WeWalk Smart Cane Helps Blind People Navigate
The WeWalk stick has an ultrasonic sensor that detects obstacles above chest level and uses vibrations to warn the user. It can be paired with a smartphone to help navigation and is integrated with a voice assistant and Google Maps. Connecting the stick to the Internet of Things and smart city solutions makes it user-friendly.
The Future Of Energy Storage Beyond Lithium-Ion
Over the past decade, prices for solar panels and wind farms have reached all-time lows. However, the price for lithium-ion batteries, the leading energy storage technology, has remained too high. So researchers are exploring other alternatives, including flow batteries, thermal batteries, and gravity-based systems.
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.
Before Tinder, There Was Dateline
Operation Match was a computer dating service started at Harvard in 1965 by two undergraduates, that paired students together for dates for $3 a pop. Students filled in questionnaires which were processed by an IBM 1401 before receiving the names and telephone numbers of their matches in the post.
How Much McDonald’s Franchise Owners Really Make Per Year
The food at McDonald’s has always sold like hotcakes but once the restaurant started franchising, the world began eating up the brand. But being a franchise owner isn’t as easy, or profitable, as you might think. Buying into a McDonald’s franchise is expensive, between $1 million and $2.2 million.
Fake It Till You Make It: Meet The Wolves Of Instagram
To thousands of young millennials from humble backgrounds, Jordan Belfort’s Wolf of Wall Street story became a blueprint for how to escape an unremarkable life on low pay. Their social media feeds display super-rich lifestyles, but what are these self-styled traders really selling?
How Do Airlines Price Tickets?
To the average buyer, airline ticket prices appear to fluctuate without reason. But behind the process is actually the science of dynamic pricing, which has less to do with cost and more to do with artificial intelligence.
Why Prices Differ Around the World
If you have ever traveled somewhere, especially to countries that are either a good deal richer or poorer than your own, you might have noticed that some places are certainly a lot more expensive than others. There seems to be a strong correlation between the average wealth of a country and the cost of goods and services.
How To Digitize Handwritten Notes
A number of smart devices offer to digitize your scribblings, either as you write or shortly afterward. In addition to storing images of your notebook pages in electronic form, some of these hardware and software packages actually convert your writings into searchable text.
How Instagram Killed The It Girl
In a world of constant self-surveillance and curation, we may never see the Parises, the Nicoles, the Taras in the way we once did. The It Girl exists within the moral grey areas of life, but with the existence of social media, such grey areas no longer exist for her to live in – everything is now black and white, good or bad.
“Missed Call”, How Do You Reconnect?
How do you reconnect with a father who’s been gone for most of your life… what do you say, what do you write? ‘Missed Call’ explores the relationship between the filmmaker and her teenage son as they work out how to reconnect with his father who’s been absent for a decade. A BAFTA Winning Documentary.
“3,000 Miles”, A Short Doc About Life In New York Through Voice Mails
On July 5th, 2016, Sean Wang moved across the country to work and live in New York City for one year. This is a personal documentary of his year, chronicled by voicemails left by his mom.
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.
Relax, Turn Off Your Phone, And Go To Sleep
Our devices are a gift that connect us to so many people and so much information, but they do not have to raise our anxiety and harm our all-important sleep. We need to control our devices, rather than letting them control us.
Iran’s Economy Could Be Huge, But They Don’t Care
What has prevented Iran, teeming with natural resources and a young, educated population, from becoming a world-leading economy? How did it go from rapid growth to economic failure, and why is it still unable to fulfil it’s potential?
Teenage Engineering’s 3D Printables Transform IKEA Speakers Into Something Cool
IKEA’s spirited Frekvens collection designed in cooperation with Stockholm-based audio geeks Teenage Engineering was already unlike anything out there in the consumer audio category. Teenage Engineering are now offering 13 additional customization accessories to 3D print gratis, adding an extra level of the practical and occasionally wonderfully weird to the IKEA line.
CBS News Coverage Of The Apollo 11 Moon Launch
The Saturn V rocket carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969 — and just four days later, man first set foot on the moon. The moon mission was a milestone in human history. But it was also a groundbreaking moment in broadcast television.
Out Of Left Fields: Dutch Land Art Installation Cuts Area Airplane Noise in Half
Landscape architects from the firm H+N+S worked with artist Paul De Court and drew on the work of acoustician Ernst Chladni to create over 100 grassy pyramids. Instead of simply disrupting sound waves, though, the Buitenschot Land Art Park also included paths for cyclists and pedestrians.
What Facial Recognition Steals From Us
In just the past five years, the meaning of the human face has quietly but seismically shifted. That’s because researchers at Facebook, Google, and other institutions have nearly perfected techniques for automated facial recognition.
Hack Your Dreams: MIT Built A Wearable Glove To Encourage Lucid Dreaming
A team of scientists at MIT is building devices meant to monitor people’s sleep and influence their dreams. One device, called Dormio, is an “interactive social robot” designed to detect when the user is falling asleep and affect their dreams with audio cues.
Why China And The U.S. Are Vying For Dominance In Pakistan
In Pakistan, China and the U.S. are clashing over China’s One Belt, One Road initiative. To understand what’s at stake, it helps to take a look at why China is in Pakistan in the first place.