After debuting just shy of two years ago, Boston Dynamics has finally made its Spot robotic dog available for sale, but don’t expect to find a great Black Friday deal on this bot at Best Buy come Thanksgiving. The company hasn’t made them available to the average consumer just yet—only businesses that can promise an interesting application for the technology.
D-Wave today announced its next generation “Advantage” quantum computer system. It’ll pack a whopping 5,000 qubits and myriad improvements to processing speed and power. And the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will be among the first to have access.
According to a press release from D-Wave, the new Advantage system improves on the previous generation’s 2000Q model – which sports a paltry-by-comparison 2,048 qubits – in nearly every conceivable way:
Designed to speed the development of commercial quantum applications, the Advantage quantum system will power a new hardware and software platform that will accelerate and ease the delivery of quantum computing applications. Reflecting years of customer feedback, the platform captures users’ priorities and business requirements and will deliver significant performance gains and greater solution precision.
Boston Dynamics is announcing this morning that Spot, its versatile quadruped robot, is now for sale. The machine’s animal-like behavior regularly electrifies crowds at tech conferences, and like other Boston Dynamics’ robots, Spot is a YouTube sensation whose videos amass millions of views.
Now anyone interested in buying a Spot—or a pack of them—can go to the company’s website and submit an order form. But don’t pull out your credit card just yet. Spot may cost as much as a luxury car, and it is not really available to consumers. The initial sale, described as an “early adopter program,” is targeting businesses. Boston Dynamics wants to find customers in select industries and help them deploy Spots in real-world scenarios.
The real robotics revolution is not having robots take care of tasks but having them available to businesses as a service. And so another acronyms to represent the expanding world of as a service is added to today’s business vocabulary.
A unified theory of ageing, there is a vid and a paper linked within.
ALAMEDA, Calif.—( BUSINESS WIRE )—AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. (“AgeX”; NYSE American: AGE), a biotechnology company focused on therapeutics for human aging and regeneration, announced today that founder and CEO Michael D. West, Ph.D., and colleagues have authored a paper in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Regenerative Medicine on the theoretical foundation of the Company’s induced Tissue Regeneration (iTRTM) technology. The paper presents the work of the company’s scientists in describing a unified theory of aging and regeneration that could pave the way for the development of new therapies for a variety of age-related degenerative diseases and conditions.
“The longevity sector is advancing at an accelerating pace, but for the most part, without a consensus on the fundamental root causes of aging,” commented Dr. West. “We believe that it is now possible to collate the diverse observations about aging into a unified model. In the paper titled, ‘Toward a Unified Theory of Aging and Regeneration’ we outline such a theory that underlies the technological underpinnings of the company’s induced tissue regeneration (iTR) program.”
PARIS — The European Union’s equivalent of a foreign ministry is starting a new effort to promote the need for sustainable space operations, but that effort will not initially include any new regulation of European satellite operators.
Carine Claeys, special envoy for space and head of the Space Task Force for the European External Action Service, said in a Sept. 13 panel discussion at Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week that the Safety, Security and Sustainability of Outer Space (3SOS) public diplomacy initiative will promote “ethical conduct” in space amid concerns about orbital debris.
The acronym, she noted, has a second meaning. “It is also three times SOS,” she said, “to create the case and a sense of urgency.”
Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience — and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it “reality.” Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.
Check out more TED talks: http://www.ted.com
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