What happens when science goes wrong, and humankind’s technological hubris causes global calamity? Usually, the credits roll, these types of scenarios are almost always science fiction. But, since it’s black hole week at NASA, we thought we’d have a little fun imagining the complete and accidental annihilation of our planet. Back in the 1930s, there was a brief moment when some of the physicists working with Einstein on the atom bomb stopped to wonder if exploding such a device would end up ligh
The human brain is said to be the most complex biological structure ever to have existed. And while science doesn’t fully understand the brain yet, researchers in the expanding field of neuroscience have been making progress. Neuroscientists have made substantial inroads toward mapping the complex functions of the brain’s 85 billion or so neurons and the 100 trillion connections between them. (To put this astronomical number into perspective, there are upwards of 400 billion stars in the Milky W
Norway is surging ahead in the electrification game again. And yes, you guessed it, the country now has the world’s fastest EV charger. Well, so far. On Tuesday, ABB announced the installation of its Terra 360 charger in the county’s second largest city, Bergen, as well as Geilo, a ski resort. How fast is the Terra 360 really? ABB introduced the charger in September, promising a 360kW maximum output — hence the name. According to the company, this kind of power enables EVs to fully charge in les
When you think of autonomous trucking, most of the airspace is given to the long-haul variety, especially with the driver shortage still underway. But automation has a vital role to play for services with shorter routes. I recently met with Gatik, a company successfully deploying middle mile autonomous trucks throughout Northern America and parts of Canada. Gatik delivers goods between micro fulfillment centers, drugstores, smaller warehouses, and other local pickup points. Their biggest clien
TikTok’s unmatched algorithm and incomparable reach make the platform a no-brainer for founders and entrepreneurs. The only question is: how best to approach it, from a content strategy and creation perspective? Consider what Professor Scott Galloway said in a recent episode of Pivot: “We’ve gotta stop thinking of TikTok as a social media platform. It’s basically streaming, without a content budget. What would Netflix be worth if it didn’t have to spend $17 billion a year on content?” It’s an in
With more than 2 billion users, WhatsApp is one of the most popular chat platforms in the world. But it’s not keen to rest on its laurels. The Facebook-owned product is expanding into new territories, like shopping and payments. The company is also thinking about even showing ads on the app — but not everyone is happy with these developments. In fact, these have led one ex-WhatsApp executive to believe selling the product to Facebook was a mistake. Niraj Arora, former Chief Business Officer for
GitHub is increasing the security of repositories by requiring all developers to enable two-factor authentication by the end of 2023. The company’s directive is simple: if you contribute to code, you must enable 2FA. GitHub is probably pushing this initiative because the number of people using adequate security measures is so low. The company said only 16.5% of active GitHub users and only 6.44% of NPM registry users use 2FA. Last November, GitHub forced NPM package maintainers to enroll for 2FA
We’ve all heard about amazing employee perks at certain tech companies. From beer taps to Botox, and pawternity leave to free acupuncture, over the last 20 years or so, companies have spent a lot of time (and money) creating impressive benefits packages to attract top talent — plus a few headlines too. But since Covid-19, we’ve started to see a shift. Staff members are no longer looking for onsite laundry facilities or weekly massages. As remote working takes over the tech world, it’s getting ha
One of the biggest issues facing mainstream adoption of VR headsets is their form factor. Anyone familiar with the tech will have the image in their mind: a bulky, binocular-looking blob attached to you like the facehugger from Alien. But Nvidia wants to fix this — and has just released a research paper in collaboration with Stanford University that shows a concept for an ultra-thin pair of holographic glasses for virtual reality. First off, let’s look at why today’s VR headsets are so bulky. Ef
The notoriously secretive Meta has set a milestone for transparency. The company this week offered the entire research community access to a fully-trained large language model (LLM). Named the Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT), the system mirrors the performance and size of OpenAI’s vaunted GPT-3 model. This mimicry is deliberate. While GPT-3 has a stunning ability to produce human-like text, it also has a powerful capacity for biases, bigotry, and disinformation. OPT’s creators said their syste