Author: Brett Venter

You know how sometimes you can leave one career for a new one and suddenly flourish because you’re doing something you’re interested in? That seems to be what’s happening to South Korean tech-maker LG, which claims to have demonstrated 6G wireless transmission using the terahertz (THz) spectrum in Berlin. Hey LG, that doesn’t terahertz as much as we thought it would Besides opting to invest in making screens for those pocketable devices it no longer makes, LG has put some of its effort into developing 6G technology. Never mind the fact that most of us don’t really have 5G yet,…

In-person events are back. Mobile World Congress did it and the Consumer Electronics Show is going to do it too. But CES 2022 has a new requirement that we haven’t really seen anyone pushing as yet — you’ll have to provide proof of vaccination if you’re planning to attend. A stab at CES 2022 The head of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Gary Shapiro said in a statement that “We all play a part in ending the pandemic through encouraging vaccinations and implementing the right safety protocols. We are taking on our responsibility by requiring proof of vaccination to attend…

All things must come to an end, it seems. Banking firm and debt-creator Mastercard has announced that it intends to phase out the magnetic strips you’ve seen on your bank card ever since you had a bank card. This means no more swiping your card when that blasted RFID chip is malfunctioning for no particular reason this week. No more swiping your Mastercard The magnetic strip (which the company called a ‘magnetic stripe’ — tomayto, tomahto) is going away from 2024, which is when the company will roll out strip-less cards first. If you’re particularly attached to your easily damaged…

There’s a moment, right at the beginning of Boston Dynamics’ most recent demo video for Atlas, its humanoid robot, where you know that you should be freaking out about how this mechanical thing is moving. It crops up again and again, whenever you realise that this robot is jumping, flipping and balancing better, unassisted, than you’ve ever seen a robot perform before. But by the time you get to the end of the video, all that’s left is admiration. Admiration for Atlas’ performance — because it sure has come a long way — but also for the team behind its…

If at first you don’t succeed, object to the process. If that doesn’t work, offer to pay to be allowed in. If that doesn’t work, go to court about it. That seems to be the battle plan Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is following in its attempt to secure the NASA Artemis lunar lander contract (the HLS, or Human Landing System) the agency awarded to SpaceX earlier this year. Someone told Jeff Bezos ‘no’ Which, yes, does mean that Blue Origin has taken its objections to Elon Musk’s SpaceX being awarded the lunar lander contract to the courtroom. A suit was…

Earlier this year it was announced that LG was pulling out of the smartphone business, the company citing heavy competition and a desire to focus on other areas of its business. It would fulfil its final obligations and then they’d be done. So what is the company doing instead? LG does what it knows Turns out, the South Korean company isn’t heading too far away from the smartphone industry. It’s investing a substantial amount. — 3.3 trillion won, or a touch over R41 billion — in new OLED production facilities. Specifically, it’s investing in small to mid-sized OLED panels, an…

Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had their work cut out for them limiting the damage caused by Western extremists and anti-vaccination proponents of late, but now they face a new challenge — what to do about the Taliban’s online activities as the religious group takes over Afghanistan. Talibanned? In case you have somehow missed world news over the past week, the United States has pulled its troops out of Afghanistan after twenty years and, pretty much immediately, the Taliban have moved in to take over the country. Depending on who your government is, the religious extremists are…

When it comes to smartwatches in South Africa, we’re far more used to items from Samsung and Huawei than we are to seeing stuff like the TicWatch Pro 3 GPS. Learning that Mobvoi, the Chinese company behind the TicWatch series of devices, is officially in the country made for a nice change of pace so we got our hands on a R6,000 TicWatch Pro 3 to see how it measures up. Typically we love to compare what we’ve got with what has come before but that’s impossible in this case. The previous models never officially launched here, so we’re measuring…

Didn’t we say that 2021 was space’s year? NASA has two new exploration projects on the boil: Lucy, a spacecraft launching this year with plans to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids and the Dragonfly, which is set to take off in 2027 bound for Saturn’s moon Titan. Lucy goes first Lucy has a 23-day launch window this year, starting on 16 October. The Lockheed Martin-created spacecraft itself was dropped off at the Kennedy Space Center at the end of July. It’s set to undergo final checks and fuelling but, once that hurdle is passed, it’ll be blasting off on a…

Any plan for human colonisation of another celestial body includes the idea that we’ll use what we find there as construction material. A 3D printer, obviously, is our best chance at turning whatever we find on the surface of the moon or Mars into buildings. Why fly a bunch of bricks into space when we can just make ’em when we get there, after all. American space agency NASA is investigating just how possible it would be to ship over a 3D printer to the moon with its upcoming Artemis missions by sending a regolith 3D printer (part of the…