After a dismal start, the UN is hosting a "halftime summit" about its 15-year plan to meet a series of human-development targets by 2030. Delegates will try to focus on problems like extreme poverty and gender equality while watching for sparks between the representatives of Ukraine and Russia.

The Health and Human Services Department employs 294 people whose jobs focus on diversity, and the department maintains seven separate "minority health" offices spread across its various agencies, according to a new report that suggests it will be tough for the incoming Trump administration to unwind it all.

A new Government Accountability Office report says that the Justice Department kept FBI employees in the dark for seven years after Congress updated whistleblower protections for bureau personnel in 2016.

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday announced that Tesla founder Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy will a new Department of Government Efficiency, a White House office given the task of cutting the federal budget.

Apple recently announced its new lineup of Macs and rolled out Apple Intelligence, its latest artificial intelligence-powered feature for its products.

The Massimo Modular E9 is a sleek, smart and comfy tiny home in 409 square feet. Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson takes a closer look at what the future of housing might look like.

Iowa archaeologists have unearthed a 13,600-year-old mastodon skull in pristine condition during a nearly two-week excavation at an eroding creek bank in Wayne County.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft landed on Earth Saturday morning, with two test pilots left behind because of NASA's concerns that their return was too risky.

A stadium-sized asteroid is passing relatively close to Earth on Tuesday, NASA announced. Its distance from Earth and its massive size makes it a "potentially hazardous object."

Scientists in New Mexico conducted several experiments and learned that asteroids can be deflected from Earth using explosions of nuclear warheads above the space rock's surface.

A coronal mass ejection could strike the Earth's magnetosphere this week and cause a geomagnetic storm due to conditions caused by the autumnal equinox.

A comet that has not been seen for more than 80,000 years is expected to be visible from Earth, potentially during two separate time periods in the next month.

A spike in earthquakes at Mount Adams, a volcano in Washington state, prompted scientists to install additional monitoring instruments to assess the seismic activity.

U.S.-based startup company Heliospect Genomics reportedly is offering wealthy couples embryo screening for IQ and other traits at $50,000 for 100 embryos.

A mum-of-four was tragically found dead at her home following a fire.

It says these components will enable "the industry's highest DRAM bit density".

$329/£300 graphics card is said to be "future ready" for your 1080p gaming needs.

Sedimentary mineral deposits found on the surface of Mars may have been left by an ancient sea 3.5 billion years ago.

The post Ancient Coastline Spotted in Martian Utopia Region appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

A FEMA supervisor fired for instructing subordinates to skip over houses with Trump signs says her actions were consistent with agency guidance and were not isolated to her team alone.

President-elect Trump announced that billionaire Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos discusses what a second Trump term could mean for U.S. education on "The Story with Martha MacCallum."

President-elect Trump announced on Tuesday that Kristi Noem is his pick for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

For more two decades Chris Wharton has played a ­defining role in the lives of West Australians.

Every invention begins with a problem—and the creative act of seeing a problem where others might just see unchangeable reality. For one 5-year-old, the problem was simple: She liked to have her tummy rubbed as she fell asleep. But her mom, exhausted from working two jobs, often fell asleep herself while putting her daughter to bed. “So [the girl] invented a teddy bear that would rub her belly for her,” explains Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson MIT Program. Its mission is to nurture the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs.

Anyone can learn to be an inventor, Couch says, given the right resources and encouragement. “Invention doesn’t come from some innate genius, it’s not something that only really special people get to do,” she says. Her program creates invention-themed curricula for U.S. classrooms, ranging from kindergarten to community college.

We’re biased, but we hope that little girl grows up to be an engineer. By the time she comes of age, the act of invention may be something entirely new—reflecting the adoption of novel tools and the guiding forces of new social structures. Engineers, with their restless curiosity and determination to optimize the world around them, are continuously in the process of reinventing invention.

In this special issue, we bring you stories of people who are in the thick of that reinvention today. IEEE Spectrum is marking 60 years of publication this year, and we’re celebrating by highlighting both the creative act and the grindingly hard engineering work required to turn an idea into something world changing. In these pages, we take you behind the scenes of some awe-inspiring projects to reveal how technology is being made—and remade—in our time.

Inventors Are Everywhere

Invention has long been a democratic process. The economist B. Zorina Khan of Bowdoin College has noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has always endeavored to allow essentially anyone to try their hand at invention. From the beginning, the patent examiners didn’t care who the applicants were—anyone with a novel and useful idea who could pay the filing fee was officially an inventor.

