Author Archives: Charles Brass

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has spotted an early yet tantalizing piece of evidence that an exoplanet some 120 light years away could be covered in a massive ocean — that’s possibly harboring life. The telescope detected a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS) — … Continued

Feeling anxious about going to school? A school district in Kumamoto, Japan thinks it might have a solution. According to the Japanese newspaper The Mainichi, the southwestern Japanese city will soon allow some students to attend class via telepresence robot in a … Continued

The chip’s components work in a way similar to synapses in human brains. Tech corporation IBM has unveiled a new “prototype” of an analog AI chip that works like a human brain and performs complex computations in various deep neural … Continued

Last year, Monash University scientists created the “DishBrain” – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes. The micro-electrode array at the heart of … Continued

Despite the brutal world around them, Gen Z has the unique potential to shape the future’s narrative through superior diversity, curiosity and data literacy. THERE HAS NEVER been a period in the history of humanity where a person’s expectations of the … Continued

Intel has announced the release of its new quantum research chip, Tunnel Falls, a 12-qubit silicon chip, and is making it available to the quantum research community. The company collaborates with the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) at the University … Continued

Australia now has a new roadmap to support our food systems to become more sustainable, productive and resilient for the future. Australia’s food systems must change now to remain sustainable in the future according to a new roadmap released today … Continued

EVERY BRAIN THINKS ABOUT THE FUTURE…BUT SOME BRAINS DO IT BETTER THAN OTHERS. From a neuroscience or brain-based perspective, foresight can be understood as the ability of the brain to imagine and anticipate possible future scenarios. The future thinking brain … Continued

The big idea A new type of material can learn and improve its ability to deal with unexpected forces thanks to a unique lattice structure with connections of variable stiffness, as described in a new paper by my colleagues and me … Continued

Some futurists try to foresee the future. Others attempt to shape it. Yet prolific science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov did both. Asimov not only invented the word “robotics,” his “Three Laws of Robotics,” first written as part of a … Continued

The idea that human desires are insatiable and that craving leads to misery is not new wisdom. It has ancient Hindu, Buddhist, and Greek roots and forms a keystone of most religions.  Lagom is the modern, Swedish twist on an … Continued

Ray Kurzweil is famous for making predictions that have actually become true. There’s no denying that we live in an era of rapid technological changes. New inventions are taking place in AI, machine learning, and nanotechnology. Over the last decade … Continued

Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in a high-tech gamble to make hydrogen clean, cheap and widely available. In Australia’s Outback, that starts with 10 million new solar panels. For eons this has been a quiet, unremarkable place. … Continued

For a small but growing network of countries, the world’s go-to metric of economic health is no longer fit for purpose. Mostly led by women, Finland, Iceland, Scotland, Wales and New Zealand are all members of the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership. … Continued

Over the past ten years, food trends have become the basic tool for many actors in the food industry: in executive offices as well as in departments of product development and innovation, in international corporations, SMEs and start-ups, in the gastronomy … Continued

“Mom answered questions from grieving relatives after they had watched her cremation.”   Marina Smith, a 87-year-old woman who passed away in June, was able to address the mourners at her own funeral in the UK — sort of, at … Continued