Bill Gates believes that innovations in technology, medicine, and public health can better the health of the world's poor within the next 15 years. As our February guest editor, he outlines some of his immediate goals: to halve the number of children who die before age five, reduce the number of mothers who die in childbirth by two-thirds, and eradicate infectious diseases like polio, guinea work, river blindness, and elephantiasis.
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Bill Gates believes that online courses can bring the world's best teachers to anyone with a smartphone or tablet, for free. As our February guest editor, he narrates this episode of the Big Future to explain why.
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This February, Bill Gates is acting as The Verge's very first guest editor and will be sharing his vision for how technology can revolutionize life for the world's poor by 2030. In this episode of the Big Future, our animated explainer series, he talks about the vast potential of mobile banking.
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The rise of smartphones has left us tapping away at touchscreens. In this week's Big Future, we look at what comes after the glass. Will we all be speaking to our devices? Are augmented reality glasses and contacts going to feed us information all day? Or does touch interaction work so well that we'll never really replace it?
We've accessed and manipulated information with our hands and fingers for decades. Whether we recognize it or not, our brains are constantly processing information afforded by what we hold and telling our hands how to respond. What we've lost over the years as we swapped mouse and key …
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This week's Big Future takes a look at how the world will change as drone technology spreads, filling the world's rooftops and skies.
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The sky may look very different in a few decades. This week's Big Future takes a look at how the world will change as drone technology spreads, filling the world's rooftops and skies. Tech giants like Amazon and Google are testing them out as delivery robots, but those early implementations are just scratching the surface.
Companies like Skycatch are currently developing drones that could act as automated guard dogs. When a motion detector is triggered, the drone would take flight and check out the scene, beaming back a live video feed so you can decide whether to follow up with a call to the police or even an onboard …
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With ambitious vaccine projects taking on the flu virus, Ebola, and other threats to human health, will our future be less sick?
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With ambitious vaccine projects taking on the flu virus, Ebola, and other significant threats to human health, will our future be less sick? Is it possible we'll never be felled by the flu again?
Scientists are working on an ambitious effort at a global flu vaccine - so seasonal variation won't matter as much for immunity. The virus has protruding proteins on its surface that look a little bit like lollipops, and current vaccines target the bulbous part of the lollipop. The attempts at a universal vaccine target the stem, which doesn't have as much genetic variation between strains.
Improvement …
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Will the future of human intelligence be something… inhuman? This week's Big Future considers the state of artificial intelligence: how do we make a computer that thinks for itself? Is it possible? What will it look like? Whatever it is - it definitely won't look like the computer on your desk.
So far our depiction of artificial intelligence in movies has been pretty ominous: from HAL 9000 to Skynet, smart machines have usually had a grudge with their fleshy makers. But even real-life scientists like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are afraid of artificial intelligence taking over. So how w …
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