About three years ago, industrial giant thyssenkrupp announced it would focus on collaboration across its business areas to help achieve new targets for sustainable innovation. What it didn’t announce was how personal that initiative would be for its employees, starting with two chemical engineers who visited the company’s steel plant in Duisburg, Germany in 2013.
“We’re less locked into old processes and habits now, so our people can be creative, take risks and even run ‘startups’ within our company,” explained Reinhold Achatz, Chief Technology Officer at thyssenkrupp. “It’s a cultural thing.”
“We’re allowed to think outside the box,” said Ralph Kleinschmidt, Head of the Technology Development Department at thyssenkrupp. “For instance, when someone in a project group questioned why we weren’t using 100 year-old chemistry to reuse gases emitted by our steel plants, he brought it up.”
“We studied it and were impressed that it made sense,” Kleinschmidt added.
This began a 15-year project, named Carbon2Chem®, that will involve several thyssenkrupp business areas, and a number of Germany’s most important companies in association with the Max Planck Institute CEC and Fraunhofer Institute Umsicht. Its goal is to devise processes to turn that gas into ammonia, methanol and other base chemicals that can be used as platform for a variety of products, while significantly reducing carbon emissions. Plans call also for using excess renewable energy to do it, thereby improving the stability and efficacy of the electrical grid.
The eventual tech could impact not only the company’s steel mills, but be made available to dozens of similarly configured installations worldwide.

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Prepare to die, as they say. From Software’s Dark Souls 3 releases tomorrow, April 12 on PS4, Xbox One and PC, offering gamers a whole new chance to throw themselves headlong into grim gothic world full of monstrosities that will tear you apart in seconds if not for judicious use of the dodge and block buttons. The Souls series, and its spinoff Bloodorne, are as much known for some of the most extreme difficult of any major AAA release as they are for their cryptic story and  haunting visuals, and Dark Souls 3 is very much more of the same.

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Vicarious has the mission to “build the next generation of artificial intelligence algorithms.” That said, its objectives are longer-term in nature. Although Vicarious has assembled a who’s who of technology legends as investors, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg, the company is clear that the biggest value it can contribute will be in the long-term, in the form of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or human-like intelligence. There will be plenty of value created in the interim in the form of what co-founder, Scott Phoenix refers to as the “exhaust” of the process. 

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Advances in cognitive computing are changing how healthcare and life sciences companies plan to use data and insights to develop new therapies and improve patient outcomes.

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The relationship between traditional PR firms and early-stage startups rarely works out well for either party. Here’s how to think through whether a traditional firm is right for you.

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