Author: zppiot
+ Riki Banerjee, CTO of brain-computer interface company Synchron, will give us an inside look at the future of minimally invasive brain-computer interfaces that enable humans to use their thoughts to control digital devices. + Pete Shadbolt, the cofounder and chief scientific officer of PsiQuantum, which is working to build the biggest US-based quantum computing facility, will explain the rewards and challenges facing quantum tech.+ Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw, a global security unit within Google, will dive into the secret digital behaviors of Gen Z. The best part is, Download readers get 30% off with the following code: DOWNLOADM24.…
“The relatively high value of cars, especially of premium brands, also means they can absorb the short-term green premium of greener steel,” Alex Keynes, cars policy manager at the European Federation for Transport and Environment, said in an email. The same principle might hold for some other common products made with steel. One estimate from Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and deputy editor at Our World In Data, put the added cost for using green steel in a house at less than 1% of its purchase price. There’s a complicated web of actors in construction though, from architects to builders…
A blockchain entrepreneur, a cinematographer, a polar adventurer and a robotics researcher plan to fly around Earth’s poles aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule by the end of the year, becoming the first humans to observe the ice caps and extreme polar environments from orbit, SpaceX announced Monday.The historic flight, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will be commanded by Chun Wang, a wealthy bitcoin pioneer who founded f2pool and stakefish, “which are among the largest Bitcoin mining pools and Ethereum staking providers,” the crew’s website says. The Fram2 crew, seen during a visit to SpaceX’s Hawthorn, Calif.,…
Google loses landmark antitrust case Google loses antitrust case in landmark ruling 01:54 Some Google users on Monday said they were unable to conduct searches using the company’s Chrome browser and experienced trouble sending emails through the Gmail app. The problem only affected users in the U.K. and has since been resolved, Google said. The number of users reporting issues with Google services jumped Monday morning, according to DownDetector, a website that tracks websites’ statuses. DownDetector said it only reports an incident when the number of reports is significantly higher than usual for a given time period.A Google Cloud spokesperson said…
When the generative AI boom started with ChatGPT in late 2022, we were sold a vision of superintelligent AI tools that know everything, can replace the boring bits of work, and supercharge productivity and economic gains. Two years on, those productivity gains mostly haven’t materialized. Instead, we’ve seen something peculiar and slightly unexpected happen: People have started forming relationships with AI systems. We talk to them, say please and thank you, and have started to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers. It’s a fascinating development, and shows how hard it is to predict how…
Astronomy enthusiasts prepare for annual Perseid meteor shower – CBS News Watch CBS News Excitement is building for an annual meteor shower that is expected to peak this weekend. Brian Hackney reports. (8-9-24) Be the first to know Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Not Now Turn On #Astronomy #enthusiasts #prepare #annual #Perseid #meteor #shower
Passage: In memoriam – CBS News Watch CBS News “Sunday Morning” remembers some of the notable figures who left us this week, including pioneering tech executive Susan Wojcicki, who was instrumental in the rise of Google and YouTube. Be the first to know Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Not Now Turn On #Passage #memoriam #CBS #News
Iran is accelerating online activity that appears intended to influence the U.S. election, in one case targeting a presidential campaign with an email phishing attack, Microsoft said Friday.Iranian actors also have spent recent months creating fake news sites and impersonating activists, laying the groundwork to stoke division and potentially sway American voters this fall, especially in swing states, the technology giant found.The findings in Microsoft’s newest threat intelligence report show how Iran, which has been active in recent U.S. elections, is evolving its tactics for another election that’s likely to have global implications. The report goes a step beyond anything…
This is what the activity looked like: “This is basically the brain thinking,” says Rapoport. “You’re seeing the physical manifestation of thought.” In this video, which I’ve converted to a GIF, you can see the pattern of electrical activity in the man’s brain as he recites numbers. Each dot represents the voltage sensed by an electrode on the array on the man’s brain, over a region involved in speech. The reds and oranges represent higher voltages, while the blues and purples represent lower ones. The video has been slowed down 20-fold, because “thoughts happen faster than the eye can see,”…
What’s new: Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play table tennis at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has announced. It claims it’s the first time a robot has been taught to play a sport with humans at a human level.How good is it? The system is far from perfect. Although the table tennis bot was able to beat all beginner-level human opponents it faced and 55% of those playing at amateur level, it lost all the games against advanced players. Still, it’s an impressive advance. Why it matters: The research represents a step towards creating robots…
There’s another way to make something compact for launch: inflate it in orbit. NASA has already done this—its experimental BEAM habitat, which is connected to the ISS, launched in 2016 and has stored cargo. Sierra Space wants to make inflatable habitats as large as a three-story building, although they’ve yet to test these designs in space. Ekblaw sees the TESSERAE habitat and inflatables as complementary technologies. TESSERAE’s hard outer shell should better protect astronauts from space debris, such as micrometeoroids. And the TESSERAE habitat is more easily repaired than an inflatable, she says, because tiles can simply be switched out.…
The system is far from perfect. Although the table tennis bot was able to beat all beginner-level human opponents it faced and 55% of those playing at amateur level, it lost all the games against advanced players. Still, it’s an impressive advance. “Even a few months back, we projected that realistically the robot may not be able to win against people it had not played before. The system certainly exceeded our expectations,” says Pannag Sanketi, a senior staff software engineer at Google DeepMind who led the project. “The way the robot outmaneuvered even strong opponents was mind blowing.” And the…
A complex multi-cloud deployment can make it difficult for IT teams to perform mission-critical tasks, such as applying security patches, meeting regulatory requirements, managing costs, and accessing data for data analytics. Configuring and securing these types of environments is a challenging and time-consuming task. And ad hoc cloud deployments often culminate in systems incompatibility when one-off pilots are ready to scale or be combined with existing products. Without a common IT operations and application development platform, teams can’t share lessons learned or pool important resources, which tends to cause them to become increasingly siloed. “People want to do more with…
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The Starliner astronauts may not return to Earth until 2025 They were supposed to stay eight days, but could end up staying eight months. (WP $)+ The pair were supposed to return on Boeing’s spacecraft. (NYT $)+ It seems there’s been a lot of disagreements behind the scenes inside NASA. (Ars Technica)+ Meanwhile, the ISS is due to return to Earth around 2030. (New Scientist $) 2 Humane’s Ai pin customers are returning more than they’re buyingThe company’s fortunes are going from bad to worse. (The Verge)…
London – The U.K.’s Royal Mint, the country’s official coinmaker, has opened a factory that will extract gold from e-waste to reduce its reliance on traditional mining and encourage more sustainable practices.”The factory underpins our commitment to using sustainable precious metals and providing a new source of high quality, recovered gold,” Sean Millard, Chief Growth Officer at The Royal Mint, said in a statement. “It allows us to reduce our reliance on mined materials and is another example of how we’re working to decarbonise our operations.” The new factory at The Royal Mint, where they are sustainably recovering precious metals…
Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in AIDS.” His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him.Speaking to the biggest podcast audience in the world, the two men were promoting dangerous and false ideas—ideas that were in fact debunked and thoroughly disproved decades ago.These comments and others like them add up to a small but unmistakable resurgence in AIDS denialism—a false collection of theories arguing either that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS or that there’s no such…