In the past year, Elon Musk and Tesla have fascinated the world with new innovations like the Tesla Cybertruck. There is excitement about most new Tesla products, but one hugely important one has been largely overlooked. With far less fanfare and no stage performance by Musk, Tesla started offering car insurance last September.
Have you ever used a public charging station to charge your mobile phone when it runs out of battery? If so, watch out for “juice jacking”.
Microsoft’s recent announcement that it would end support for users of its Windows 7 operating system had stress written all over it. The company advised that important day-to-day tasks such as personal banking and online shopping would no longer be safe on users’ now out-of-date and hacker-friendly Windows computers.
Now, more sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are being developed in an attempt to extract DNA profiles and try to work out whether a DNA sample came directly from someone who was at the crime scene, or whether it had just been innocently transferred.
South Africa’s energy crisis has many dimensions, from political and economic to technical and environmental. Recently, the country’s power utility, Eskom, has been generating only about 60% of its capacity and has had to restrict usage to prevent a regional blackout.
Have you ever wondered why the coffee you make at home tastes different from the drinks you buy in cafes? Or why coffee from the same place can taste different throughout the week? You may be quick to blame the barista for changing the recipe, but our recent study, published in Matter, suggests that this variation is down to an inherent inconsistency of common brewing methods. Luckily, we believe to have discovered a path to making a great espresso – to your taste – every time. The quality of a cup of coffee depends on the coffee’s variety and origin, its…
Fear of missing out, or FoMO, is commonly described as that anxious feeling you get when you think other people might be having a good time without you. Excessive FoMO is closely related to symptoms of behavioural addiction. It often leads to undesirable behaviour such as the constant checking of social media, even in an inappropriate context, like while driving, and becoming overly preoccupied with reactions to online posts and messages.
Many young people spend significantly more time using screens than is recommended by health professionals. Excessive screen time has been blamed for several ills, including obesity and poor mental health. To mitigate these negative effects, we need to understand the things that encourage children to spend lots of time in front of a screen.
Workplace surveillance sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but we are having to get used to it. In a sign of the times, the European Court of Human Rights has just ruled that a supermarket in Barcelona was entitled to fire employees after catching them stealing on CCTV cameras that they didn’t know were installed. This overturned a decision by the court’s lower chamber that the cameras had breached the employees’ human rights.
The digital economy has been getting a lot of attention, with increasingly strong headlines offering apocalyptic as well as breathtakingly exciting scenarios. Some warn of job losses due to automation, some wonder at the things digital technology can do. And then there’s real scepticism about whether this will translate into delivering to people who need it most.
