Imagine walking into your house, where it’s waiting to predict your every need—where your daily life and technology blend perfectly into one.

From voice-controlled gadgets to automated security features, these cutting-edge smart home devices turn your home into a dream come true from the future.

Get ready to discover 13 incredible gadgets that will transform your living space into a high-tech haven, where comfort and innovation go hand in hand.

1. Smart Thermostats

Imagine coming home to a perfectly temperature-controlled environment, all thanks to a smart thermostat that learns your preferences over time.

These devices optimize energy usage by adjusting settings based on your habits, ensuring comfort and savings on your utility bills.

2. Smart Security Cameras

Keep an eye on your home from anywhere in the world with smart security cameras that offer real-time video feed and alerts.

With features like motion detection and night vision, these devices ensure your peace of mind while you’re away.

3. Smart Lights

Transform your living space with smart lights that can be controlled remotely or set to change colors and brightness based on your mood.

With automation features, you can schedule them to turn on and off, enhancing both convenience and ambiance.

4. Smart Plugs

Smart plugs turn any regular appliance into a smart device, allowing you to control them from your smartphone or through voice commands.

Imagine brewing your coffee before you even get out of bed, all thanks to these handy gadgets.

5. Smart Doorbells

Answer your door from anywhere with a smart doorbell that features a built-in camera and two-way audio.

These devices not only enhance security but also add a layer of convenience to your daily life.

6. Smart Speakers

Smart speakers serve as your personal assistant, playing music, answering questions, and controlling other smart devices with simple voice commands.

They are the ultimate hub for automation and convenience in your home.

7. Smart Fridges

Step into the future of food storage with smart fridges that come equipped with touch screens, cameras, and the ability to create grocery lists.

These devices help you manage your food inventory and even suggest recipes based on what you have at home.

8. Smart Vacuum Cleaners

Let a smart vacuum cleaner take care of your floors while you relax.

Equipped with sensors and mapping technology, these devices can navigate your home and clean efficiently, saving you time and effort.

9. Smart Blinds

Control the natural light in your home with smart blinds that can be adjusted remotely or set to open and close on a schedule.

These devices not only enhance privacy but also contribute to energy savings.

10. Smart Health Monitors

Monitor your health with smart devices that track everything from heart rate to sleep patterns.

These gadgets provide valuable insights, empowering you to make informed health choices.

11. Smart Showers

Experience luxury with smart showers that allow you to control water temperature and flow via your smartphone or voice assistant.

These devices take your daily routine to the next level, making every shower feel like a spa experience.

12. Smart Pet Feeders

Never worry about your pets going hungry again with smart feeders that allow you to schedule feeding times and portions through an app.

These devices ensure your furry friends are well-fed, even when you’re not home.

13. Smart Mirrors

Get ready in style with smart mirrors that display the weather, news, and even your calendar while you prepare for the day.

These mirrors enhance your morning routine with a touch of futuristic flair.

Conclusion

The future of living is here, and these smart home devices are just the beginning.

With the advent of automation and convenience, your home can become a sanctuary of comfort and innovation, making life easier and more enjoyable.

The post 13 Smart Home Devices That Will Make You Feel Like You’re Living in 2050 (You Won’t Believe #7!) first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

In a world where technology meets comfort, smart thermostats are revolutionizing the way we manage our home environments.

These devices not only enhance energy efficiency but also integrate seamlessly into your smart home ecosystem.

Join us as we explore the top three smart thermostats that promise to transform your living space while keeping your energy bills in check.

1. Nest Learning Thermostat – The Classic Choice

The Nest Learning Thermostat is a household name known for its sleek design and intuitive learning capabilities.

It adapts to your schedule and preferences, optimizing your home’s temperature for maximum comfort and energy efficiency.

With features like remote control via a mobile app and integration with other smart devices, it’s the perfect choice for those looking to elevate their home automation experience.

2. Ecobee SmartThermostat with Voice Control – The Voice Assistant

The Ecobee SmartThermostat is not just about temperature control; it’s about convenience with built-in voice control.

This thermostat allows you to adjust your home’s climate using just your voice, thanks to its compatibility with Alexa and other voice assistants.

With its room sensors, it ensures that every corner of your home stays comfortable, making it a great option for larger spaces.

