This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 11) – Singularity Hub

LONGEVITY

Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valleys Latest Wild Bet on Living ForeverAntonio Regalado | MIT Technology ReviewAltos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life. The new companyis recruiting a large cadre of university scientists with lavish salaries and the promise that they can pursue unfettered blue-sky research on how cells age and how to reverse that process.

The Worldview Changing Drugs Poised to Go MainstreamEd Prideaux | BBCThe psychedelic renaissance promises to change far more about our societies than simply the medical treatments that doctors prescribe. Unlike other drugs, psychedelics can radically alter the way people see the world. They also bring mystical and hallucinatory experiences that are at the edge of current scientific understanding. So, what might follow if psychedelics become mainstream?

A Single Laser Fired Through a Keyhole Can Expose Everything Inside a RoomAndrew Liszewski | GizmodoBeing able to see inside a closed room was a skill once reserved for superheroes. But researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Labhave expanded on a technique called non-line-of-sight imaging so that just asingle point of laser light entering a room can be used to see what physical objects might be inside.

One Labs Quest to Build Space-Time Out of Quantum ParticlesAdam Becker | QuantaFor over two decades, physicists have pondered how the fabric of space-time may emerge from some kind of quantum entanglement. In Monika Schleier-Smiths lab at Stanford University, the thought experiment is becoming real. By engineering highly entangled quantum systems in a tabletop experiment, Schleier-Smith hopes to produce something that looks and acts like the warped space-time predicted by Albert Einsteins theory of general relativity.

Our Flexible Processors Can Now Use Bendable RAMJohn Timmer | Ars TechnicaA few months ago, we brought news ofa bendable CPU, termed Plastic ARM, that was built of amorphous silicon on a flexible substrate. The use cases for something like this are extremely low-powered devices that can be embedded in clothing or slapped on the surface of irregular objects, allowing them to have a small amount of autonomous computing. [Now] researchers have built a form of flexible phase-change memory, which is closer in speed to normal RAM than flash memory but requires no power to maintain its state.

Lithium-ion Batteries Just Made a Big Leap in a Tiny ProductJames Temple | MIT Technology ReviewSilas novel anode materials packed far more energy into a new Whoop fitness wearable. Its a small device but potentially a big step forward for the battery field, where promising lab results often fail to translate to commercial success. Were big believers that hope and hype doesnt change the worldshipping does, [Sila CEO] Gene Berdichevsky says.

In the US, the AI Industry Risks Becoming Winner-Take-MostKhari Johnson | WiredA new study warns that the American AI industry is highly concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area and that this could prove to be a weakness in the long run. The Bay leads all other regions of the country in AI research and investment activity, accounting for about one-quarter of AI conference papers, patents, and companies in the US. Bay Area metro areas see levels of AI activity four times higher than other top cities for AI development.

Image Credit: Shubham Dhage /Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 11) - Singularity Hub