It has been some 3 and a half years since the incredibly successful Glowing Plant Kickstarter campaign. At 484.013 USD the by far largest synthetic biology Kickstarter campaign of all time promised to create auto bio-luminescent capable at glowing in the dark without the addition of extra chemicals. As we previously reported the initiative later morphed into TAXA Biotechnologies, which received another 758.818 USD in funding via WeFunder. The project has become so popular t

Couple of months back Google owned Deep Mind designed a machine called AlphaGo able to beat the world`s best Go player. Machines beating humans in various games such as backgammon or chess is nothing new, this particular success however was something entirely different. In comparison to chess the game of Go has exponentially more possible moves. To illustrate this, in example after the first two moves in Chess there are 400 possible moves, in Go the number is close to 130,000

Chances are you have already heard the term exponential organization. It was introduced in 2014 by Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest in their book ‚Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)‘. As the title suggest this new breed of companies is supposedly ten times as efficient as their ‚linear‘ counterparts by employing methods as externalization of key resources and by rel

Theranos is certainly one of the most fascinating Silicon Valley startups. When it first emerged in the mainstream media in 2014 for a brief moment it looked like we are witnessing the next Facebook-like success story. A startup founded by a sole female entrepreneur after dropping out of Stanford poised to disrupt the multibillion medical testing industry. Soon enough the headlines were pouring in. Elizabeth Holmes was "America's Youngest Female Billionaire" before even turn

Recently we wrote about deep learning and its potential to revolutionize virtually every industry. One startup thinks that it can apply it to scientific research itself putting technological progress on an even faster development path. Meet ARIS.AI, the virtual assistant designed to scan through the entire scientific literature and categorize and display the relevant studies in any area in a easy to navigate structured way. As every post-grad student is very well aware of, mo

We recently mentioned the world's first blockchain application in trade finance. Given the size of the industry and the huge potential for fraud it seemed logical to go into a bit more details on the actual solution. In December 2015 Standard Chartered and DBS announced that they have successfully completed the Proof of Concept (PoC) of a new distributed ledger based solution in Trade Finance. The initiative supported by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) i

Do you remember Glowing Plants, the oversubscribed Kickstarter campaign from couple of years back? To refresh your memory Glowing Plants is a project by Anthony Evans aiming to create a genetically engineered glowing plant just for the fun of it. This was the first Kickstarter funded biotech project made possible by the massive decrease of DNA sequencing and synthesis costs. Bellow is the original Kickstarter video: Fast forward a couple of years and it appears Anthony had mo