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One of the big drawbacks of data recorded by our culture is that it’s longevity relies on the robustness of the medium that it is encoded on: paper rots, magnetic sectors on hard drives fade, and the plastic and aluminum used in optical disks like DVDs eventually degrade and oxidize. The ancients had a penchant for setting things down in stone, a method of preserving information that seems to have worked quite well, but it’s a method that our culture doesn’t use very frequently. But what if we were to encode information in glass?
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Construction is currently underway on what will be the world’s largest radio telescope, being built in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province. As it’s name implies, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, will be 500 meters (1,640 feet) across, surpassing the 305-meter (1,000 foot) Arecibo array in Puerto Rico in size. Unfortunately, 9,110 nearby residents will need to be relocated  by Guizhou’s provincial government before the array goes online next year.
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Okay, that’s not exactly what happened, but Google-owned Boston Dynamics has released a new video of the latest incarnation of their Atlas robot, showcasing it’s capabilities for balance, navigating rough terrain, handling objects, and even getting back up after being knocked over. And all of this is accomplished while the robot is untethered.

Slimmed down to a 180-lb, 5’9" — quite svelte compared to it’s previous 6-foot form — the video shows the new Atlas model leaving the office to take a stroll through the snowy woods, using LiDAR and stereo cameras to "avoid obstacles, assess the terrain, help with navigation and manipulate objects".
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In a controversial move, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) regulatory body has approved a research application for a London-based laboratory to carry out gene-editing experiments on human embryos. While the proposed experiments are aimed at researching fertility issues, critics of the issue say that this could open the door to creating designer babies.
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