3. Honeywell Home T9 Smart Thermostat – The Budget-Friendly Option

The Honeywell Home T9 Smart Thermostat strikes a perfect balance between affordability and advanced features.

With customizable scheduling, geofencing, and smart alerts, it caters to the needs of energy-conscious homeowners.

Moreover, its easy installation and user-friendly app make it an excellent choice for those new to smart home technology.

Conclusion: Choosing the Right Smart Thermostat for Your Home

When it comes to selecting the right smart thermostat, consider your home size, budget, and preferred features.

Each of these options offers unique benefits that can enhance your home automation journey while promoting energy efficiency.

Take the time to evaluate your needs, and you’ll find the perfect match to keep your home comfortable and your energy bills low.

The post Top 3 Smart Thermostats: Which One is Right for You? first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

In this smartwatch comparison, we’ll delve into the unique features and benefits of the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy, and Fitbit, helping you make an informed decision that aligns with your personal health goals.

Get ready for a visually stunning breakdown that will not only inform but also inspire you to make the best choice for your active life. Find out which smartwatch best suits your lifestyle and watch our video for a detailed comparison.

Design Aesthetics: The Visual Appeal

When it comes to aesthetics, the Apple Watch stands out with its customizable watch faces and premium materials, perfect for those who appreciate elegance.

The Samsung Galaxy offers a more traditional watch look with circular designs and a variety of straps, appealing to users who prefer a classic style.

Fitbit focuses on a sporty design, making it ideal for fitness enthusiasts who want a durable and lightweight device.

Fitness Tracking Features: Who Leads the Way?

Fitness tracking is at the heart of any smartwatch, and here the Fitbit shines with its extensive range of health metrics and user-friendly app.

The Apple Watch combines fitness and health seamlessly, offering innovative features like ECG and blood oxygen monitoring, catering to health-conscious individuals.

Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy packs a punch with advanced sleep tracking and stress management tools, making it a well-rounded choice for a balanced lifestyle.

Battery Life: Keeping You Connected Longer

Battery life is crucial, especially for active users. Fitbit takes the lead with impressive longevity, often lasting over a week on a single charge.

The Apple Watch typically offers around 18 hours, which may require daily charging, particularly for heavy users.

Samsung Galaxy strikes a balance with about two days of usage, making it a reliable option for those who don’t want to charge daily but also don’t need a week-long battery.

App Ecosystem: Options Galore

When it comes to apps, the Apple Watch boasts a rich ecosystem with seamless integration into the iOS environment, offering countless third-party applications.

Samsung Galaxy users enjoy a versatile selection of apps, also compatible with Android, providing flexibility and options.

Fitbit’s app is tailored for fitness and wellness, but it may lack the broader range of applications available on its competitors.

Health Monitoring: Beyond Fitness

Health monitoring features are vital for many users. The Apple Watch excels here, offering an ECG app and comprehensive heart health metrics.

Samsung Galaxy also provides robust health tracking, including stress management and blood pressure monitoring, appealing to a health-conscious audience.

Fitbit focuses on wellness, providing insights into sleep patterns and readiness metrics, perfect for those who prioritize overall health.

Customization: Personalize Your Watch

Customization options can enhance the personal connection with your smartwatch. The Apple Watch offers a myriad of bands, faces, and colors to match any outfit or occasion.

Samsung Galaxy also provides a variety of watch faces and straps, allowing users to express their style uniquely.

Fitbit, while more limited in customization, still offers vibrant band colors and interchangeable straps for a sporty look.

Price Point: Finding Your Fit

Price is often a deciding factor when choosing a smartwatch. The Apple Watch tends to be on the higher end, reflecting its premium build and features.

Samsung Galaxy offers a range of prices, providing options for different budgets while maintaining quality.

Fitbit is generally the most affordable, making it a great starting point for those new to smartwatches.

Integration with Other Devices

Integration is key for a seamless user experience. The Apple Watch syncs flawlessly with iPhones, allowing for easy access to notifications and apps.

Samsung Galaxy watches work well with both Android and iOS, but the full experience shines with Samsung devices.

Fitbit primarily focuses on fitness features but also syncs with various apps and devices to enhance usability.

Durability: Built to Last

Durability is essential for an active lifestyle. The Apple Watch is water-resistant and built with premium materials, making it suitable for most activities.

