​​​​​The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. More people will require surgery this year than ever before. ​​​​And next year, that number will rise again. By 2030, more than 313 million surgical procedures will done annually. This is a demand the current healthcare system can’t keep up with. The result will be longer wait times, more complications, and a system stretched far beyond its limits.  For decades, surgical innovation has been defined by better tools, stronger materials, and finer instruments, including hardware designed to improve human hands. But true transformation doesn’t come from refining scalpels and sutures; it comes from giving surgeons the right information at the right time, through the world’s most intelligent dataset.  This is where AI is rewriting the playbook. Not by replacing human expertise, but by amplifying it and by turning intuition into insight, experience into data, and uncertainty into precision.  The rise of intelligent surgery  Even the most skilled surgeon is limited by human perception. AI is placing intelligence at the center of the operating room, creating a data-driven surgical environment that continuously adapts and enhances precision in real time.  Technologies like light field imaging and advanced sensor suites are eliminating blind spots by creating real-time 3D reconstructions of the surgical field with unprecedented depth and clarity. AI guidance continuously adapts during a procedure, giving the surgeon a live surgical roadmap that helps them optimize their every move.  AI isn’t just showing better images. It’s learning. It’s refining implant placement with sub-millimeter precision and continuously optimizing surgical workflows. The result? Reduced operating times, fewer complications, and a consistency level in patient outcomes once thought impossible.  AI as the ultimate surgical partner  Surgical expertise has always been a mix of experience, intuition, and technique, but even the most skilled hands rely on intraoperative estimations. AI can reduce that guesswork by integrating computational modeling of anatomical structures, shrinking uncertainty to improve surgical precision.  AI is improving surgical decision making by giving surgeons clearer insights before and during procedures. It can help plan the best approach, decrease guesswork in the operating room, and lead to more consistent, predictable patient results.  ​​​​​In one recent study (RF145), an AI tool was able to measure spinal alignment during surgery more accurately than surgeons. It provided real-time feedback before and after a correction, helping the surgical team see exactly how much alignment had changed and whether additional adjustments were needed. This kind of support can lead to safer surgeries and better patient outcomes.  Improve patient safety and outcomes  For patients, the success of AI isn’t just in better, more informed surgeries—it’s also in better, more informed recoveries. Predictive analytics flag potential complications before they become problems, enabling proactive interventions and improved care.  The numbers tell the story: A deep learning model predicted post-operative complications with 70% accuracy, surpassing traditional clinical risk models and enabling earlier interventions to improve patient safety.   Similarly, predictive models have successfully forecasted 30-day hospital readmissions, strongly indicating whether a patient is likely to be readmitted or not.  The techmed shift  For decades, medtech has been defined by hardware: selling instruments, implants, and surgical devices as products. While these tools have advanced, the underlying approach has been transactional, focused on selling physical components rather than evolving surgical intelligence.  Techmed is changing this paradigm. Instead of treating surgery as a series of isolated procedures, AI-driven platforms are creating data rivers, or continuous streams of surgical data that refine precision, optimize workflows, and improve decision making over time. Each procedure informs the next, driving exponential improvements in efficiency, safety, and patient outcomes.  This mirrors the evolution of modern technology companies. Rather than one-time sales of surgical tools, techmed is building intelligent, learning-based systems that deliver ongoing value, just as cloud computing and AI-driven platforms have transformed other industries. By integrating data intelligence into surgery, techmed is creating a new foundation for precision, adaptability, and continuous improvement.  AI’s role in the future of surgery  We are at an inflection point. AI is the catalyst reshaping what’s possible in surgical care. It is ensuring that every patient, everywhere, benefits from the collective intelligence of thousands of surgeries before them. AI isn’t replacing surgeons. It’s making them unstoppable.  The question isn’t whether AI will transform surgery. It already has. The real challenge is whether we will fully harness its potential to ensure precision, efficiency, and better outcomes for all.  The revolution isn’t coming.  It’s already here.  Gabriel Jones is cofounder and CEO of Proprio. 

