where there’s volcanic activity.

Such areas exist in the western US as well, namely in California, Nevada, Utah, and Hawaii. In fact, the US leads the world in installed geothermal generating capacity—yet we’ve tapped less than 0.7 percent of our geothermal resources. The majority of those resources can only be accessed via enhanced geothermal technology—and that’s where Fervo comes in.

Horizontal Drilling for Heat

Rather than only drilling vertically to access naturally occurring reservoirs of hot water, Fervo and other enhanced geothermal companies also drill horizontally to create artificial reservoirs in hot, dry rock. After drilling vertically to depths of about 8,000 feet, they bore horizontal tunnels then pump water through them, essentially creating artificial reservoirs. Heat from the rock transfers to the water, which is brought to the surface and used to generate electricity. The water is typically recycled and pumped back into the ground again.

Besides putting more surface area in contact with geothermal fluid and maximizing heat transfer, horizontal drilling allows multiple wells to be drilled from a single surface location. This means there’s a smaller surface footprint and less impact on the environment surrounding the wells.

Horizontal drilling was developed for oil and gas production to find new fossil fuel deposits. Fervo’s cofounder, Tim Latimer, started his career in the oil and gas industry, but after a 2015 flood in his home city of Houston, he realized the urgency of the climate crisis and decided to find a way to apply fossil fuel technologies to renewable energy.

Horizontal drilling isn’t the only technology Latimer repurposed for geothermal. Fervo installs fiber-optic cables in its wells to monitor real-time data on flow, temperature, and performance. They also use an advanced drill bit technology called polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC). PDC contains lab-grown diamond, one of the hardest and most resilient materials in existence. The drill bits can cut through harder types of rock, do so faster, and go longer without wearing down. In addition, Latimer said in an interview with Time Magazine, “One of the things that we drove forward was a way of pumping fluid down while we’re drilling that cools your drilling system more efficiently than in an oil and gas operation.”

Fervo set multiple drilling performance records with its recent completion of an appraisal well in southwest Utah (part of the larger project the company will use its new funding on): The 15,765-foot-deep Sugarloaf well will reach a temperature of 520 degrees Fahrenheit and was completed in 16 drilling days. The company says that’s a 79 percent reduction in drilling time compared to the US Department of Energy baseline for ultradeep geothermal wells.

Beyond the Low-Hanging Fruit

Fervo’s technology is making it feasible to develop geothermal power plants in areas where they wouldn’t have been possible before, mainly because the economics wouldn’t have made sense. The company plans to use the $206 million in new funding to keep building out its Cape Station plant in Beaver County, Utah. Phase I of the project plans to deliver 100 megawatts of power to the grid starting in 2026, and Phase II will add another 400 megawatts by 2028. The site has received permitting approval to expand up to two gigawatts.

Fervo ultimately has ambitions to go far beyond those two gigawatts—and the resources to do so definitely exist. A US Geological Survey assessment published last month says geothermal energy in the Great Basin alone, which spans Nevada and neighboring states, could produce electricity equal to one-tenth of the current US power supply.

“Principally, there’s virtually an unlimited amount of geothermal energy,” Latimer said. “The world is really big, and the world is really hot. We’ve got billions of years of energy under our feet. It’s all a question about how much you can access economically.”

The post Geothermal Unicorn Fervo Energy Is Building a Massive Next-Gen Plant in Utah appeared first on SingularityHub.

SYNESTHETES

Tired: Listening to music.
Wired: Feeling the music.

A mind-bending new suit straps onto your torso, ankles and wrists, then uses actuators to translate audio into vivid vibration. The result: a new way for everyone to experience music, according to its creators. That’s especially exciting for people who have trouble hearing.

THE FEELIES

The Music: Not Impossible suit was created by design firm Not Impossible Labs and electronics manufacturing company Avnet. The suit can create sensations to go with pre-recorded music, or a “Vibrotactile DJ” can adjust the sensations in real time during a live music event.”

Billboard writer Andy Hermann tried the suit out, and it sounds like a trip.

