Robots used to be restricted to heavy lifting or fine detail work in factories. Now Boston Dynamics’ nimble four-legged robot, Spot, is available for companies to lease to carry out various real-world jobs, a sign of just how common interactions between humans and machines have become in recent years.
Call of Duty is one of the most successful franchises in video game history, but there are currently calls to boycott its latest release due to the game’s depiction of military conflict.
The transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energies is a global pursuit. But it’s faster and more intensive in some countries than others. Take the case of South Africa. Heavily dependent on coal, the country is proceeding with a more intense transition in which renewable energies are set to play a growing role. Renewable energy technologies have recently established their role in the global energy supply mix. This is because they have begun to overcome two big hurdles. The first was concerns about high cost. The second was their inability to provide secure energy supply. A number of factors have improved their accessibility and…
The major streaming services – both old and new – all have different catalogs, pricing and strategies. While all services seek viewers’ time and attention, in other respects they are different beasts.
When the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge became the first human to run a marathon in under two hours as part of the recent INEOS 1:59 Project Challenge, this was arguably one of the most significant achievements of athleticism since Sir Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954.
Personal data reflect our web searches, emails, tweets, where we walk, videos we watch, etc. We don’t own our personal data though; whoever processes it ends up owning it, which means giant monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.
William Gregor, an amateur mineralogist and chemist, first discovered ilmenite – some black sand containing one of the world’s lightest metals – in the UK in 1791. Four years later, this light metal was isolated and named “titanium” by a German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth. Titanium has comparable strength to steel, the world’s most used metal, but is about 56% as dense and 45% lighter. Pure titanium is very difficult to extract from ilmenite and so it took about 145 years before the metal became generally useful. Titanium alloys are made when controlled amounts of other elements – such as chromium, iron, vanadium, aluminium, nitrogen,…
Finally, some good news from the weirdo-sphere that is social media. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced that, effective November 22, the microblogging platform will ban all political advertising – globally.
These days, it’s hard to know whom to trust online, and how to discern genuine content from fakery. Some degree of trust in our devices is necessary, if we’re to embrace the growing number of technologies that could potentially enhance our lives. How many of us, however, bother trying to confirm the truth, and how many blindly approach their online communications? In a study published this week, Texas Tech University researchers tested how university students reacted when unknowingly given incorrect calculator outputs. Some students were presented with an onscreen calculator that was programmed to give the wrong answers, whereas a second group was…
In fact, the 42 authors of DeepMind’s paper, published today in Nature, greatly outnumber the rest of the world building bots for StarCraft. Without wishing to take anything away from an impressive feat of collaborative engineering, if you throw enough resources at a problem, success is all but assured.
