German semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies announced it's making printed circuit boards (PCBs) that dissolve in water. Sourced from UK startup Jiva Materials, the plant-based Soluboard could provide a new way for the tech industry to reduce electronic waste. Jiva's biodegradable PCB is made of natural fibers and a halogen-free polymer with a much lower carbon footprint. A team at the University of Washington College of Engineering and Microsoft Research created a mouse using a Soluboard PCB as its core. The researchers found the Soluboard dissolved in hot water in under six minutes.

The next generation of wireless technology is upon us, called 5G. This new standard promises faster speeds, lower latency, and more reliable connections than ever before. But what is 5G, and how will it impact our lives? This new standard is being rolled out across the globe, and many experts believe that it will revolutionize the way we live and work. This will open up a whole new world of possibilities and allow us to do things that were previously not possible.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already helping doctors and medical professionals in a variety of ways. AI can help diagnose diseases, identify genetic risk factors, and even predict how patients will respond to certain drugs. But could AI be used to improve radiology? In the early days of radiography, radiology was a part of medicine. Doctors used x-rays to diagnose and treat a large variety of illnesses, from arthritis to cancer.

No one likes to schedule a medical appointment only to find an endless wait at a crowded doctor's office or clinic. But with a critical lack of healthcare workers, those waits aren't getting any shorter. The good news is IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) technology is helping take the pressure off overburdened staff. Self-service kiosks, powered by AI, can deliver a better patient experience--both in and out of the clinical setting. The shortage of medical workers may be new in some parts of the world, but it's a familiar problem in other markets.

As AI is integrated into day-to-day lives, justifiable concerns over its fairness, power, and effects on privacy, speech, and autonomy grow. Join this VB Live event for an in-depth look at why ethical AI is essential, and how we can ensure our AI future is a just one. "AI is only biased because humans are biased. And there are lots of different types of bias and studies around that," says Daniela Braga, Founder and CEO of Defined.ai. "All of our human biases are transported into the way we build AI. So how do we work around preventing AI from having bias?"

It seems like computers are getting smaller all the time. Now some companies are betting big on new ones that run at the atomic level -- tiny machines that could have a huge impact.

When two elite technologies meet, AI and IoT, we get Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). Artificial intelligence combined with IoT will improve IoT operations, make human-machine interaction better, and intelligent data management. With AI on the side, a more efficient and thoughtful analysis of IoT device data is possible. In a usual scenario, IoT-enabled devices collect all the data according to their configuration. Then the data is passed to a cloud platform.

This quote is so apt. Many junior data scientists I know (this includes myself) wanted to get into data science because it was all about solving complex problems with cool new machine learning algorithms that make huge impact on a business. This was a chance to feel like the work we were doing was more important than anything we've done before. However, this is often not the case. In my opinion, the fact that expectation does not match reality is the ultimate reason why many data scientists leave.

A new report lays out the ways digital transformation could reverse the trend of declining ROI in pharma R&D. In 2010 the mean cost of bringing a new asset to market was $1.1 billion; in 2018 it was $2.1 billion, with clinical trials making up an increasingly large share of this cost. Meanwhile, the mean projected return on new R&D investments fell to 1.9% from 10.1% in 2010, according to an ongoing analysis by Deloitte. Tom O'Leary, chief information officer at ICON, says there are a number of factors behind this decline in return on investment (ROI). "Costs are continuing to increase as more capabilities become available," he says.

While most agree that artificial intelligence will have a huge impact on society, not everyone is sure whether that impact will be for good or ill. One man who believes that the fears of the doom-and-gloom merchants are groundless is analyst, author and futurologist, Tom Koulopoulos. ZDNet: Tell me about your new book, The Bottomless Cloud? Koulopoulos: Clearly, we are at a point where the noise level around AI has reached an apex – a lot of very big promises along with scepticism and outright fear. What clouds the issue is that we we have extremes at both ends of that spectrum – making promises that are much greater than what we are going to able to live on in the near term and we are painting a picture of a dystopian future that will somehow be the end of humanity as we know it.