“Sure enough, a pulse timed to a kickdrum throbs into my ankles and up through my legs,” he wrote. “Gradually, [the DJ] brings in other elements: the tap of a woodblock in my wrists, a bass line massaging my lower back, a harp tickling a melody across my chest.”

MORE ACCESSIBLE

To show the suit off, Not Impossible and Avnet organized a performance this past weekend by the band Greta Van Fleet at the Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. The company allowed attendees to don the suits. Mandy Harvey, a deaf musician who stole the show on America’s Got Talent last year, talked about what the performance meant to her in a video Avnet posted to Facebook.

“It was an unbelievable experience to have an entire audience group who are all experiencing the same thing at the same time,” she said. “For being a deaf person, showing up at a concert, that never happens. You’re always excluded.”

READ MORE: Not Impossible Labs, Zappos Hope to Make Concerts More Accessible for the Deaf — and Cooler for Everyone [Billboard]

More on accessible design: New Tech Allows Deaf People To Sense Sounds

The post Make Music A Full Body Experience With A “Vibro-Tactile” Suit appeared first on Futurism.

IN THE FEELS

Today’s prosthetics can give people with missing limbs the ability to do almost anything — run marathons, climb mountains, you name it. But when it comes to letting those people feel what they could with a natural limb, the devices, however mechanically sophisticated, invariably fall short.

Now researchers have created a “synthetic skin” with a sense of touch that not only matches the sensitivity of natural skin, but in some cases even exceeds it. Now the only challenge is getting that information back into the wearer’s nervous system.

UNDER PRESSURE

When something presses against your skin, your nerves receive and transmit that pressure to the brain in the form of electrical signals.

To mimic that biological process, the researchers suspended a flexible polymer, dusted with magnetic particles, over a magnetic sensor. The effect is like a drum: Applying even the tiniest amount of pressure to the membrane causes the magnetic particles to move closer to the sensors, and they transmit this movement electronically.

The research, which could open the door to super-sensitive prosthetics, was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

SPIDEY SENSE TINGLING

Tests shows that the skin can sense extremely subtle pressure, such as a blowing breeze, dripping water, or crawling ants. In some cases, the synthetic skin responded to pressures so gentle that natural human skin wouldn’t be able to detect them.

While the sensing ability of this synthetic skin is remarkable, the team’s research doesn’t address how to transmit the signals to the human brain. Other scientists are working on that, though, so eventually this synthetic skin could give prosthetic wearers the ability to feel forces even their biological-limbed friends can’t detect.

READ MORE: A Skin-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Smart Prosthetics [Science Robotics]

More on synthetic skin: Electronic Skin Lets Amputees Feel Pain Through Their Prosthetics

The post “Synthetic Skin” Could Give Prosthesis Users a Superhuman Sense of Touch appeared first on Futurism.

BRAIN BOOST

There’s a gadget that some say can help alleviate depression and enhance creativity. All you have to do is place a pair of electrodes on your scalp and the device will deliver electrical current to your brain. It’s readily available on Amazon or you can even make your own.

But in a new paper published this week in the Creativity Research Journal, psychologists at Georgetown University warned that the practice is spreading before we have a good understanding of its health effects, especially since consumers are already buying and building unregulated devices to shock them. They also cautioned that the technique, which scientists call transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), could have adverse effects on the brains of young people.

“There are multiple potential concerns with DIY-ers self-administering electric current to their brains, but this use of tES may be inevitable,” said co-author Adam Green in a press release. “And, certainly, anytime there is risk of harm with a technology, the scariest risks are those associated with kids and the developing brain”

SHOCK JOCK

Yes, there’s evidence that tES can help patients with depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, and other serious conditions, the Georgetown researchers acknowledge.

But that’s only when it’s administered by a trained health care provider. When administering tES at home, people might ignore safety directions, they wrote, or their home-brewed devices could deliver unsafe amounts of current. And because it’s not yet clear what effects of tES might be on the still-developing brains of young people, the psychologists advise teachers and parents to resist the temptation to use the devices to encourage creativity among children.

