Developing new medicines isn’t for the faint of heart. On average, it takes about a decade of research — and an expenditure of $2.6 billion — to shepherd an experimental drug from lab to market. And because of concerns over safety and effectiveness, only about 5 percent of experimental drugs make it to market at all. But drug makers and tech companies are investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence with the hope that AI will make the drug discovery process faster and cheaper.
While SUVs and pickup trucks were the stars of the show at this year's American Auto Show in Detroit, it's a different story across the pond. Instead of big and bulky, the cars at the Geneva Motor Show generally fall into one of two categories; either small and electric, or ridiculously fast and eye-wateringly expensive. The Swiss show is traditionally a showcase for high-end performance cars with prices that start in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and soar into the millions.
The demonstration flight of America’s new astronaut capsule successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS). The Dragon vehicle, launched by California’s SpaceX company, is designed to make the attachment autonomously. It is the latest in a series of tests the capsule must pass in order to get approval from NASA to transport people. All this particular mission is carrying is a test dummy and 90kg of supplies. The instrumented test dummy will remain in the capsule throughout the mission culminating in a Splashdown of Dragon SpaceX Capsule in the Atlantic Ocean on March 8, 2019.
On a snowy evening in New York City, David Hockney’s 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold at auction for a jaw-dropping $90.3 million, shattering the previous world record for a work sold at auction by a living artist—Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, which went for $58.4 million back in 2013. It also far exceeded the estimated sale price of $80 million, which itself would have been a record. What do these kinds of prices say about the state of the art world, and of the world in general?
