Journal

Researchers now believe there are three different kinds of type 2 diabetes—a result discovered with help from machines combing through reams of medical data.

With the cost to sequence a human genome dropping by the day and medical records finally going digital, public health experts are excited for a new era of personalized, or “precision,” medicine—a big data future in which there is no “average” patient, only individual patients with unique genes, environments, and lifestyles. As a measure of this excitement, this year, President Obama launched a $215 million initiative that will create a health database from 1 million volunteers that is unprecedented in detail. Breakthroughs in prevention, understanding, and treatment of disease are hoped.

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Get beyond Ikea, and make your own projects like a pro.

If you’re convinced that you’re not capable of building anything more complicated than a bookcase from Ikea—and possibly not even that—a new startup was created to prove you wrong.

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The open-source lab in Copenhagen will help Ikea come up with the catalog of 2026, not 2016.

Ikea usually keeps a close lid on what it is working on next. But with Space10, an innovation lab recently opened in Copenhagen’s hip meatpacking district, Ikea is looking to change all that. The Swedish furniture giant is throwing the doors wide open to progressive thinkers who want to help solve the next couple decades’ biggest home design problems, all on Ikea’s dime.

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There is still a lot of small-scale thinking in the train world. Andreas Vogler wants to change that.

It’s well-documented that the United Kingdom’s trains are overcrowded. Some regional lines are as much as 86% over capacity. Congestion plagues train systems all over the world from San Francisco to New York to Mumbai. The solution isn’t as easy as putting more of the same trains into commission; it’s about future-proofing the trains that come next.

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The Iris Lens will definitely up your iPhone camera game, but the best part might be the clever mounting system that slides over your case.

A popular saying among photographers is “the best camera is the one you have with you.” For most people, that will almost always be a smartphone camera. For more serious photographers, there’s an array of attachable lenses that will transform that ever-handy camera into something closer to a professional one (Moment and Olloclip lenses are the most popular). But here’s the problem: those lenses almost always require either a special iPhone case or no case at all.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced the successful launch and landing of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

Between Boeing, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Xcor, and Blue Origin, the private space race is fully underway—and it appears that Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, is finally making some headway. After much speculation as to how far along in the development process the company’s line of rockets was, Bezos announced today the successful launch and landing of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on Monday.

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After a successful rocket test, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos tweeted the good news—but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had a few things to add.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Tuesday morning sent his very first tweet, which announced the successful launch and landing of a New Shepard rocket built by Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin.

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Apple is reportedly introducing its mobile payments service to China next year—but it faces stiff competition in Tencent and Alibaba.

Come next year, Apple intends to bring Apple Pay to China, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal. Apple has inked deals with China’s four largest state-owned banks, and the company’s goal is to allow Chinese citizens to hook up Apple Pay with their existing bank accounts by February. Though Apple may still be subject to regulatory issues, its entry into the Chinese market could open up its mobile payments product to millions of potential new customers.

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In an exclusive interview, CEO Max Ventilla updates Fast Company on the micro-school startup’s expansion plans.

Micro-school startup founder Max Ventilla has a big ambition. He wants AltSchool—an expanding network of project-based private schools—to have as big an impact on education as his former employer, Google, did on information.

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Vine is adding new functionality to its service, including an Apple Watch version.

Vine has introduced some new features to its iOS app that are designed to get users to watch more video. The new functionality lets users find more, related videos to watch by swiping left on a currently playing video. The update also brings Vine to the Apple Watch for the first time.

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