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This week, I covered a fascinating effort to preserve organs outside the body. There’s a huge shortage of donor organs, and one of the main reasons is time—they survive only a matter of hours outside the body, even when they’re kept on ice. Doctors dream of organ banks—stores of human organs that can be preserved…
When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been carefully removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. Leave it too long and the organ will become unusable. In most cases, organs will be kept…
"The thing that the space needs is a company making $100 million a year of revenue," Science Corp. CEO Max Hodak said.
The four-year-old firm's latest fund is 60% larger than its second vehicle announced 18 months ago.
Ronald Fischer, aka Richard Graydon, was arrested in New York last week.
If you have ever stared at a misbehaving circuit at two in the morning, muttering about the "bug" you cannot find, you are part of a lineage that runs back to a very literal insect. On September 9, 1947, engineers working on Harvard's Mark II computer opened up the machine, found a moth wedged inside a relay, and taped it into their logbook. The note beside it reads: "First actual case of bug being found." It is one of the most charming artifacts in the history of computing, and it carries a surprisingly practical lesson for anyone who builds connected hardware today. What actually happened in 1947 The Mark II was an electromechanical monster: a room-sized calculator built from thousands of relays, switches that physically clacked open and closed to represent ones and zeros. On that September day the machine was producing errors, and the operators -- part of the U.S. Navy computing effort that Grace Hopper worked in -- traced the fault to Relay #70 in Panel F. Inside was a moth, its wings shorting across the contacts. They removed it, taped it into the logbook at 15:45, and recorded the now-famous line. That page, moth still attached, lives today in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Hopper loved telling the story for the rest of her career, which is why her name is forever attached to it. She is often credited with coining "bug" and "debugging" because of that moth, but the honest history is a little different, and the difference is the interesting part. The word "bug" was already old Engineers had been calling faults "bugs" for decades before 1947. Thomas Edison used the term in an 1878 letter to describe the little glitches and "difficulties" that show up when a new invention meets the real world. By the early twentieth century "bug" was common shop-floor slang among electrical and telephone engineers. So the moth did not invent the word. What made the logbook entry so memorable is the joke buried in it: "first actual case of bug being found"
When people think about delays in Building Management System (BMS) projects, they usually blame installation issues, communication failures, or commissioning problems. In reality, many delays begin much earlier. They start during engineering. Before a single controller is installed, engineering teams spend significant time reviewing I/O lists, selecting controllers, designing panels, preparing wiring documentation, planning network architecture, and coordinating procurement. These activities are essential, but they are also repetitive, manual, and prone to errors. As modern buildings become larger and more connected, traditional engineering workflows are struggling to keep up. The Hidden Cost of Manual Engineering A typical BMS project may contain hundreds or even thousands of points: Temperature sensors Humidity sensors Pressure transmitters VFD controls Damper controls Pump status points AHU controls Chiller interfaces Each point must be reviewed, categorized, mapped, documented, and connected to the correct controller. While this process is necessary, it creates a bottleneck that often goes unnoticed. A small mistake in controller sizing or wiring documentation can trigger a chain of revisions, procurement changes, and commissioning delays. The result is a project schedule that slowly expands before installation even begins. Why Traditional Workflows Don't Scale The challenge isn't engineering knowledge. The challenge is repetition. Engineering teams repeatedly perform similar tasks across projects: Reviewing I/O schedules Selecting controllers Allocating points Generating documentation Creating wiring drawings Verifying network configurations As project complexity increases, the amount of repetitive work increases as well. This leads to: Longer engineering cycles Increased project costs More documentation reviews Greater risk of human error The Shift Toward Engineering Automation Many industries have already embraced automation in design and manufacturing. Build