Samsung Galaxy watches are equally resilient, with rugged designs that can withstand various environments.

Fitbit focuses on lightweight materials, which are durable but may not be as tough as the others, ideal for casual fitness enthusiasts.

User Experience: Interface Insights

User experience can make or break a smartwatch. The Apple Watch interface is intuitive, with smooth navigation that enhances usability.

Samsung Galaxy offers a user-friendly interface that is customizable, providing a pleasant experience for all users.

Fitbit’s interface is straightforward and focused on fitness metrics, catering to users who prioritize functionality over flair.

Customer Support and Community

Support and community can significantly influence your smartwatch experience. Apple is known for its excellent customer service and a robust community of users.

Samsung also provides solid support options and a growing user community for troubleshooting and tips.

Fitbit, with its strong focus on fitness, has a dedicated community that shares insights and motivation among users.

Final Thoughts: Choosing Your Perfect Smartwatch

In the end, selecting the right smartwatch comes down to your personal preferences and lifestyle needs.

Whether you prioritize fitness tracking, design, or integration with your devices, the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy, and Fitbit each offer unique advantages.

Consider what aspects are most important to you and make the choice that aligns with your fitness journey.

The post Top 3 Best-Selling Smartwatches: Which Smartwatch is Right for You? first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

Luna Lu, Purdue University and Vishal Saravade, Purdue University

Every day, Americans travel on roads, bridges and highways without considering the safety or reliability of these structures. Yet much of the transportation infrastructure in the U.S. is outdated, deteriorating and badly in need of repair.

Of the 614,387 bridges in the U.S., for example, 39% are older than their designed lifetimes, while nearly 10% are structurally deficient, meaning they could begin to break down faster or, worse, be vulnerable to catastrophic failure.

The cost to repair and improve nationwide transportation infrastructure ranges from nearly US$190 billion to almost $1 trillion. Repairing U.S. infrastructure costs individual households, on average, about $3,400 every year. Traffic congestion alone is estimated to cost the average driver $1,400 in fuel and time spent commuting, a nationwide tally of more than $160 billion per year.

I am a professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering and the director of the Center for Intelligent Infrastructures at Purdue University. My co-author, Vishal Saravade, is part of my team at the Sustainable Materials and Renewable Technology (SMART) Lab. The SMART Lab researches and develops new technologies to make American infrastructure “intelligent,” safer and more cost-effective. These new systems self-monitor the condition of roads and bridges quickly and accurately and can, sometimes, even repair themselves.

Smart, self-healing concrete

Infrastructure – bridges, highways, pavement – deteriorates over time with continuous use. The life of structures could be extended, however, if damages were monitored in real time and fixed early on. In the northern U.S., for example, freeze-thaw cycles in winter cause water to seep into the pavement where it freezes, expands and enlarges cracks, which can cause significant damage. If left unrepaired, this damage may propagate and break down pavements and bridges.

Such damage can be identified and repaired autonomously. At an early stage of a crack, for example, self-healing pavement would activate super absorbent polymers to absorb water and produce concrete-like material that fills in the crack. Cracks as small as a few microns could be healed to prevent significant damage by preventing or delaying the later stages of the freeze-thaw cycle.

Roadway technology

Many researchers in the world are working on improving construction infrastructure. Technologies recently being explored include solar and energy-harvesting roads, charging lanes for electric vehicles, smart streetlights and reducing carbon-related emissions from construction materials.

At the Purdue SMART Lab, our team is also testing novel sensors that monitor transportation infrastructure by embedding them in several Indiana interstate highways. We plan to expand to other state highway systems in the next few years with a goal to better accommodate increased traffic and provide accurate estimates of road conditions during construction and its life.

Sensors embedded in concrete pavement acquire information about the infrastructure’s health condition in real time and communicate the data to computers. Electrical signals are applied through the sensors. Concrete’s vibrations are converted into electrical signals that are read and analyzed by lab-built customized software. This enables transportation engineers to make effective and data-driven decisions from opening roads to traffic and to proactively identifying issues that cause damage or deterioration.

