Archive (Page 1 of 3)

Holistic Heat Management

Machines gen­er­ate waste heat when they do work for us. And this year, sev­en bil­lion of us will use twenty-five tril­lion kilo­watt hours of elec­tric­i­ty. An awful lot of that will end up as waste heat. So, we treat waste heat as a prob­lem. We see it as a chal­lenge to design how we can man­age it. We don’t think of it as a resource. If we thought of it as a resource, that would be results we are just throw­ing away.

Automation and Algorithms in the Digital Age

I want to think more broad­ly about the future of cyber state, and think about accu­mu­la­tions of pow­er both cen­tral­ized and dis­trib­uted that might require trans­paren­cy in bound­aries we would­n’t be used to.

Self-healing Concrete for Low-carbon Infrastructure

Our bridges, motor­ways, tun­nels, and dams, and all the build­ings that make up our infra­struc­ture are vital to our soci­ety and eco­nom­ic growth yet we take them for grant­ed. The shock­ing truth is that our infra­struc­ture is crum­bling beneath our feet. And this is cost­ing us dear­ly, both in terms of mon­ey and carbon. 

A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions: Ian Goldin

Our con­nec­tiv­i­ty not only spreads good ideas, it spreads bad ones too. Our con­nec­tiv­i­ty not only allows us to make finance trav­el around the world and help peo­ple, it means that a cas­cad­ing risk that orig­i­nates in the South of the US can be every­where with­in a mat­ter of hours. And this hyper­con­nec­tiv­i­ty, this but­ter­fly defect of glob­al­iza­tion, requires new management. 

A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions: Hannah Dawson

The ques­tion that philoso­phers have asked since antiq­ui­ty is how should you live? What is the good life for a human being? And the two answers that have repeat­ed­ly come back time and time again are that there are two things that mat­ter. One is agency. That’s to say being in con­trol of your life, active­ly, cre­ative­ly engag­ing with the world. And the oth­er is community.

A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions: Patrick McCray

One of the ways that indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions are inter­est­ing to think about is that they look dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on how and where you see them from. They look dif­fer­ent whether you see them from Europe or Asia or Africa. But regard­less of time or place, econ­o­mists and his­to­ri­ans gen­er­al­ly tend to look at indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions through the lens of inno­va­tion. And in my short talk today I want to encour­age a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about this.

Molecular Mechanisms of Reward and Aversion

Why do we do the things that we do? Why do we some­times choose to be lov­ing par­ents and oth­er times engage in irra­tional self-destructive behav­iors? What dri­ves us to some­times be altru­is­tic and oth­er times make deci­sions that real­ly threat­en our very sur­vival? Well, the answer lies in our brains. Our brains evolved to ensure that we repeat behav­iors that will lead to our survival. 

The Cellular Basis of Neural Computation

Over the past cen­tu­ry, we’ve been to the moon, we’ve split the atom, we’ve sequenced the human genome, but were still only at the very begin­ning of our under­stand­ing of the human brain. This is one of the great chal­lenges that we face. If we can under­stand the brain, we can devel­op bet­ter treat­ments for brain dis­or­ders, we can design bet­ter robots, bet­ter com­put­ers, and ulti­mate­ly we can bet­ter under­stand ourselves.

Towards a Quantum Computer

From vast data cen­ters to mobile phones, the pow­er of com­put­ers con­tin­ues to trans­form our lives. But there are some prob­lems across arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, in the design of new mate­ri­als, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, and clean ener­gy devices that they will sim­ply nev­er solve. So even if we turned our entire plan­et into a giant super­com­put­er we would­n’t be able to solve these and many oth­er impor­tant prob­lems. The good news is that if we could build a com­put­ing device based on fun­da­men­tal quan­tum prin­ci­ples, we could.

Controlling the Brain with Light to Reactivate Lost Memories

The key mol­e­cule of opto­ge­net­ics is a light-sensitive pro­tein called chan­nel­rhodopsin, which is extract­ed from green algae. Scientists can insert chan­nel­rhodopsin into mem­o­ry cells. Subsequently, sci­en­tists can even acti­vate these with blue light which they deliv­er deep inside the brain with optic fibers. 

Page 1 of 3