Remember Tamagotchis? Those little egg-shaped keychains from the 90s with a pixelated pet that got hungry, got sad, and, if you were a negligent eight-year-old like me, got dead during math class. I've been looking for an excuse to play with the Waveshare ESP32-S3 Touch AMOLED 1.8" , a $30 board with a gorgeous 368×448 AMOLED touchscreen, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a speaker. And I found one: I'm building a Tamagotchi. But with a twist that makes it worth a four-article series The pet's body lives on the device. Its brain lives in AWS. The device renders an adorable pet and captures your taps and shakes. But its hunger, mood, and energy are rows in DynamoDB. It gets hungry overnight because EventBridge Scheduler says so. And, my favorite part (and because it's 2026, we can't not have genAI in a project 🤪), every morning it fetches the AWS news, has Amazon Bedrock rewrite them in its own squeaky personality, and reads them to me out loud through Amazon Polly. A Tamagotchi with a job. In this series, I will walk you through the whole build: This article : the architecture, and connecting the ESP32-S3 to AWS IoT Core (the pet's nervous system). Part 2 : giving it a face: animations and touch with LVGL on the AMOLED. Part 3 : the serverless brain: Lambda, DynamoDB, and a pet that gets hungry while you sleep. Part 4 : Bedrock + Polly: my Tamagotchi reads me the AWS news. ⚠️ Reality check before you get too excited (sorry 😅): this is a hobby project, not a product. You'll need the specific Waveshare board (or the patience to adapt the code to yours), an AWS account, and a USB-C cable. The AWS bill for the whole series is well under a dollar a month, but it is not zero, and neither is the time you'll spend staring at idf.py monitor . Worth it, though. All the code lives in this repository . Each article has its own branch. For this one, git checkout article-1 . Why put a pet's brain in the cloud? Fair question. The original Tamagotchi ran on a chip with less power
The de-extinction startup is looking to double or triple its previous valuation, according to the report.
Scan a menu, pay a bill, onboard a smart plug, and you are using a piece of technology that was never meant for any of those things. The QR code was invented in 1994, and its original job was tracking car parts on a factory floor. Understanding why it was built the way it was explains why it now shows up on nearly every connected device. Who invented the QR code The QR code was created in 1994 by a team led by engineer Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave, a subsidiary of the Toyota group in Japan. At the time, the automotive industry ran on standard one-dimensional barcodes, the striped labels still seen on grocery products. Those barcodes held very little data, usually around 20 characters, and a busy assembly line often needed a worker to scan ten different labels on a single box of components. It was slow, and it was error-prone. Hara wanted a code that could store far more information and be read much faster. His answer was to go two-dimensional: instead of encoding data only in the width of vertical bars, a QR code (short for "Quick Response") stores data across a grid of black and white squares, packing in thousands of characters in a fraction of the footprint. The board game that shaped it The most famous detail of the QR code's origin is where Hara found his design inspiration. He was reportedly playing the board game Go on a lunch break, staring at the black and white stones arranged on the grid, when the idea of encoding information in a two-dimensional matrix of light and dark cells clicked into place. The harder problem was speed. A scanner needs to find the code and figure out its orientation before it can read anything, and in a factory a label might be rotated any which way. Hara's team solved this with the three distinctive square markers in the corners of every QR code. Those "position detection patterns" use a ratio of black to white areas that almost never occurs by chance in printed material, so a scanner can instantly locate the code and work out its an
A salamander can lose a leg and grow a new one. Cut a zebrafish's fin and it simply builds another. Mammals, us included, got the consolation prize: a scar. For a century, biologists assumed that somewhere on the evolutionary road to becoming warm-blooded, fast-moving animals, we traded regeneration away for good. Two research teams working on opposite sides of the planet have just made that assumption look wrong. The headline is almost hard to believe: the ability to regrow lost body parts may not have been deleted from our biology at all. It may simply have been switched off, and switches can be flipped back on. The genetic "remote control" that stopped working The first clue comes from a team at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, working with genomics powerhouse BGI-Research. Publishing in Science , they zeroed in on a gene called ALDH1A2 , the instruction sheet for an enzyme that turns vitamin A into retinoic acid, a molecule that acts like a foreman on a construction site, telling cells where to go and what to build during tissue repair. Animals that regenerate freely crank this gene up at the wound site. Mice, it turns out, still carry the same gene. They've just lost the genetic "remote controls," the regulatory DNA that tells the gene to fire after an injury. The hardware is intact; the software command was disconnected somewhere in evolution. So the researchers reconnected it. By reactivating that dormant switch and restoring the flow of retinoic acid, they got mice to regenerate damaged outer-ear tissue, something a normal mouse simply cannot do. In their own words, they had found "a genetic switch involved in the evolution of regeneration." Meanwhile, in Texas, they regrew a limb joint The second piece of evidence lands the point with force. At Texas A&M, a group led by Dr. Ken Muneoka took a different route to the same destination. Instead of editing a genetic switch, they used a precisely timed sequence of two signaling proteins.