After concrete is poured for highway pavement, for example, it takes hours to cure and become strong enough to open for traffic. The timing of when to open a highway depends on when the concrete mix is cured. If a roadway opens too early and the concrete is undercured, it can reduce the life expectancy of the pavement and increase maintenance costs. Waiting too long to open a road can result in traffic delays, congestion and increased safety risks for construction workers and commuters. Curing concrete for massive highway projects requires close attention by engineers in conjunction with the weather specific to that region.

Smart sensors embedded in concrete enable engineers to monitor the infrastructure and make data-driven decisions about when a road can open while retaining maximum life expectancy. Sensors can also help monitor the quality of concrete and whether it is robust enough to withstand traffic flow and corrosion after a roadway is opened. Smart, efficient infrastructure can significantly reduce structural failures, both catastrophic and through normal wear, as well as lead to reduced costs and provide new ways for structural engineers to assess real-time information about the pavement.

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Saving time and money

Congress recognizes the need to invest in American transportation systems. A $494 billion legislation package, the INVEST In America Act, was recently introduced to address America’s deteriorating highways and bridges while diminishing carbon pollution.

Smart sensors and intelligent infrastructure system can enable significant savings of time and money with improved construction safety. Sensors can provide engineers with real-time data of the quality of our infrastructure to make the best decisions for building and maintaining roads, bridges and pavements while improving safety for drivers and construction workers. The addition of self-repairing properties can help build sustainable and long-lasting infrastructure to reduce maintenance and costs.

Luna Lu, ACPA Scholar & Professor Of Civil Engineering, Purdue University and Vishal Saravade, Post-doctoral Scientist, Purdue University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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T.J. Thomson, Queensland University of Technology; Daniel Angus, Queensland University of Technology, and Paula Dootson, Queensland University of Technology

Twitter over the weekend “tagged” as manipulated a video showing US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden supposedly forgetting which state he’s in while addressing a crowd.

Biden’s “hello Minnesota” greeting contrasted with prominent signage reading “Tampa, Florida” and “Text FL to 30330”.

The Associated Press’s fact check confirmed the signs were added digitally and the original footage was indeed from a Minnesota rally. But by the time the misleading video was removed it already had more than one million views, The Guardian reports.

If you use social media, the chances are you see (and forward) some of the more than 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video shared daily. When faced with such a glut of content, how can we know what’s real and what’s not?

While one part of the solution is an increased use of content verification tools, it’s equally important we all boost our digital media literacy. Ultimately, one of the best lines of defence — and the only one you can control — is you.

Seeing shouldn’t always be believing

Misinformation (when you accidentally share false content) and disinformation (when you intentionally share it) in any medium can erode trust in civil institutions such as news organisations, coalitions and social movements. However, fake photos and videos are often the most potent.

For those with a vested political interest, creating, sharing and/or editing false images can distract, confuse and manipulate viewers to sow discord and uncertainty (especially in already polarised environments). Posters and platforms can also make money from the sharing of fake, sensationalist content.

Only 11-25% of journalists globally use social media content verification tools, according to the International Centre for Journalists.

Read more:
Facebook is tilting the political playing field more than ever, and it’s no accident

Could you spot a doctored image?

Consider this photo of Martin Luther King Jr.

This altered image clones part of the background over King Jr’s finger, so it looks like he’s flipping off the camera. It has been shared as genuine on Twitter, Reddit and white supremacist websites.

In the original 1964 photo, King flashed the “V for victory” sign after learning the US Senate had passed the civil rights bill.

Beyond adding or removing elements, there’s a whole category of photo manipulation in which images are fused together.

Earlier this year, a photo of an armed man was photoshopped by Fox News, which overlaid the man onto other scenes without disclosing the edits, the Seattle Times reported.

Similarly, the image below was shared thousands of times on social media in January, during Australia’s Black Summer bushfires. The AFP’s fact check confirmed it is not authentic and is actually a combination of several separate photos.

Fully and partially synthetic content

Online, you’ll also find sophisticated “deepfake” videos showing (usually famous) people saying or doing things they never did. Less advanced versions can be created using apps such as Zao and Reface.

Or, if you don’t want to use your photo for a profile picture, you can default to one of several websites offering hundreds of thousands of AI-generated, photorealistic images of people.

Editing pixel values and the (not so) simple crop

Cropping can greatly alter the context of a photo, too.

