News

Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet

Well done, Clippy: Microsoft has passed Google in market valuation for the first time in three years,CNBC reports. Microsoft is now valued at $753 billion, while Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is valued at $739 billion. While Amazon and Apple still top this particular list, Microsoft now rounds out the top three and gosh it just feels so good when rich people become richer.

China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data

GENEVA (Reuters) – China has overtaken the United States in healthy life expectancy at birth for the first time, according to World Health Organization data. Chinese newborns can look forward to 68.7 years of healthy life ahead of them, compared with 68.5 years for American babies, the data – which relates to 2016 – showed. American newborns can still expect to live longer overall – 78.5 years compared to China’s 76.4 – but the last 10 years of American lives are not expected to be healthy.

AI winter is well on its way

Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to the world of wonders of technological singularity (general AI). Many bets were made in 2014, 2015 and 2016 when still new boundaries were pushed, such as the Alpha Go etc. Companies such as Tesla were announcing through the mouths of their CEO’s that fully self driving car was very close, to the point that Tesla even started selling that option to customers [to be enabled by future software update].

China just invited the world to its space station

At a time when NASA and its partners are trying to decide how long to maintain the International Space Station, China has taken the significant step of inviting the world to its planned orbital station. The China Space Station, or CSS, could become operational as soon as 2022. Such an announcement represents potentially the greatest soft power threat of the last six decades to US and Russian dominance of spaceflight.

Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin go all in on moon settlements

Ingestible “bacteria on a chip” could help diagnose disease

This “bacteria-on-a-chip” approach combines sensors made from living cells with ultra-low-power electronics that convert the bacterial response into a wireless signal that can be read by a smartphone. In the new study, appearing in the May 24 online edition of Science, the researchers created sensors that respond to heme, a component of blood, and showed that they work in pigs. They also designed sensors that can respond to a molecule that is a marker of inflammation.

Americans Less Trusting of Self-Driving Safety Following High-Profile Accidents

Americans are less trusting of self-driving cars following two deadly accidents involving autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, with half of U.S. adults considering those automobiles less safe than human drivers, according to a new poll. A Morning Consult survey conducted March 29-April 1 among a national sample of 2,202 adults found that 27 percent of respondents said self-driving cars are safer than human drivers, while 50 percent said autonomous vehicles are less safe. Eight percent said the automobiles are on par with human drivers when it comes to safety.

Making driverless cars change lanes more like human drivers do

The Internet of Trash: IoT Has a Looming E-Waste Problem

The US government wants to start charging for the best free satellite data on earth