Friday Futures: arsenic breathing creatures, graphene twisting

Image credit: Rost9 | shuttersstock.com

Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of The Future from around the web. This week: arsenic breathing creatures; twisting graphene is amazing; quantum computers could wreck the internet and Jakarta is sinking – fast.

Arsenic breathing creatures found in the Pacific

Arsenic is a deadly poison for most living things, but new research shows that microorganisms are breathing arsenic in a large area of the Pacific Ocean. Read more…

We can’t explain how the Universe is expanding like this

Twisting graphene produces super conductivity

Jarillo-Herrero lab at MIT had found superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene—a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon crystal dropped on another one, and then rotated to leave the two layers slightly askew. Read more…

Quantum computers could wreck the internet

Synthetic biology could kill cancer cells, leaving healthy ones

Synthetic proteins engineered to recognize overly active biological pathways can kill cancer cells while sparing their healthy peers, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Read more…

Jakarta is sinking, time to find a new capital

This week, after devastating flooding, Indonesia announced it’s planning to move its capital out of Jakarta, which really is nothing new—the country’s first president was talking about it way back in 1957. Read more…

Did you hear the one about the AI that tried to crack a joke?

He He’s aim is to build AI that’s natural and fun to talk to—bots that don’t just read us the news or tell us the weather, but can crack jokes or compose a poem. Read more…

(Compiled by Alex Leslie and edited by Tony Poulos)

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