In 1898, years before radio broadcasting existed and decades before anyone used the word "electronics," Nikola Tesla stood in front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden and did something that looked like magic. In a large pool of water sat a small iron-hulled boat. With no wires connecting them, Tesla sent commands through the air and the boat obeyed, turning, stopping, and blinking its lights on demand. Spectators were so unprepared for the idea that some accused him of hiding a trained monkey inside the hull, or of controlling it with his mind. What Tesla had actually built was the first wireless remote control, and it is the direct ancestor of every connected device we make today. A machine that took commands through the air Tesla called his invention a "teleautomaton," from the Greek for "remote" and "self-acting." The boat carried a radio receiver, a set of relays, and a battery driving its motor and rudder. From a control box on the side of the pool, Tesla transmitted radio signals that the receiver decoded into physical actions. Press a control, and a coherer-based circuit closed a relay, which in turn stepped the boat's steering and switching mechanism to a new position. The patent behind the demonstration, US Patent 613,809, "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles," was granted in November 1898. Read today, it is startling how modern the thinking is. Tesla was not just wiggling a boat around a pool for show; he was describing a general system for sending control signals to a remote machine and having that machine act on them without a human physically present. That is the exact problem statement behind modern IoT , just with vacuum-era hardware. Why nobody knew what to do with it Tesla saw enormous potential. He imagined remotely piloted vessels, automated vehicles, and machines that could carry out instructions from miles away. He even pitched the concept to the US military as a radio-controlled torpedo. The receptio
How I went from toggling a single GPIO pin to deploying intelligent, low-power firmware on the edge — and the lessons that shaped me along the way. The first program I ever ran on a microcontroller did exactly one thing: it blinked an LED. No operating system. No framework. No safety net. Just my code, a register, and a clock ticking a few million times a second. When that LED finally blinked at the rate I intended — not too fast, not stuck on — I felt something I hadn't felt writing software before. On a bare-metal system, nothing happens unless you make it happen. There's no runtime quietly cleaning up after you. That mix of total control and total responsibility is what pulled me into embedded systems, and it's the same thread that eventually led me to running machine learning models on the edge. This is the story of that journey — from a single blinking pin to intelligent devices that sense, decide, and act on their own. The Bare-Metal Beginning Bare-metal firmware is where you learn what a computer actually is. When you write to a memory-mapped register to toggle a GPIO, or configure a UART peripheral one bit at a time, there's no abstraction hiding the hardware from you. You read the datasheet. You read the reference manual. You get the clock configuration wrong, and nothing works — no error message, just silence. Then you fix it, and suddenly bytes are streaming out of a pin at exactly the baud rate you configured. Most of my early growth happened writing low-level peripheral drivers — UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO, ADC — on ARM Cortex-M platforms. These are the unglamorous building blocks, but they teach you the discipline embedded work demands: Every byte and every milliwatt matters. On a resource-constrained MCU, you don't get to be careless with memory or power. Timing is a first-class citizen. An interrupt that fires 50 microseconds late can break the whole system. The hardware is always right. If your code and the oscilloscope disagree, the oscilloscope wins. Th
Perimenopause has entered the chat. Perimenopause—and its better-known relative, menopause—used to be considered taboo. Not anymore, thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers. Perhaps it’s my age, but these days, both my algorithm and my conversations with friends increasingly swing toward perimenopause. Menopause is defined as the life stage that…
Neko Health has developed proprietary body-scanning technology, which it couples with bloodwork, to assess a person's health.
