Lifeboat Foundation

Marines will control a head-up display with a gun-mounted mouse.

With the phone, predictions now feel relatively easy. But we’re setting off on our next five years, and we’re looking beyond the phone. What happens next? And what does it mean for how we live in the future? For our anniversary, we asked 10 of the smartest, most interesting, most influential people we know to describe our lives in 2021 — and the many ways technology, culture, science, and transportation will change. We’ll be running these interviews all through November, and they paint an ambitious, dynamic vision of the future.

We’ll discuss how in the near future, many Americans may never drive again. We’ll talk to groundbreaking scientists about CRISPR, a revolutionary method of editing genes that’s already led to incredible breakthroughs. We’ll see how for many employees, technology may make geography irrelevant, and how social media will usher in a new age of social activism. More women will finally find their rightful place in boardrooms, and by 2021, artificial and human intelligence will exist in something called “symbiotic autonomy.”

It’s tempting to look backwards on an anniversary. But The Verge is about looking ahead, and we would much rather spend our fifth birthday imagining the incredible (and occasionally terrifying) promise of the future. We’ve collected some excellent guides to help us along the way — we hope you join us.

In groundbreaking work on morality-proofing AI, researchers at MIT are designing neural networks that will provide explanations for why they reached a conclusion.

Credits: Futurism

The bio-inspired robot sweats for the same reason we do.

According to the tender documentation, Roscosmos is ready to allocate more than 264 million rubles (about $4 million) for this work.

The winner of the tender is expected to be announced on October 28.

As of now, only the Keldysh Research Center has submitted its bid for this work.

Devices that autonomously regulate blood sugar levels are in the final stages before widespread availability.

In Brief:

Our life experiences may be passed on to our children and our children’s children — and now scientists report that they have discovered that this inheritance can be turned on or off.

Epigenetics is the study of inherited changes in gene expression…changes that are inherited, but they are not inherent to our DNA. For instance, life experiences, which aren’t directly coded in human DNA, can actually be passed on to children. Studies have shown that survivors of traumatic events may have effects in subsequent generations.

Continue reading “Memories Can Be Inherited, and Scientists May Have Just Figured out How” »

A little more scary than cute.