We saw this in 2017, when a US government employee edited official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger, according to The Guardian. The staffer cropped out the empty space “where the crowd ended” for a set of pictures for Trump.

But what about edits that only alter pixel values such as colour, saturation or contrast?

One historical example illustrates the consequences of this. In 1994, Time magazine’s cover of OJ Simpson considerably “darkened” Simpson in his police mugshot. This added fuel to a case already plagued by racial tension, to which the magazine responded:

No racial implication was intended, by Time or by the artist.

Tools for debunking digital fakery

For those of us who don’t want to be duped by visual mis/disinformation, there are tools available — although each comes with its own limitations (something we discuss in our recent paper).

Invisible digital watermarking has been proposed as a solution. However, it isn’t widespread and requires buy-in from both content publishers and distributors.

Reverse image search (such as Google’s) is often free and can be helpful for identifying earlier, potentially more authentic copies of images online. That said, it’s not foolproof because it:

• relies on unedited copies of the media already being online
• doesn’t search the entire web
• doesn’t always allow filtering by publication time. Some reverse image search services such as TinEye support this function, but Google’s doesn’t.
• returns only exact matches or near-matches, so it’s not thorough. For instance, editing an image and then flipping its orientation can fool Google into thinking it’s an entirely different one.

Read more:
Instead of showing leadership, Twitter pays lip service to the dangers of deep fakes

Most reliable tools are sophisticated

Meanwhile, manual forensic detection methods for visual mis/disinformation focus mostly on edits visible to the naked eye, or rely on examining features that aren’t included in every image (such as shadows). They’re also time-consuming, expensive and need specialised expertise.

Still, you can access work in this field by visiting sites such as Snopes.com — which has a growing repository of “fauxtography”.

Computer vision and machine learning also offer relatively advanced detection capabilities for images and videos. But they too require technical expertise to operate and understand.

Moreover, improving them involves using large volumes of “training data”, but the image repositories used for this usually don’t contain the real-world images seen in the news.

If you use an image verification tool such as the REVEAL project’s image verification assistant, you might need an expert to help interpret the results.

The good news, however, is that before turning to any of the above tools, there are some simple questions you can ask yourself to potentially figure out whether a photo or video on social media is fake. Think:

• was it originally made for social media?
• how widely and for how long was it circulated?
• what responses did it receive?
• who were the intended audiences?

Quite often, the logical conclusions drawn from the answers will be enough to weed out inauthentic visuals. You can access the full list of questions, put together by Manchester Metropolitan University experts, here.

T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Media, Queensland University of Technology; Daniel Angus, Associate Professor in Digital Communication, Queensland University of Technology, and Paula Dootson, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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While governments are spending billions to build football – sized nuclear fusion reactors — the elusive process of harnessing energy from fusing atoms, rather than breaking them apart — a 12 year old kid from Memphis, Tennessee, just became the youngest person to have ever achieved nuclear fusion, […]

Jackson Oswalt achieved nuclear fusion by fusing two deuterium atoms together in a thermonuclear reactor he built in the playroom of his family’s house.

According to Jackson, he was the sole one that worked on the reactor during both the planning and production stages.

“The temperature in my fusor varies, but it’s approximately 100 million degrees [Kelvin],” Jackson said in the Guinness World Records video accompanying the announcement.
“I have been able to use electricity to accelerate two atoms of deuterium together in order that they fuse together into an atom of helium 3 [isotope], which also releases a neutron which can be used to heat up water and turn a steam engine, which in turn produces electricity,” he explained in the video.

Jackson was inspired by Taylor Wilson, who was the previous record holder at the age of 14.
Building a DIY thermonuclear reactor — albeit not one which will generate more power than you set into it, a grail among energy researchers — may be a challenging but achievable task with a thriving online community around it.

“There were a few moments during the project that I had some reservations,” Jackson’s mother admitted. “I would definitely be googling things before he turned on various stages.”

She also added that “he did a great job of explaining it to us.”

Click here to check out the original story at Futurism

The post 12-Year Old Builds A Working Fusion Reactor first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

Dramatic political polarization. Rising anxiety and depression. An uptick in teen suicide rates. Misinformation that spreads like wildfire.

The common denominator of all these phenomena is that they’re fueled in part by our seemingly innocuous participation in digital social networking. But how can simple acts like sharing photos and articles, reading the news, and connecting with friends have such destructive consequences?

