Technology Tuesday: May 10
Welcome to Technology Tuesday! Every week The Job Shop Blog will bring you our 5 top science and technology news stories from around the web.
This week: Luxembourg sets itself up to be Europe’s space mining capital, GM and Lyft plan to make self driving cabs a reality, a vitamin shown to stop the aging process in mice, a fully bendable smartphone, and bringing the dead back to life.
Luxembourg Inks Asteroid Mining Deal
Luxembourg has staked its claim to the final frontier with an ambitious plan to profit from the mining of asteroids, the government said Thursday.
The tiny Grand Duchy has joined forces with American company Deep Space Industries (DSI) to cash in on the wealth of natural resources thought to exist on asteroids.
The two have inked an agreement that will pave the way for Luxembourg to partly fund DSI’s plans to probe nearby asteroids for mineral riches using “nano” spaceships.
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Self Driving Taxis May Be On The Roads Within A Year
The world could get a glimpse of a futuristic transportation system in which people get around in self-driving electric taxis as soon as next year.
General Motors Co. and Lyft Inc. will start testing self-driving taxis with real customers within a year in a pilot program that could include electric vehicles, a Lyft executive told The Wall Street Journal.
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Vitamin Shown To Stop Organ Aging
Nicotinamide riboside (NR) is pretty amazing. It has already been shown in several studies to be effective in boosting metabolism. And now a team of researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Integrated Systems Physiology (LISP), headed by Johan Auwerx, has unveiled even more of its secrets. An article written by Hongbo Zhang, a PhD student on the team, was published today in Science and describes the positive effects of NR on the functioning of stem cells. These effects can only be described as restorative.
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Autonomous Robotic Surgeon Outperforms Human Surgeon
We’re pretty good at using surgery to keep people alive. But at a certain point, doctors are only human—hands shake, surgeons get tired, sutures and stitches are done imperfectly, wrists can only twist so far. That’s why, in recent years, surgeons have used robots more frequently, to direct tools inside a patient more perfectly than a human could. Now researchers have developed a robotic surgical tool that can operate autonomously on soft tissue, according to a study published today in Science Translational Medicine.
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Dead Could Be Brought “Back to Life” In Groundbreaking Project
A groundbreaking trial to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from health watchdogs.
Indian specialist Dr Himanshu Bansal, working with Biotech companies Revita Life Sciences and Bioquark Inc, has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life.
Know any interesting stories we missed? Let us know in the comments!