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What if technology could eliminate the need for anyone to go through pregnancy and childbirth to have a baby? This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here. It takes nine months for a fertilized egg to develop into a roughly 7-pound baby, and during that time, the person carrying the baby gets to feel the miracle of life growing inside them. They can also expect to experience a slew of unpleasant side effects, from nausea and vomiting...

Aformer Google engineer has made a stark realization that humans will achieve immortality in eight years - and 86 percent of his 147 predictions have been correct. Ray Kurzweil spoke with the YouTube channel Adagio, discussing the expansion in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he believes will lead to age-reversing 'nanobots.' These tiny robots will repair damaged cells and tissues that deteriorate as the body ages and make us immune to diseases like cancer. The predictions that such a feat is achievable by 2030 have been met with excitement and skepticism, as curing all deadly diseases seems far out of...

Amazon is nearing a deal to acquire MGM Studios, the co-owner of the "James Bond" franchise and other TV and film series, for between $8.5 billion and $9 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal is expected to be announced as soon as Tuesday.

Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people to share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it's as weird as it sounds. It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields. The researchers behind the system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds...

Neuroscientists behind the project called it "BrainNet", a "multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving". In layman's terms, researchers from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University figured out a way to connect three brains (still attached to their human hosts!) and have the owners of said brains make collective choices together without speaking. And they tested it by playing Tetris. Because of course they did. The team used "electroencephalograms" (EEGs) to record electric impulses from two human brains and "transcranial magnetic stimulation" (TMS) to deliver information to a third brain. The end result: an interface that...

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. While we have a long way to go before robots become self-aware, any robot that comes to know it's a robot could kick off the machine uprising that so many science-fiction dystopias warn about. Fortunately, there might be another way — at least according to renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. My Heart Is Human, My Blood Is Boiling, My Brain I.B.M. "Robots are pretty stupid now. However, eventually they'll be as smart as a mouse, then a rat, then a rabbit, then a cat, then a dog. By the end of the century,...

The mouse walked, the mouse stopped; the mouse ignored a bowl of food, then scampered back and gobbled it up, and it was all controlled by neuroscientists, researchers reported on Thursday. The study, describing a way to manipulate a lab animal's brain circuitry accurately enough to turn behaviors both on and off, is the first to be published under President Barack Obama's 2013 BRAIN Initiative, which aims to advance neuroscience and develop therapies for brain disorders. The point of the remote-control mouse is not to create an army of robo-rodents. Instead, neuroscientists hope to perfect a technique for identifying brain...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is helping fund the creation of an implantable antenna for health care, which could be used for “long-term patient monitoring.” The government has so far given $5,070 for a graduate fellowship to work on the project, which begins June 1. The project is being financed in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea to create a high frequency antenna that can be permanently implanted under a person’s skin. “Antennas operating near or inside the human body are important for a number of applications, including healthcare,” a grant for the project said. “Implantable medical devices...

"This is a really important point that, you know, CEOs have a lot of power and control on investment in states and we want to invest in states where there is equality," Benioff said. "One thing that you're seeing is that there is a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs," he said

Explanation: On another April 12th, in 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human to see planet Earth from space. Commenting on his view from orbit he reported, "The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very clearly". To celebrate, consider this recent image from the orbiting International Space Station. A stunning view of the planet at night from an altitude of 240 miles, it was recorded on March 28. The lights of Moscow, Russia are near picture center and one of the station's solar panel arrays is on the left. Aurora and the...

My wife and I are getting used to hearing that we’re doing it wrong. It's not coming from one side of the aisle or another. It's a barrage that boxes the compass. We're becoming immune to it. Most everyone is willing to point out how strange they think we've become, in detail, without compunction -- or manners. We're wrong, wrong, wrong. If you drift with the current, no one makes you explain anything. Your behavior might seem deranged to me, but I'm not allowed to point it out to you. Our own relatives call us "The Amish" because we don't...

Another embarrassing moment for Apple and their iPhone. A woman from Orange Park said she can't get her phone fixed, because Apple's automated software doesn't like her last name. Sandy Burdick told our news partner Channel 4 the Apple website would not let her set an appointment to have her phone fixed, because of her last name. "It stopped me. It said, 'You have put in an inappropriate word in this line.' I thought I must have a typo," she said. Burdick's son even called customer service, and he claims they told him they couldn't do anything about it. "She...

Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent. On Wednesday, the Obamas hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which they stood for 130 photographs with visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single shot. See for yourself — the pictures are up on the State Department’s flickr. And, of course, compressed above into 20 seconds for your viewing pleasure.

A lecture hall photo taken recently at The Missouri School of Journalism is worth a thousand words: Click on image to see larger version...

Immigration reform is dead. But before conservatives who killed this bill start popping champagne corks, they ought to consider the following. Our borders will be less secure, not more. Employers who want to do the right thing and only hire legal workers won't have the tools to do so. The 12 million illegal aliens who are here now will continue to live in the shadows, making them less likely to cooperate with law enforcement to report crimes and less likely to pay their full share of taxes. In other words, the mess we created by an outdated and ill-conceived immigration...

This month, SAP's Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as "intellectual property socialism." In January, Bill Gates suggested that free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux "a cancer."