How To Boost Your Home’s WiFi
You may have a moment when you realize that your Wi-Fi just isn’t cutting it anymore — it could be a frozen video feed, a rainbow spinner on your screen, or a cry from your kids when their favorite game doesn’t load. Here are a few things you can do to get the most out of your bandwidth.
Korvaa Is The World’s First Headphones “Grown” From Bio-based Materials
Helsinki-based multidisciplinary design studio Aivan recently unveiled Korvaa, the world’s first headphones made exclusively from microbially grown materials. Created using synbio, Korvaa is the first physical implementation of the technology and marks a potential shift away from a fossil fuel-based economy.
The “Smart City” Makes Infrastructure And Surveillance Indistinguishable
The “smart city” is not an actually existing entity. It’s a misleading euphemism for a corporately controlled urban future. Urban command centers are built primarily for police, not planners, let alone the public.
Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual For Cops
Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies.
How To Get Up To Speed On Any Subject Quickly
When you’re in over your head, how do you quickly figure out what’s important? Is there a way to go from incompetent to in control—really, really fast? There is. Here’s how it works.
Why Are Hardcover Books Published Before Paperbacks?
Despite their popularity, it’s still impossible to find paperback versions of many new books when they debut. It’s a common practice among publishers to release new titles as hardcovers and publish the paperback edition about a year after the initial print run.
Using Artificial Intelligence To Create Art
Artist Refik Anadol doesn’t work with paintbrushes or clay. Instead, he uses large collections of data and machine learning algorithms to create mesmerizing and dynamic installations.
Why Do Pandemics Keep Happening?
From the black death to the coronavirus, this is what we need to think about in order to tackle pandemics. Bloomberg explains why pandemics keep happening in this 8-minute video.
The High-Tech Vertical Farmer
In the kale-filled facility at vertical farm startup Bowery Farming, it’s a piece of proprietary software that makes most of the critical decisions — like when to harvest and how much to water each plant. But it still takes humans to carry out many tasks around the farm.
For The Smartphone Industry, Theft Is A Part Of The Business Model
The manufacturer profits by hawking a replacement phone; the carrier profits double, by locking the crime victim into a new contract, then opening an account with whomever ends up with the stolen phone. Telecom companies even profit from the specter of phone theft, by selling expensive insurance policies to protect their users.
China Aims To Launch The World’s First Official Digital Currency
Dozens of central banks have started looking at whether to issue digital currencies. But only a few have run trials and none has gone as far as China, which appears set to become the first country to put a central-bank digital currency (cbdc) into limited use.
Instagram, My Daughter, And Me
What Instagram has allowed me to do is to employ a kind of digital physics, to warp my experience of space and time in my favor. In the offline world, I spend precious hours with her and then she disappears. But online, she is with me again when I post, and then again each time I receive a notification.
How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind
I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked. When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite.
How The Doomed Masa Son-Adam Neumann Relationship Set WeWork On The Road To Disaster
For Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, Neumann was the prodigal son he never had, with a wild-eyed vision to rival Son’s own. The inside story of how it all went wrong.
The Twitter Electorate Isn’t The Real Electorate
For anyone interested in politics, Twitter is the closest thing to a global community center, or a small-ads section—the virtual room where it happens. All of this gives the social network outsize power to shape the political conversation. However, social media is distorting our sense of mainstream opinion.
When Elon Musk Tried To Destroy A Tesla Whistleblower
It started with an Elon Musk Twitter meltdown and ended with a fake mass shooter. A former security manager says the company also spied and spread misinformation.
Tech’s Most Controversial Startup Makes Drone-Killing Robots
Founded by Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel, Anduril is rekindling the connection between the American military and Silicon Valley. The company’s surveillance technology consists of large towers, packed with sensors, and small surveillance drones that can be set up to guard the perimeter.
Inside The Apple Team That Decides Which Apps Get On iPhones
Before a developer can sell an app on the App Store, it must be approved by Apple’s app review team. The former head of App Store reviews discusses why apps get rejected, competition between Apple and developers, and planning for WWDC.
How Much Would You Pay To Never Use Tinder Again?
One in four single people under the age of 35 use dating apps. Being single is very expensive, maybe paying a premium matchmaker thousands of dollars to meet someone isn’t so crazy.
Farmer’s Fridge Wants To Make Eating Healthy Food As Easy As Getting Money From An ATM
Farmer’s Fridge retrofits vending machines to serve up healthy foods — salads, sandwiches, granola, etc. — for people on the go. In order to ensure restaurant-quality food, Farmer’s Fridge has a chef on board who receives feedback from customers to constantly tweak the menu and the food.
How The Dumb Design Of A WWII Plane Led To The Macintosh
For all the triumph of America’s new planes and tanks during World War II, a silent reaper stalked the battlefield: accidental deaths and mysterious crashes that no amount of training ever seemed to fix. At first, pilots took the blame for crashes. The true cause, however, lay with the design. That lesson led us into our user-friendly age—but there’s peril to come.