Imagine a world where health diagnostics were color-coded and visible on your skin. “A team of scientists in Germany have developed permanent dermal sensors that can be applied as artistic tattoos.” | learn more
Richard Branson wants someone to disrupt air conditioning.
“It represents a 100 billion dollar market today, and is set to grow to nearly four times that size by 2050. It is based on a technology that has not fundamentally changed since its invention (or rather, accidental discovery) over 100 years ago. A handful of companies dominate the channels to market, and generally spend far more on advertising than they do on R&D.” | learn more
New AI tool has ingested almost every chemical reaction ever.
“The new AI tool, developed by Marwin Segler, an organic chemist and artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Münster in Germany, and his colleagues, uses deep-learning neural networks to imbibe essentially all known single-step organic-chemistry reactions — about 12.4 million of them. This enables it to predict the chemical reactions that can be used in any single step. The tool repeatedly applies these neural networks in planning a multi-step synthesis, deconstructing the desired molecule until it ends up with the available starting reagents.” | learn more
Power prices go negative in Germany.
After decades of investment into renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the energy produced is having unexpected consequences. Energy prices are actually going negative at times because at times there’s more supply than demand. The missing link in grids seems to be battery storage capacity. | learn more
HelloFresh to IPO, despite Blue Apron’s rough start.
Blue Apron hasn’t had the best go of their public market debut. Despite that, HelloFresh plans to go public in Germany soon. Crunchbase tries to explain why. |learn more
Homo sapiens are older than we thought.
“‘We used to think that there was a cradle of mankind 200,000 years ago in east Africa, but our new data reveal that Homo sapiens spread across the entire African continent around 300,000 years ago,’ palaeoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said in a statement.” | learn more
Germany’s Otto uses AI to order inventory.
Managing inventory efficiently is a challenge that each retailer (and wholesaler) must figure out how to work through. Managing a broad assortment of inventory gets really hard for a team of humans. Otto has applied AI to automatically order over 200,000 items a month from its suppliers without human intervention. “Overall, the surplus stock that Otto must hold has declined by a fifth. The new AI system has reduced product returns by more than 2m items a year.” | learn more