These are the questions explored in the new Netflix docu-drama The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, it features several former Big Tech employees speaking out against the products they once upon a time helped build. Their reflections are interspersed with scenes from a family whose two youngest children are struggling with social media addiction and its side effects. There are also news clips from the last several years where reporters decry the technology and report on some of its nefarious impacts.

Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) and has become a crusader for ethical tech, is a central figure in the movie. “When you look around you it feels like the world is going crazy,” he says near the beginning. “You have to ask yourself, is this normal? Or have we all fallen under some kind of spell?”

Also featured are Aza Raskin, who co-founded CHT with Harris, Justin Rosenstein, who co-founded Asana and is credited with having created Facebook’s “like” button, former Pinterest president Tim Kendall, and writer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. They and other experts talk about the way social media gets people “hooked” by exploiting the brain’s dopamine response and using machine learning algorithms to serve up the customized content most likely to keep each person scrolling/watching/clicking.

The movie veers into territory explored by its 2019 predecessor The Great Hack—which dove into the Cambridge Analytica scandal and detailed how psychometric profiles of Facebook users helped manipulate their political leanings—by having its experts talk about the billions of data points that tech companies are constantly collecting about us. “Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded,” says Jeff Siebert, a former exec at Twitter. The intelligence gleaned from those actions is then used in conjunction with our own psychological weaknesses to get us to watch more videos, share more content, see more ads, and continue driving Big Tech’s money-making engine.

“It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product,” says Lanier. “That’s the only thing there is for them to make money from: changing what you do, how you think, who you are.” The elusive “they” that Lanier and other ex-techies refer to is personified in the film by three t-shirt clad engineers working tirelessly in a control room to keep peoples’ attention on their phones at all costs.

Computer processing power, a former Nvidia product manager points out, has increased exponentially just in the last 20 years; but meanwhile, the human brain hasn’t evolved beyond the same capacity it’s had for hundreds of years. The point of this comparison seems to be that if we’re in a humans vs. computers showdown, we humans haven’t got a fighting chance.

But are we in a humans vs. computers showdown? Are the companies behind our screens really so insidious as the evil control room engineers imply, aiming to turn us all into mindless robots who are slaves to our lizard-brain impulses? Even if our brain chemistry is being exploited by the design of tools like Facebook and YouTube, doesn’t personal responsibility kick in at some point?

The Social Dilemma is a powerful, well-made film that exposes social media’s ills in a raw and immediate way. It’s a much-needed call for government regulation and for an actionable ethical reckoning within the tech industry itself.

But it overdramatizes Big Tech’s intent—these are, after all, for-profit companies who have created demand-driven products—and under-credits social media users. Yes, we fall prey to our innate need for connection and approval, and we’ll always have a propensity to become addicted to things that make us feel good. But we’re still responsible for and in control of our own choices.

What we’re seeing with social media right now is a cycle that’s common with new technologies. For the first few years of social media’s existence, we thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Now it’s on a nosedive to the other end of the spectrum—we’re condemning it and focusing on its ills and unintended consequences. The next phase is to find some kind of balance, most likely through adjustments in design and, possibly, regulation.

“The way the technology works is not a law of physics. It’s not set in stone. These are choices that human beings like myself have been making, and human beings can change those technologies,” says Rosenstein.

The issue with social media is that it’s going to be a lot trickier to fix than, say, adding seatbelts and air bags to cars. The sheer size and reach of these tools, and the way in which they overlap with issues of freedom of speech and privacy—not to mention how they’ve changed the way humans interact—means it will likely take a lot of trial and error to come out with tools that feel good for us to use without being addicting, give us only true, unbiased information in a way that’s engaging without preying on our emotions, and allow us to share content and experiences while preventing misinformation and hate speech.

In the most recent episode of his podcast Making Sense, Sam Harris talks to Tristan Harris about the movie and its implications. Tristan says, “While we’ve all been looking out for the moment when AI would overwhelm human strengths—when would we get the Singularity, when would AI take our jobs, when would it be smarter than humans—we missed this much much earlier point when technology didn’t overwhelm human strengths, but it undermined human weaknesses.”