The takeaway: tES is likely here to stay, and it may provide real benefits. But for everyone’s sake, consumer-oriented tES devices should be regulated to protect users.

READ MORE: Use of electrical brain stimulation to foster creativity has sweeping implications [Eurekalert]

More on transcranial electrical stimulation: DARPA’s New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40%

The post People Are Zapping Their Brains to Boost Creativity. Experts Have Concerns. appeared first on Futurism.

MIND CONTROL

The military is making it easier than ever for soldiers to distance themselves from the consequences of war. When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the U.S. and drop bombs in the Middle East.

Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required.

Earlier this month, DARPA, the military’s research division, unveiled a project that it had been working on since 2015: technology that grants one person the ability to pilot multiple planes and drones with their mind.

“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said, according to Defense One.

THE SINGULARITY

Sanchez may have unveiled this research effort at a “Trajectory of Neurotechnology” session at DARPA’s 60th anniversary event, but his team has been making steady progress for years. Back in 2016, a volunteer equipped with a brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pilot an aircraft in a flight simulator while keeping two other planes in formation — all using just his thoughts, a spokesperson from DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office told Futurism.

In 2017, Copeland was able to steer a plane through another simulation, this time receiving haptic feedback — if the plane needed to be steered in a certain direction, Copeland’s neural implant would create a tingling sensation in his hands.

NOT QUITE MAGNETO

There’s a catch. The DARPA spokesperson told Futurism that because this BCI makes use of electrodes implanted in and on the brain’s sensory and motor cortices, experimentation has been limited to volunteers with varying degrees of paralysis. That is: the people steering these simulated planes already had brain electrodes, or at least already had reason to undergo surgery.

To try and figure out how to make this technology more accessible and not require surgical placement of a metal probe into people’s brains, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. The plan is to make a device with similar capabilities, but it’ll look more like an EEG cap that the pilot can take off once a mission is done.

“The envisioned N3 system would be a tool that the user could wield for the duration of a task or mission, then put aside,” said Al Emondi, head of N3, according to the spokesperson. “I don’t like comparisons to a joystick or keyboard because they don’t reflect the full potential of N3 technology, but they’re useful for conveying the basic notion of an interface with computers.”

READ MORE: It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm [Defense One]

More on DARPA research: DARPA Is Funding Research Into AI That Can Explain What It’s “Thinking”

The post Military Pilots Can Control Three Jets at Once via a Neural Implant appeared first on Futurism.

ONE IN A MILLION TEN

Today, about 10 people on Earth have bladders they weren’t born with. No, they didn’t receive bladder transplants — doctors grew these folks new bladders using the recipients’ own cells.

On Tuesday, the BBC published a report on the still-nascent procedure of transplanting lab-grown bladders. In it, the publication talks to Luke Massella, who underwent the procedure more than a decade ago. Massella was born with spina bifida, which carries with it a risk of damage to the bladder and urinary tract. Now, he lives a normal life, he told the BBC.

“I was kind of facing the possibility I might have to do dialysis [blood purification via machine] for the rest of my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to play sports, and have the normal kid life with my brother.”

All that changed after Anthony Atala, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, decided he was going to grow a new bladder for Massella.

ONE NEW BLADDER, COMING UP!

To do that, Atala first removed a small piece of Massella’s own bladder. He then removed cells from this portion of bladder and multiplied them in a petri dish. Once he had enough cells, he coated a scaffold with the cells and placed the whole thing in a temperature controlled, high oxygen environment. After a few weeks, the lab-created bladder was ready for transplantation into Massella.

“So it was pretty much like getting a bladder transplant, but from my own cells, so you don’t have to deal with rejection,” said Massella.

The number of people with lab-grown bladders might still be low enough to count on your fingers, but researchers are making huge advances in growing everything from organs to skin in the lab. Eventually, we might reach a point when we can replace any body part we need to with a perfect biological match that we built ourselves.

READ MORE: “A New Bladder Made From My Cells Gave Me My Life Back” [BBC]

More on growing organs: The FDA Wants to Expedite Approval of Regenerative Organ Therapies

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