This ethos continues today. It’s still possible for an individual to launch a tech startup from a garage or go on “Shark Tank” to score investors. The Swedish inventor Simone Giertz, for example, made a name for herself with YouTube videos showing off her hilariously bizarre contraptions, like an alarm clock with an arm that slapped her awake. The MIT innovation scholar Eric von Hippel has spotlighted today’s vital ecosystem of “user innovation,” in which inventors such as Giertz are motivated by their own needs and desires rather than ambitions of mass manufacturing.

But that route to invention gets you only so far, and the limits of what an individual can achieve have become starker over time. To tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity today, inventors need a deep-pocketed government sponsor or corporate largess to muster the equipment and collective human brainpower required.

When we think about the challenges of scaling up, it’s helpful to remember Alexander Graham Bell and his collaborator Thomas Watson. “They invent this cool thing that allows them to talk between two rooms—so it’s a neat invention, but it’s basically a gadget,” says Eric Hintz, a historian of invention at the Smithsonian Institution. “To go from that to a transcontinental long-distance telephone system, they needed a lot more innovation on top of the original invention.” To scale their invention, Hintz says, Bell and his colleagues built the infrastructure that eventually evolved into Bell Labs, which became the standard-bearer for corporate R&D.

In this issue, we see engineers grappling with challenges of scale in modern problems. Consider the semiconductor technology supported by the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, a policy initiative aimed at bolstering domestic chip production. Beyond funding manufacturing, it also provides US $11 billion for R&D, including three national centers where companies can test and pilot new technologies. As one startup tells the tale, this infrastructure will drastically speed up the lab-to-fab process.

And then there are atomic clocks, the epitome of precision timekeeping. When researchers decided to build a commercial version, they had to shift their perspective, taking a sprawling laboratory setup and reimagining it as a portable unit fit for mass production and the rigors of the real world. They had to stop optimizing for precision and instead choose the most robust laser, and the atom that would go along with it.

These technology efforts benefit from infrastructure, brainpower, and cutting-edge new tools. One tool that may become ubiquitous across industries is artificial intelligence—and it’s a tool that could further expand access to the invention arena.

What if you had a team of indefatigable assistants at your disposal, ready to scour the world’s technical literature for material that could spark an idea, or to iterate on a concept 100 times before breakfast? That’s the promise of today’s generative AI. The Swiss company Iprova is exploring whether its AI tools can automate “eureka” moments for its clients, corporations that are looking to beat their competitors to the next big idea. The serial entrepreneur Steve Blank similarly advises young startup founders to embrace AI’s potential to accelerate product development; he even imagines testing product ideas on digital twins of customers. Although it’s still early days, generative AI offers inventors tools that have never been available before.

Measuring an Invention’s Impact

If AI accelerates the discovery process, and many more patentable ideas come to light as a result, then what? As it is, more than a million patents are granted every year, and we struggle to identify the ones that will make a lasting impact. Bryan Kelly, an economist at the Yale School of Management, and his collaborators made an attempt to quantify the impact of patents by doing a technology-assisted deep dive into U.S. patent records dating back to 1840. Using natural language processing, they identified patents that introduced novel phrasing that was then repeated in subsequent patents—an indicator of radical breakthroughs. For example, Elias Howe Jr.’s 1846 patent for a sewing machine wasn’t closely related to anything that came before but quickly became the basis of future sewing-machine patents.

Another foundational patent was the one awarded to an English bricklayer in 1824 for the invention of Portland cement, which is still the key ingredient in most of the world’s concrete. As Ted C. Fishman describes in his fascinating inquiry into the state of concrete today, this seemingly stable industry is in upheaval because of its heavy carbon emissions. The AI boom is fueling a construction boom in data centers, and all those buildings require billions of tons of concrete. Fishman takes readers into labs and startups where researchers are experimenting with climate-friendly formulations of cement and concrete. Who knows which of those experiments will result in a patent that echoes down the ages?

Some engineers start their invention process by thinking about the impact they want to make on the world. The eminent Indian technologist Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, who has popularized the idea of “Gandhian engineering”, advises inventors to work backward from “what we want to achieve for the betterment of humanity,” and to create problem-solving technologies that are affordable, durable, and not only for the elite.

Durability matters: Invention isn’t just about creating something brand new. It’s also about coming up with clever ways to keep an existing thing going. Such is the case with the Hubble Space Telescope. Originally designed to last 15 years, it’s been in orbit for twice that long and has actually gotten better with age, because engineers designed the satellite to be fixable and upgradable in space.

For all the invention activity around the globe—the World Intellectual Property Organization says that 3.5 million applications for patents were filed in 2022—it may be harder to invent something useful than it used to be. Not because “everything that can be invented has been invented,” as in the apocryphal quote attributed to the unfortunate head of the U.S. patent office in 1889. Rather, because so much education and experience are required before an inventor can even understand all the dimensions of the door they’re trying to crack open, much less come up with a strategy for doing so. Ben Jones, an economist at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, has shown that the average age of great technological innovators rose by about six years over the course of the 20th century. “Great innovation is less and less the provenance of the young,” Jones concluded.

