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Automation is progressing, widening its reach to fields we would have never considered as a target. Writing a book? No way, it takes a human, and a good one at that. Yet, this is what just happened. Springer Nature has published a Machine Generated summary on the status of the …

The French Supermarket chain FranPrix is testing robot shopping delivery in the XIII Arrondissement in Paris. Their plans are to start running the test first  with three robots in one of their stores that will be helping people with some movement impairment (hence having problems in moving stuff from the …

Kaggle is a website (and a company) dedicated to data scientists where data science projects are published to exchange experience. It is becoming addictive if you are in the field and this is further enhanced by competitions that are being set up challenging those passionate in leveraging data in finding new, …

Human Machine Symbiosis My personal bet, and the conclusion of the study carried out in 2018 by the IEEE-FDC Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative, is that by 2050 it will be difficult to separate living from non-living things. Notice that today there is still a debate going on among those considering …

Extended phenotype modification – cognitive Improving alertness, focus is clearly contributing to improving the cognitive capability of a person (coffee is still playing a big role in this… ) but it is not really changing the rules of the game. However, in the last few years we have started to …

Using 3D printers to create tissue is nothing new. It started with printing of skin and progressed with printing jaws and windpipes. In the labs, researchers are working on printing more complex tissues and organs. Bladder and liver have attracted the attention of researchers as well as the heart. The …

We are likely the only species that have the capability of extending our phenotype (at least in such a significant way). We learn, and what we learn change who we are. We learn from books, from experience and from being immersed in a specific culture. More recently we have created …

Augmentation through changes in the genotype is fraught with ethical issues both rooted in the lack of knowledge on the consequences and on general considerations, including the unfair advantage that may be gained by a restricted few (among these extremes there are plenty more!). In the coming decade(s) we can expect …

When I was young (that was long long time ago) materials existed in four states: gaseous, liquid, solid and plasma (with this latter reserved for physics buff). It turns out that materials may also exist in a state that is both solid and liquid. Andreas Hermann, at the University of …

Human Augmentation There are basically three ways to augment humans: Modifying the genotype Modifying the phenotype Modifying the extended phenotype As individual we inherit the genotype (the set of our genes contained in our chromosomes, each of us has 22 pairs of chromosomes –autosomes- plus the sex chromosomes, either X-X, …