The pandemic ended years ago. You don’t need to sit at home anymore. You can hang out at a friend’s place, on a terrace, in a backyard, anywhere. And sure, you could sit and stare at your phone while you share TikToks with everyone around you – but projectors are now affordable enough that you can buy one and turn any place into an impromptu movie theater. Watch the latest episodes of White Lotus, binge a movie series (I recently began rewatching X-Men), or just indulge in some brain-rot movies online – projectors are perfect for gatherings. They’re portable, affordable, they create a massive screen nearly 100 inches diagonally, and here’s the best part – you can now power them with a simple power bank. That’s the feature that JMGO wants to highlight with its latest projectors in the N1S series. The newly debuted N1S SE and N1S Nano form a part of their wildly popular N1S series, but unlike some of their higher-end projectors, these ones are designed to be affordable, adaptable, and power-efficient. The projectors were teased at CES this year, but JMGO’s now lifted the veil on them, with a very affordable sub-$999 price tag… and the ability to run the projector on the same power bank you use to charge your phone. Designer: JMGO JMGO N1S SE A projector this compact has no right to feel this premium. The JMGO N1S SE is sculpted like a desktop monolith but behaves more like a precision instrument. At just 3.9lb, it fits anywhere, but the real party-trick is its motorized gimbal base, which rotates 360° and tilts without fuss—no stack of books or janky tripod required. Inside, JMGO’s upgraded MALC 2.0 triple laser system pushes out 800 ISO lumens at 1080p, with shockingly crisp clarity and rich color accuracy thanks to its full BT.2020 coverage and HDR10+ support. Autofocus and keystone correction are automatic, image sizes go up to a whopping 200 inches, and 65W Type-C charging means you can plug it into any mid or hi-end power bank to run your portable cinema. The N1S SE folds in Google TV for instant access to Netflix, YouTube, and everything else you binge in denial. Two built-in 5W speakers with Dolby Atmos support mean you can skip the soundbar in a pinch, and with Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.1, HDMI, and USB ports, it plays nice with your whole setup. JMGO nailed the physical proportions too—this thing has presence without bulk, and that matte black body makes it feel more like design gear than a disposable gadget. No garish branding, no over-the-top frills—just a clean, focused machine that belongs in your space. Why We Recommend It So why do I recommend it? Because the N1S SE does something rare—it respects your living space. It’s a projector you don’t have to hide or babysit. The image looks consistently excellent without constant tweaking, and the design is quietly assertive without screaming for attention. For people who care about color accuracy, placement flexibility, and owning tech that doesn’t feel disposable, this hits the sweet spot. I’ve seen pricier models do less with more, and cheaper ones fail on fundamentals. This one delivers where it counts, starts at an impressively budget-friendly €799 ($906 USD) price tag—and looks damn good doing it. Click Here to Buy Now. JMGO N1S Nano Weighing in at 3.9 lbs and measuring approximately 7.4 x 6.5 x 7.5 inches, the N1S Nano is the tiniest in its series. It’s designed for easy transport, fitting snugly into your backpack for those outdoor cinema experiences I mentioned earlier. The inner LED light source delivers up to 460 ISO lumens brightness, projecting crisp 1080p images up to 80 inches wide – that’s the equivalent of four 40-inch televisions arranged in a 2×2 format. While the N1S SE boasts a more advanced triple laser system, the Nano’s LED setup provides a respectable viewing experience for its class. The integrated stand allows for flexible positioning, and with automatic focus and keystone correction, setting up becomes a hassle-free endeavor. Running on Android with the Google TV interface, the N1S Nano offers seamless access to streaming platforms like YouTube and Apple TV. Its two built-in 5W speakers, compatible with Dolby Atmos, ensure immersive audio without the need for external devices. Connectivity is well-addressed with HDMI 2.1 (ARC) and USB-A ports. Unlike the N1S SE, which requires a constant power source, the Nano can be powered via a 65W USB-C input, making it adaptable for on-the-go scenarios when paired with a compatible power bank. This flexibility, combined with its more affordable price point, positions the N1S Nano for anyone looking to dip their toes into the projector world. Why We Recommend It The JMGO N1S Nano strikes a commendable balance between portability, performance, and price. While it may not match the N1S SE’s advanced features, it offers a solid viewing experience in a compact form factor, and a fairly lower entrance-friendly €599 ($679 USD) price tag. Its user-friendly setup, versatile connectivity, and the ability to power it via USB-C make it a practical choice for casual movie nights, presentations, or impromptu viewing sessions. A perfect pick for people who love dabbling in movie nights, projecting YouTube videos on the ceiling while they lie in bed, or just want a large-screen experience without committing to a television. Click Here to Buy Now.The post JMGO’s New Budget-Friendly Projectors Give You A Portable Cinema That Can Run On A Power Bank first appeared on Yanko Design.