Gidi Littwin's new AI startup, Hemispheric, makes diagnostic brain scans for conditions like depression, PTSD, and Parkinson’s. He wants the technology to be as cheap and easy as a blood test.
The funding discussions point to investor interest in applying AI to make breakthroughs in life sciences.
Look inside almost any modern connected device -- a smartphone, a smartwatch, a Wi-Fi thermostat, a battery-powered sensor node -- and you will find a processor core designed by ARM. It is one of the most successful engineering ideas in computing history. And here is the strange part: ARM has never manufactured a single one of those chips. It does not own a factory. It sells blueprints. A three-person project in Cambridge The story starts at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, England, in the early 1980s. Acorn had built the BBC Micro, a hugely popular educational computer in the UK, and it needed a faster processor for its next machine. The commercial chips available at the time were disappointing, so a tiny team decided to design their own. The acronym everyone knows today originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine . Sophie Wilson designed the instruction set and wrote the simulator; Steve Furber led the physical chip design. RISC -- Reduced Instruction Set Computing -- was the key bet. Instead of piling on complex instructions, they kept the instruction set small and simple, which made the chip easier to build, cheaper, and remarkably power-efficient. The first silicon, the ARM1, was fabricated by VLSI Technology and delivered to Acorn on 26 April 1985. When the team powered it on, it simply worked -- first try. For anyone who has designed hardware, that is almost unheard of; new processors normally need several rounds of revisions to shake out design errors. A famous piece of Acorn lore is that the early ARM chips drew so little current they could keep running on leakage alone after the power was disconnected. From a British computer to the whole world Acorn the computer company faded, but the processor design did not. In 1990 the ARM team was spun out into a separate joint venture, and the acronym was quietly re-expanded to Advanced RISC Machines . The new company made a decision that defined its future: it would not build chips. It would license the designs and let oth
Ask most people to name the chip that started modern electronics and they will say the microprocessor. But there is a quieter hero inside almost everything you own that beeps, blinks, or connects to the internet: the microcontroller. And the first one you could actually buy shipped in 1974 as the Texas Instruments TMS1000. Microprocessor vs. microcontroller The distinction matters. A microprocessor, like Intel's famous 4004, is just the processing core. To build anything useful with it you still have to wire up separate memory chips, input/output controllers, and support logic on a circuit board. A microcontroller collapses all of that onto a single piece of silicon: the CPU, the ROM that holds your program, the RAM that holds your data, and the I/O pins that talk to the outside world, all in one package. That is exactly what the TMS1000 did. Designed by Texas Instruments engineers Gary Boone and Michael Cochran, it was a 4-bit device using a Harvard architecture, meaning it kept program memory and data memory in separate spaces so it could fetch an instruction and read data at the same time. One chip in, one chip out, and you had a complete tiny computer dedicated to a single job. Cheap enough to put in everything The genius of the TMS1000 was not raw power, it was economics. In 1974 you could buy the chips in volume for around two dollars each. By 1979, Texas Instruments was selling roughly 26 million of them every year. That price point changed what engineers could build. Suddenly it made sense to drop a small, programmable brain into products that never would have justified a full computer. You have almost certainly held one. The TMS1000 family ran the Speak & Spell, the Big Trak programmable toy vehicle, and the electronic memory game Simon, along with countless calculators, microwave ovens, and appliances. Each one was doing the same fundamental thing an IoT node does today: read some inputs, run a fixed program, drive some outputs. Why this still matters for
Researchers cobbled together funding and time to show how quantum computing could aid in the development of drugs to help underserved populations and combat rare diseases.