VW Car2X: Networked Driving Comes To Real Life
Volkswagen Car2X technology warns the driver of problems such as roadside breakdowns, the end of a traffic jam or the location of an accident. But also emergency braking situations: if a driver slams on the brakes, other vehicles are informed of sudden braking maneuvers by other traffic participants.
Hacking Darwin
We are on the verge of perhaps the greatest innovation in the history of our species — a genetically altered future in which many of us will conceive our offspring in labs. If we want to control this future, now is the time to question what we want it to be.
The Economy Skynest: Airplane Sleeping Pods For Economy Passengers
New York to Auckland is one of the longest flights in the world. Because the flight is roughly 17 hours and 40 minutes, Air New Zealand has been working on how to make Economy passengers more comfortable for the duration. The Skynest is a well-designed tower containing six bunks.
The Everything Town In The Middle Of Nowhere
On any given day, thousands of packages from Walmarts, Targets, and stores around the country travel north along a two-lane road out of Billings, Montana — past the Tumbleweed Saloon, past cows grazing on empty rangeland, past the Busy Bee Cafe and stands of short pines — to the town of Roundup, where they will be unboxed, re-boxed, and sent off to Amazon.
How Psychology Is Just Catching Up With The Effects Of Online Hate
Lindsay Ellis is a video essayist. She makes videos commenting on films, TV shows, and other media. More than 860,000 people subscribe to her YouTube channel. But there is also this difficult aspect to what Ellis does: online hate.
New Technology In China Turns Desert Into Land Rich With Crops
China was praised for a law it passed in 2002 — the world’s first integrated law dedicated to combating desert expansion. With this goal in mind, China has carried out several projects that have been successful, including at one desert in northern China.
How To Tell If You’re Talking To A Bot
It’s important not to be swayed by fake accounts or waste your time arguing with them, and identifying bots in a Twitter thread has become a strange version of the Turing test. Advances in machine learning hint at how bots could become more humanlike.
The Doomsday Invention: Will Artificial Intelligence Bring Us Utopia Or Destruction?
Philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction.
Could Air-Conditioning Fix Climate Change?
Air conditioning systems can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour. Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air. So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?
The Influencer Economy Hurtles Toward Its First Recession
Brand deals have dried up; sponsored posts have been delayed. The great reckoning is unlikely to topple the influencer industry—by now, it’s already too big—but the business of influence is going to change.
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.
Silicon Valley Is Listening To Your Most Intimate Moments
For $12 an hour, “data associates” listened to snippets of random conversations and jotted down every word on their laptops. Amazon would only say the work was critical to a top-secret speech-recognition product. The clips included recordings of intimate moments inside people’s homes.
AI Is Dreaming Up New Kinds Of Video Games
Game-making algorithms are almost as old as video games, but their use has typically been limited to generating terrain and other simple digital art. The next frontier is using increasingly sophisticated machine-learning techniques to design entirely new kinds of games that have, to date, evaded the human imagination.
Destroyer Of Worlds
The story of 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, is a perfect expression of this: born with a profound disability and shuttled in and out of foster care, his creation of the site was born not out of cold calculation or political ambition, but from a need to find community in loneliness.
What Are Third-Party Internet Cookies, And Why Is Google Killing Them?
Killing the cookie might be a good first step in finally respecting consumer privacy. But when it comes to fixing what ails the modern internet, it’s a drop in the bucket. The effort is belated, murky, and not quite the revolution it’s being portrayed as.
Inside The Most Watched YouTube Channel In The World
India’s T-Series built an online empire from Bollywood. Now it has to survive Netflix. Bhushan Kumar argues that T-Series has no reason to fear this invasion, and not just because it sits behind a moat filled with more than 200 million YouTube subscribers.
Global 5G Deal Poses Significant Threat To Weather Forecast Accuracy
A long-awaited international deal governing how the world’s technology companies should roll out 5G technology poses serious risks to weather forecast accuracy, according to data from federal agencies and the World Meteorological Organization.
Freemium Love: Tech Transforms Dating In San Francisco
Tracking relationships with customer relationship management software. Automating Tinder date-hunting with chatbots. ‘Homeless’ camping dates. Techies are putting their stamp on San Francisco’s dating scene.
The Soviets’ Unbreakable Code
Created at the end of World War II and introduced in 1956, the Fialka replaced the Albatross, a Soviet cipher machine that was itself more complex than the Enigma. By the 1970s, Fialka encryption machines had been widely adopted by Warsaw Pact and other communist nations, and they remained in use until the early 1990s.
Design Schemes To Survive Climate Change
A new generation of architects, designers, and experts is creating infrastructure and buildings that respond to both extreme conditions and ongoing stress. Here’s a look at some of the most innovative approaches to living in a increasingly apocalyptic world.
Radical Hydrogen-Boron Reactor Leapfrogs Current Nuclear Fusion Tech
HB11 Energy is a spin-out company that originated at the University of New South Wales, and it announced today a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA protecting its unique approach to fusion energy generation. Fusion, of course, is the long-awaited clean, safe theoretical solution to humanity’s energy needs.