Working as a tech journo, I meet many people with big, world-changing ideas. But despite the hyperbole, when I ask about how they are going to achieve their aims – or indeed if they are already up and running, who they have helped – the Zoom call often gets really quiet. So when I meet someone who is making the lives of some of the most disadvantaged people in the world a better place, and they’re using tech to do so, I get wildly excited. This week I had the pleasure of talking to Michael Sch
Not a week goes by without seeing a video, news item, or tweet about a lithium-ion battery fire. Just over the weekend, there was news in Canada of a Tesla Model Y 2021 driver who had to break a window to escape after his car shut down and caught fire unexpectedly. The car lost power, locked him inside, and started filling up with smoke. The problem is big. Incidents range from exploding roadside mopeds to ebike batteries that catch fire while charging at home, to fires burning on cargo ships ho
The AI imagery competition is getting personal. Google this week unveiled a new challenger to OpenAI’s vaunted DALLE-2 text-to-image generator — and took shots at its rival’s efforts. Both models convert text prompts into pictures. But Google’s researchers claim their system provides “unprecedented photorealism and deep language understanding.” Human raters preferred Imagen over DALLE-2 for both sample quality and image-text alignment. Credit: Saharia et al.The cringingly-named Imagen system use
Apple’s finally cracking down on apps that don’t easily let you delete your account and data when you want to leave their service. Starting June 30, the company will enforce a policy that apps that provide sign up (or account creation methods) features, will also need to make sure they allow users to delete their account through that interface. Here’s what the company says in its developer guidelines: If your app supports account creation, you must also offer account deletion within the app. App
Nobel laureate Otto Hahn is credited with the discovery of nuclear fission. Fission is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, yet Hahn considered something else to be his best scientific work. In 1921, he was studying radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, Germany, when he noticed something he could not explain. One of the elements he was working with wasn’t behaving as it should have. Hahn had unknowingly discovered the first nuclear isomer, a
A team of researchers from Austria recently developed an AI-powered drone capable of tracking moving objects through dense foliage. So much for escaping to the woods and living off the land if the machines ever rise up against us. Per the team’s research paper: While detecting and tracking moving targets through foliage is difficult (and often even impossible) in regular aerial images or videos, it becomes practically feasible with image integration … This finding together with the implementatio
While the real-life Delorean still can’t go back to the future, Google’s Street View vehicles can now transport us to the past. Historial images captured by the cars have been assembled in a tool that shows how places have changed over time. The feature was previously only available on the desktop version of Google Maps, but is now available on smartphones. “Street View is all about capturing the world as it changes, and it’s also a powerful way to reminisce about the past,” said Ethan Russell,
The EV industry is striving to develop fast-charging batteries that’ll make range anxiety a thing of the past — and it seems that whoever gets there first will have an enviable advantage. On Tuesday, Polestar officially threw its hat in the ring, announcing its investment in the Israeli battery manufacturer StoreDot. To create extreme fast-charging (XFC) batteries, StoreDot has used two different techniques. First up, it has replaced the conventional graphite in the battery’s anode with silicon
Twitter reports that fewer than 5% of accounts are fakes or spammers, commonly referred to as “bots.” Since his offer to buy Twitter was accepted, Elon Musk has repeatedly questioned these estimates, even dismissing Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal’s public response. Later, Musk put the deal on hold and demanded more proof. So why are people arguing about the percentage of bot accounts on Twitter? As the creators of Botometer, a widely used bot detection tool, our group at the Indiana Unive
Fans of Apple-powered smart devices, rejoice — it’s rumored there’ll be a new HomePod released either at the end of 2022, or the start of 2023. What’s currently unclear is whether this will be a direct replacement for the now-discontinued original HomePod, or if Apple is going to release a model that’s sized in between this and the mini — as has been reported in the past. It isn’t all plain sailing though. According to renowned leaker and analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple won’t make any substantial c