Videos showing autonomous or self-driving vehicles weaving in and out of crossroads at speed without colliding suggest this technology will solve traffic problems. You almost never see pedestrians or cyclists in these videos. The reality is that they don’t fit.
Long-distance running times are dropping – and the first sub-two hour marathon was completed recently by Kenyan athlete, Eliud Kipchoge. Some are arguing that innovations in trainer design are playing a pivotal role in these improvements. But what is the science behind these elite running shoes? Can they really make such a big difference? And can they get even better?
Researchers recently produced an algorithm that could guess whether heart patients had lived or died from their condition within a year. By looking at data from a test of the heart’s electrical activity known as an electrocardiogram or ECG, the algorithm successfully predicted patient survival in 85% of cases
When one talks about young Africans using smartphones, the dominant narrative is that these gadgets serve mostly as platforms for connection so that users can communicate and share greetings and information via text and images.
Mobile services have had an important and positive impact on developing countries where they are the main means of connecting to the internet. However, mobile services have capacity constraints. They use limited radio frequency spectrum, which means that mobile data typically has usage limits. They also have high prices per unit (per gigabyte), which results in lower use per connection.
“To be dead,” wrote the 20th century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “is to be a prey for the living.” Even Sartre, though, would have struggled to imagine casting James Dean in a movie 64 years after the actor’s death.
Just a few years ago, virtual reality (VR) was being showered with very real money. The industry raised an estimated US$900 million in venture capital in 2016, but by 2018 that figure had plummeted to US$280 million.
Do violent video games create violent gamers? It’s a topic of discussion that continues to rear its head despite there being no solid evidence linking the two. It was once again brought back to the fore in August…
“Fake news” is a relatively new term, yet it’s now seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy and free debate. In the Netflix documentary The Great Hack — which chronicled the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica — we saw how Facebook data was used to target potential voters with insidious right-wing propaganda packaged as if it were news.
Like any eight-year-old, Ryan Kaji loves to play with toys. But when Ryan plays, millions watch.
Since the age of four he’s been the star of his own YouTube channel. All up his videos have gained more than 35 billion views. This helped make him YouTube’s highest-earning star in 2018, earning US$22 million, according to Forbes.