When linking up screens and devices, which connectivity option should you choose? We compare the two most popular, HMDI vs. USB-C, in this article

This adventurous vegan meal kit requires some elbow grease, but it’s (mostly) worth it.

Embedding models help transform complex data — text, images, audio, and video — into numerical representations that computers can understand. The embeddings capture the semantic meaning of the data, making them useful for tasks like search, recommendation systems, and natural language processing. Still, they can struggle with more complex materials, such as documents comprising a mix of text and images, so enterprises often have to build pre-processing pipelines to get data ready for AI to use. Canadian AI company Cohere hopes to solve this problem with Embed 4, its latest multimodal model that supports frontier search and retrieval capabilities. The model can quickly search documents, whether they are solely text-based or include images, diagrams, graphs, tables, code, diagrams, and other components. “Enterprise IT buyers will certainly be interested in Cohere if they are looking for technology that can process large materials for companies with global operations, including multilingual annual reports or legal documents,” said Thomas Randall, director of AI market research at Info-Tech Research Group. Multimodal, multilingual, able to understand ‘messy’ data Multimodal AI systems can process and make sense of various types of data — text, images, audio, and video — simultaneously, giving them a more comprehensive understanding of a given situation. Multimodality is important because unstructured data comes in many unpredictable formats, noted Amy Machado, IDC’s senior research manager for enterprise content and knowledge management strategies. Business data is diverse, and nearly 90% of it is estimated to be unstructured, residing in text, PDFs, images, tables, audio, and presentations, she pointed out. “Multimodality allows for a more complete search and retrieval experience, unlocking more assets, not just text, with a consolidated vectorized data set,” she explained. Embed 4’s ability to handle different types of input differentiates it from other embedding models that focus solely on text, Randall noted. This enables stronger capabilities for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and intelligent document understanding, he said. Embed 4 can generate embeddings for documents up to 128K tokens (roughly 200 pages) and was designed to output compressed embeddings, which Cohere says can help enterprises save up to 83% on storage costs. It is multilingual, supporting 100-plus languages including Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and French, and is also capable of searching across languages, so employees can find critical data regardless of the language they speak. Embed 4 was specifically trained to handle what Cohere calls “noisy real-world data” such as data containing the spelling mistakes or formatting issues that can be found in documents such as invoices or legal paperwork. It can search scanned documents as well as handwritten ones. “The model is designed to handle imperfect real-world data, including fuzzy images and poorly oriented documents,” said Randall, noting that organizations using Embed 4 will save “huge amounts of time” because they will not need to perform data preprocessing. Embed 4 can be deployed in a virtual private cloud (VPC) or on-premises. It is integrated with Cohere’s work platform, North, and is also available on Microsoft’s developer hub, Azure AI Foundry, and on Amazon SageMaker. Handling specific enterprise use cases In addition to its general