Read the latest articles from Futurism (Page 949)

Update: Vid Appears to Show SpaceX Capsule Exploding During Test
SpaceX

SpaceX won't say whether the video is real.

According to consumer tech website Sam Mobile, the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Fold has been delayed in China — the world's largest market for smartphones.
Robots and Machines

Samsung has yet to comment on the delay, which could be a turning point against much-hyped folding phones.

NASA approved the preliminary designs of a spacecraft expected to visit the asteroid Psyche in 2022. When it gets there, NASA won't know what to expect.
NASA

NASA is getting ready to visit a leftover fragment from the core of a destroyed planet.

A new biomaterial exhibits metabolism-like behaviors. It appears in some ways to act like a living thing, blurring the line between biology and machinery.
Biology

It isn't quite alive, but it isn't quite not-alive either.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered genetic variants that protect people from obesity and its symptoms.
Health & Medicine

"This study drives home the fact that genetics plays a major role in why some people are obese."

IBM is halting development and sales of its Watson AI designed to find promising new medications, according to a new STAT story.
Artificial Intelligence

It's starting to look like IBM's high hopes for Watson Health were misplaced.

The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly considering holding Mark Zuckerberg directly responsible for Facebook's privacy scandals.
Future Society

Federal regulators are meeting behind closed doors to discuss how to handle Zuck.

China has announced what local media is calling the "world's first armed amphibious drone boat."
Military

This weird autonomous vehicle is designed for combat missions on land and sea.

Boston Dynamics has debuted the version of its SpotMini robot dog that it plans to actually sell to consumers — but it has yet to announce a price tag.
Boston Dynamics

What the company hasn't unveiled: a price.

The governor of Puerto Rico just signed a bill that will quickly move the island away from non-renewable energy sources within the next few decades.
Climate Change

The goal is switch to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

A neural network is grinding out the blast beats, super-distorted guitars and bellowing vocals of death metal — and livestreaming it.
Artificial Intelligence

This is the finest death metal that AI can dream up.

The European Space Agency just greenlit a UK aerospace manufacturer's tests of a novel air-breathing rocket engine that sucks up atmospheric oxygen.
Off-World

The same payload could be delivered to orbit at half the vehicle mass of current launchers.

Nick Bostrom, author of "The Simulation Argument," says humanity needs to embrace mass surveillance to avoid the destruction of civilization.
Future Society

The author of "The Simulation Argument" says one bad technology could destroy humanity — and the only way to prevent it is an AI overlord.

Almost every active nuclear reactor in the U.S. is unprepared for flooding and storm surge caused by climate change; industry groups chose not to act.
Climate Change

Almost all American nuclear power plants are unprepared for floods and storms, according to a new analysis.

Denver, Colorado, may soon decriminalize the personal use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, making it the first place in the U.S. to consider doing so.
Future Society

Personal use and possession would no longer be punishable by law.

GermFalcon, a company specializing in airplane sanitizing tech, developed a kind of space Roomba that can blast sterilising UV rays at the walls of the ISS.
Sleep

Blasting the walls with UV is bound to curb the spread of microbes.

Infamous tech entrepreneur John McAfee says he's going unmask Bitcoin's creator, but the clues he's shared so far do little to narrow the field.
Bitcoin

But so far, his "clues" about Satoshi Nakamoto haven't narrowed down the field much.

Scientists finally detect helium hydride, a combination of helium and hydrogen, thought to be the first molecule to form in the universe.
Science & Energy

Decades of hunting has paid off.

When India blew up a satellite, it introduced a lot of debris into orbit. Lockheed Martin's experimental Space Fence is keeping an eye on it.
Off-World

Lockheed Martin's experimental tech is monitoring the satellite fragments.

The legal industry isn't ready for AI-generated music, leading to all sorts of new questions about copyrights in the age of creative machines.
Artificial Intelligence

What happens when an AI is trained to mimic just one artist's style?