Consider designing something as complex as a nuclear fusion reactor, as Tom Clynes describes in “An Off-the-Shelf Stellarator.” Fusion researchers have spent decades trying to crack the code of commercially viable fusion—it’s more akin to a calling than a career. If they succeed, they will unlock essentially limitless clean energy with no greenhouse gas emissions or meltdown danger. That’s the dream that the physicists in a lab in Princeton, N.J., are chasing. But before they even started, they first had to gain an intimate understanding of all the wrong ways to build a fusion reactor. Once the team was ready to proceed, what they created was an experimental reactor that accelerates the design-build-test cycle. With new AI tools and unprecedented computational power, they’re now searching for the best ways to create the magnetic fields that will confine the plasma within the reactor. Already, two startups have spun out of the Princeton lab, both seeking a path to commercial fusion.

The stellarator story and many other articles in this issue showcase how one innovation leads to the next, and how one invention can enable many more. The legendary Dean Kamen, best known for mechanical devices like the Segway and the prosthetic “Luke” arm, is now trying to push forward the squishy world of biological manufacturing. In an interview, Kamen explains how his nonprofit is working on the infrastructure—bioreactors, sensors, and controls—that will enable companies to explore the possibilities of growing replacement organs. You could say that he’s inventing the launchpad so others can invent the rockets.

Sometimes everyone in a research field knows where the breakthrough is needed, but that doesn’t make it any easier to achieve. Case in point: the quest for a household humanoid robot that can perform domestic chores, switching effortlessly from frying an egg to folding laundry. Roboticists need better learning software that will enable their bots to navigate the uncertainties of the real world, and they also need cheaper and lighter actuators. Major advances in these two areas would unleash a torrent of creativity and may finally bring robot butlers into our homes.

And maybe the future roboticists who make those breakthroughs will have cause to thank Marina Umaschi Bers, a technologist at Boston College who cocreated the ScratchJr programming language and the KIBO robotics kit to teach kids the basics of coding and robotics in entertaining ways. She sees engineering as a playground, a place for children to explore and create, to be goofy or grandiose. If today’s kindergartners learn to think of themselves as inventors, who knows what they’ll create tomorrow?

Samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain key ingredients in the biological cookbook.

A SpaceX capsule carrying the crew parachuted before dawn into the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida coast.

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Researchers show the average surface temperature on our planet has shifted between 51.8 to 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit

Researchers suspect the marine mammals may have been communicating across the vast distance

From the busy cities to ocean waters, our need to illuminate the world has had some strange and tragic consequences

The Puerto Rican singer covers the latest issue of 'Out' magazine.

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The actor is getting some support from his ex-wife, Lindsay Hartley, and daughter, Bella.

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New NatGeo documentary was directed by the same duo who brought us the Oscar-winning Free Solo.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have a mandate for new economic policy.

The post Breitbart Business Digest: The Trump Economic Mandate appeared first on Breitbart.

Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, former Saudi ambassador to the United States, has written an open letter to President-elect Donald Trump asking him to “finish what you started the last time you occupied the White House” with respect to Middle Eastern affairs.

The post Saudi Royals Ask Trump to ‘Finish What You Started’ in Middle East appeared first on Breitbart.

Trump nominated Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to serve as his Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The post Trump Nominates Kristi Noem for Secretary of Department of Homeland Security appeared first on Breitbart.

President-elect Donald Trump announced he has picked Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk and entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to "lead the Department of Government Efficiency."

The post Donald Trump Selects Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to ‘Lead the Department of Government Efficiency’ appeared first on Breitbart.

1. Best smartphones under ₹20,000 with good cameras: Redmi Note 13 Pro, Vivo T3 5G and others  Hindustan Times
2. Best smartphones under ₹30,000 with good battery life and cameras  Mint
3. 5 Affordable Camera Phones To Make Instagram Reels  Times Now
4. Best Smartphones Under Rs 20,000 With Excellent Cameras, Redmi Note 13 Pro, Vivo T3 5G & More  NewsX

FPGA-powered hardware will capture CRT glow with "bespoke, purpose-built upscaler"

Hombale Films and Prabhas will begin their three-film partnership with ‘Salaar 2’, to be directed by Prashanth Neel

Starring Ashika Ranganath as the female lead, the film is directed by N Rajasekar of ‘Maapla Singam’ and ‘Kalathil Sandhippom’ fame