business knowledge, Embed 4 is optimized with domain-specific understanding of finance, healthcare and manufacturing. The model can identify insights in common documents including investor presentations, annual financial reports and M&A due diligence files in finance; product specification documents, repair guides, supply chain plans in manufacturing; and medical records, procedural charts, and clinical trial reports in healthcare. This domain-specific understanding is important for “greater accuracy and trust, which is paramount for regulated industries and companies that are risk-averse,” said Machado. She pointed to many potential enterprise use cases, including: Compiling financial data, which is often found in lengthy PDFs with unpredictable table structures and formats; Deep research for life sciences or R&D; Self-service knowledge bases for tech and customer support that rely on standard operating procedures and manuals full of images; Developing dynamic sales decks or analysis that requires visual output; Cohere can differentiate itself, but the price could be hefty Having a choice of models is beneficial for enterprises, as it allows them to experiment and identify the most reliable tools for their unique business needs, said Machado. “We are in the very early days, with significant experimentation, and Cohere has the opportunity to differentiate itself by delivering trusted outcomes directly linked to key business metrics,” she said. However, IT buyers should be wary of Embed 4’s pricing of per image embedding, Randall pointed out: $0.47 per million image tokens is relatively high compared to text embeddings ($0.12/million tokens). “For image-heavy workloads, this could outpace quarter-by-quarter budgets if usage scales,” he said. Moreover, he added, Cohere lacks the “massive developer ecosystem” enjoyed by the likes of OpenAI, Meta, and Google. This could mean fewer plug-and-play integrations, third-party tutorials, or off-the-shelf wrappers for niche use cases. “These issues are especially pronounced, given Embed 4 is a new model without independent benchmark validations,” Randall noted.

This deal on Apple's upgraded M4 14-inch MacBook Pro is part of an April price war as B&H and Amazon compete for your business.Save $200 on a well-equipped M4 MacBook Pro - Image credit: AppleToday's $1,799 price for the upgraded M4 14-inch MacBook Pro in Silver reflects a $200 discount off MSRP. This model is particularly enticing as it includes a bump up to 24GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage, up from the 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD that's standard in the M4 line. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

International design competition platform Volume Zero has announced the results of the Tiny House 2024 Architecture Competition. The challenge's fifth edition drew participants from over 46 countries, each vying for $4,5000 worth of prize money for designs that effectively utilize space to enable a simpler and more efficient way of living tailored to the current and future needs of its inhabitants.Once again, participants were tasked with designing a comfortable off-the-grid living accommodation for two people under 300 square feet in total. The winning designs thereby afforded clients the chance to be off the grid as much as possible. Volume Zero says they "re-imagine sustainability through the concept of maximum usable space in a minimum footprint."The 2024 Tiny House jury consisted of Carlos Patrón (Taco taller de), Dinesh Suthar (Design Work Group), Fran Silvestre (Fran Silvestre Arquitectos), Nguyen Dang Anh Dung (AD + studio), Rayne Fouché (Fouché Architects), Realrich Sjarief...