It’s up to tech companies to re-design their products in more ethical ways to stop exploiting our weaknesses. But it’s up to us to demand that they do so, be aware of these weaknesses, and resist becoming cogs in the machine.

Image Credit: Rob Hampson on Unsplash

The post ‘The Social Dilemma’ Will Freak You Out—But There’s More to the Story first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

This handy tool allows you to strip down plastic bottles to reuse. Turn them into ropes!

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As the ills of factory farming become more pronounced, people are increasingly gravitating towards vegetarian or pescatarian diets. Besides producing a large percentage of our total greenhouse gas emissions, raising livestock uses up a third of the world’s arable land to grow feed, not to mention that the animals themselves are often terribly mistreated.
Eating fish, then, seems preferable to meat. In fact, according to the Global Aquaculture Alliance, 3.1 billion people around the world now rely on fish and seafood for a fifth of their daily animal protein intake. Fish are also one of our only sources of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
But—spoiler—it turns out there are some serious issues with the seafood industry, too.

In Hot Water

Water temperatures are rising, throwing off marine ecosystems’ natural balance and kicking off negative ripple effects throughout their food chains. Overfishing—when we take fish out of their natural habitat at a rate too fast for them to keep up with in terms of replenishing the supply—has depleted wild populations of halibut, monkfish, tuna, and salmon, among others.
Salmon in particular are one of the most crucial species for the ecosystems they inhabit. Since they’re born in freshwater streams but then migrate to the sea to mature, salmon serve as a link between saltwater and freshwater ecosystems, bringing nutrients from the oceans inland and vice versa. They’re also a key food source for bigger animals like bears and whales.
But mass-producing salmon for human consumption has hurt the species’ wild population. Between the 1970s and today, for example, the number of wild Atlantic salmon out there has been cut in half or maybe more, going from 8 to 10 million to just 3 to 4 million. And salmon farms have a recurring problem with parasites called sea lice (I know—gross), which flourish in densely-packed pens and spread to wild fish when farmed fish escape.

Fish Without Fish

A San Francisco-based startup called Wildtype is developing a product that could one day help alleviate the problems caused by fish farming: the company is devoted to producing lab-grown salmon.
Similar to cultured meat like that made by Memphis Meats, Wildtype’s salmon starts with real animal cells and adds a mixture of nutrients, sugars, salts, amino acids, and growth factor to coax the cells to grow as they naturally would inside an animal’s body. Done right, the process can yield animal tissue that contains muscle, blood, and fat, just like you’d get from a farmed fish. Except in some ways it’s even better, because what you don’t get is mercury, microplastics, and the other contaminants that farmed fish are becoming rife with.
Wildtype created its own technology for the “scaffolds” where tissue grows. “This is applicable to other species than the salmon that we have worked on,” Wildtype co-founder Arye Elfenbein told Tech Crunch. “We basically create a scaffold that provides the right guidance…for cells to take up fats in different places or become more striated.”
The company just opened up a pre-order waiting list for its product to chefs around the country, despite commercial production being up to five years away.

Challenges Upstream

Last year the company did a taste test for employees, investors, and a group of chefs and restaurateurs. While the texture of the fish was apparently realistic, its taste was described as “lacking.” And that’s not the only challenge Wildtype will have to overcome; the company estimated that each spicy salmon roll served at the tasting cost $200 to produce.
This is the biggest issue with lab-grown meat, whether beef, pork, or fish—it’s difficult and costly to scale up its production. Wildtype is aiming to lower its costs to seven to eight dollars a pound within a few years. “The dream vision is the cleanest, purest, freshest salmon, without contaminants or antibiotics, for a price lower than farmed Atlantic salmon,” said cofounder Justin Kolbeck.
It’s likely that one day in the future—maybe distant, maybe not so much—we’ll look back in disbelief at the way we used to raise and slaughter entire animals just to get a few cuts of their flesh. It will seem wasteful and barbaric compared to growing exactly the cuts of meat that we want, with no death or pollution involved. It’s still a ways off, but if companies like Wildtype can make their vision a reality, people, animals, and the planet will all be better off for it.
Image Credit: Wildtype
By Vanessa Bates RamirezThis article originally appeared on Singularity Hub, a publication of Singularity University.

The post Learn How This Startup Is Growing Sushi-Grade Salmon From Cells in a Lab first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.