It would not exactly be a stretch to say that modern PlayStation’s success as a game maker and a first party is built upon Uncharted. Naughty Dog’s seminal action adventure game series started out as a rather unassuming blend of the classic Tomb Raider games and the at the time new hotness Gears of War. The original game, Drake’s Fortune, while being a moderate sized critical and commercial success, at no point indicated what the series would go on to become. But of course, any fan of the franchise, or of PlayStation, knows how it went – with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Naughty Dog elevated its craft of cinematic storytelling blended with taut and tightly designed linear action adventure gameplay. The studio’s name became synonymous with PlayStation games, and other Sony studios started following in Naughty Dog’s wake. Eventually, Naughty Dog would bring its craft to perfection with the Last of Us games, building on everything that had worked in the Uncharted games to a polished sheen, and delivering some of the greatest titles in the history of the medium in the process. But for as great as the Last of Us games are – and I say this as someone who legitimately feels The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the greatest games of all time – they are also fundamentally very different in the mood, tone, and aesthetic they strike as compared to Uncharted. For all the similarities that the two franchises share, if you wanted that globetrotting, swashbuckling, treasure hunting adventure, filled with some great action set pieces, some great historical fiction, and maybe a supernatural twist or two? The Last of Us is very decidedly not it. Very few things are, as it turns out. Earlier, I mentioned Tomb Raider as an inspiration for Uncharted, and within the video games medium, at least, Tomb Raider absolutely is the best equivalent. And for what it’s worth, fans of Uncharted do have potentially three other games they might like a lot to check out in the new Tomb Raider trilogy, if they haven’t checked them out already. Those games rebooted the franchise, taking inspiration from Uncharted liberally (how the tables turn, and what have you). And while none of the new Tomb Raider games ever match Uncharted’s brilliance, they are still really good in their own right. If you want more games along those lines, they are well worth checking out. But those games themselves are old now, and the Tomb Raider franchise has itself been inactive in terms of new releases for almost as long as Uncharted has. Inherently, it’s not unreasonable to assume that if there was any Uncharted fan who wanted more games along those lines, the seven years that have passed since the release of the final game in the modern Tomb Raider trilogy have provided more than enough time for them to look into those games for their fix. So pointing to Tomb Raider hardly helps here. Where hope comes from for Uncharted fans in these cases ends up being a very, very unlikely game– in more ways than one. This month, Microsoft will release MachineGames’ fantastic Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5. The game, which launched in December last year for Xbox Series X/S and PC to great acclaim, is being brought over to the PS5 as part of Microsoft’s continued multiplatform publishing push. Admittedly, the idea of a Microsoft game acting as a stand in for a flagship PlayStation franchise is hilarious, as is the idea that Indiana Jones, the granddaddy of Uncharted and Tomb Raider to begin with, has come in with an eleventh hour win here- but the game’s quality speaks for itself. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a marvelous single player action adventure game that really hits the perfect tone and aesthetic, takes players to multiple locations around the world on a globetrotting treasure hunting story, has a great historical fiction infused central plot and mystery, and has some really strong storytelling- which, of course, is typical for MachineGames. They are obviously not perfect equivalents. Indiana Jones is largely a first person game, for starters, which creates a fundamental change to the flow of the moment to moment gameplay. It is also far less focused on combat than the Uncharted games. Naughty Dog’s franchise is, of course, so combat focused that it has given rise to a whole class of memes about how the series’ protagonist Nathan Drake is a mass murderer (and even led to the rise in awareness of ludonarrative dissonance, and what it may mean when it comes to video games). Anyone who has seen the Indiana Jones movies, of course, knows that that level of killing and violence isn’t exactly what the eponymous main character is known for. And so it makes sense that The Great Circle de-emphasizes action. Instead, the game is designed almost like an immersive sim. Rather than guiding players through linear areas interspersing light platforming and puzzle solving with heavy combat encounters, The Great Circle moves players into small sandbox style semi open areas, giving players objectives but mostly leaving it to them to figure out how to go about them. In other words, it almost plays like an immersive sim lite. In any area, in any part of the game, Indiana Jones will have to contend with a lot of armed opponents, but he will rarely be shooting them away in grand shootouts. Instead, The Great Circle emphasizes stealth and melee combat, it emphasizes puzzles, and it emphasizes exploration and discovery within its areas for players to figure out how to progress. This is a fundamentally different type of game than Uncharted in that sense. If you were in it purely for linear and high octane action packed gameplay, and the roller coaster style set pieces and combat encounters that Uncharted is known for, then little in The Great Circle would scratch that itch (though it does admittedly have some excellent set pieces). At the end of the day, it’s not really going for that sort of experience, so if that’s the sort of Uncharted-style game you’re looking for, your search for something new that fills that niche is sadly going to have to continue. However, for other fans, who primarily want Uncharted’s pulpy, high octane, swashbuckling tone, its globe trotting adventure stories blending fact and fiction, for those fans who want Uncharted’s vibes more than anything, The Great Circle is a fantastic pick, one that carves out a very comfortable place for itself in the pantheon that Naughty Dog and Uncharted had monopolized for the better part of two decades now. That’s an amazing feat, and hopefully, MachineGames gets the chance to build on that with the follow up to this game. As for Uncharted? Hopefully, a new one of those is on the horizon as well. Thankfully we have something great and new that has a lot of the same vibes– but MachineGames’ take on Indy is ultimately its own thing (which is arguably one of the reasons it’s so good, and doesn’t just suffer from a knock-off syndrome). It’s not the exact alchemy that led Uncharted to becoming one of the most beloved brands in the industry. When the next one of those is coming is anyone’s guess– in a couple of years, it will have been a whole ten years since the last time the franchise was active. Hopefully there’s a new release well before then. Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Tree Rings Bear Witness to Illegal Gold Mining Operations in the Amazon, New Study Finds Mercury concentrations in fig trees could provide useful information about mining activity in the rainforest over time An aerial view of dredges at an illegal gold mining area in the Amazon region of Peru. Ernesto Benavides / AFP via Getty Images Gold mining has ramped up across the Amazon rainforest in recent years, leaving devastated landscapes behind. Small-scale—and usually illegal—mining operations dredge the mineral from subsoil or river sediment. Then, to separate the gold, miners will pour liquid mercury into the soil, forming a hard coating around the coveted mineral. Then, they’ll burn off the mercury to get pure gold. This process unleashes toxic mercury into the air, making small-scale gold mining worldwide responsible for nearly two-fifths of the planet’s mercury pollution. While these operations provide an important source of income to many locals, they also poison the surrounding environment and negatively impact people’s health. That mercury also finds its way into trees, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science “We could potentially see whether mining is starting to ramp up,” says Jacqueline Gerson, an environmental engineer at Cornell University and the study’s lead author, to James Dinneen at New Scientist. Gerson and her team took core samples from the trunks of fig trees (Ficus insipida) at five sites in the Peruvian Amazon. Three of those sites were located within about 3.1 miles of towns with known mining activity, while the other two were far from any activity. Research assistants took cores from fig trees in the Peruvian Amazon to study their rings. Fernanda Machicao Mercury levels were highest in the samples collected near mining operations and lower near the more isolated towns. The levels found in the trunks reflected higher atmospheric mercury concentrations, which in that area can be readily linked to gold mining, Gerson says in a statement. The results also show that mercury concentrations rose after 2000, likely because that’s when gold mining activities started to ramp up in those towns, per the statement. “You can start to go back and see: How did it change when the mining came?” says study co-author Luis Fernandez, executive director of Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation, to New Scientist. “We’re starting to see that it changed a lot.” Other studies have also used tree rings to track mercury levels, but not in gold-mining regions of the tropics. “While the technique itself is not new,” Gerson adds in another statement, “we wanted to test its application in places where it’s really hard to put out monitors for atmospheric concentrations, because they’re costly and require energy or need to be changed a lot.” Mercury monitors for remote areas can cost up to $100 each, so studying tree rings is a much cheaper option. The study authors suggest their findings could be helpful to the United Nations’ Minamata Convention on Mercury, an international treaty to protect humans and the environment from the negative effects of the metal. Using tree rings can allow for regional monitoring efforts beyond the Amazon, says Gerson in a statement. Fernandez tells New Scientist that his research consortium, the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation, which focuses on rainforest restoration and mercury pollution, has had its funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) terminated. He calls that decision counter-productive. “Artisanal gold mining is something that threatens borders,” he says. “It corrupts societies. It is a global source of mercury pollution.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Not all AI scaling strategies are equal. Longer reasoning chains are not sign of higher intelligence. More compute isn't always the answer.Read More