In mid-April, Elon Musk made public his desire to acquire Twitter, make it a private company, and overhaul its moderation policies. Citing ideals of free speech, Musk claimed that “Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have the, both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” While making Twitter free for all “within the bounds of the law” seems like a way to ensure free speech in theor
“Becoming a digital consumer goods company is our ambition,” says Atul Bhardwaj, Chief Digital and Technology Officer of The Lego Group, in a not entirely predictable statement statement — coming from the world’s most valuable manufacturer of physical toys. “We’ll always be anchored in the physical — just to be clear — but digital needs to come in and augment that physical build process,” Bhardwaj clarifies. “Our business has scaled a lot in the last two years; we need to make sure that our plat
Even during times of conflict on the ground, space has historically been an arena of collaboration among nations. But trends in the past decade suggest that the nature of cooperation in space is shifting, and fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted these changes. I’m an international relations scholar who studies power distributions in space – who the main players are, what capabilities they possess and whom they decide to cooperate with. Some scholars predict a future in which
By now, we all know the most known use of blockchain technology: cryptocurrency. Of course, this isn’t all there is though. In 2022, we’ve seen NFTs (non-fungible tokens that are part of the Ethereum blockchain) capture the public’s imagination — but outside of this, blockchain as a whole hasn’t translated into something most people use. In fact, the majority of news in this space often appears hyped or pointless. From an outsider’s perspective, it appears as though companies put things on the b
Although the space race between Bezos, Branson, and Musk dominated the headlines last year, the growing SpaceTech revolution will be about more than billionaires blasting off to space in dildo-shaped rockets. Rather than seeing who can go furthest (or who’s got the bigger rocket), the much more quiet revolution will be about looking inwards. The democratization of satellite monitoring and data is bringing about a new era in which technologies like geothermal heat mapping, satellite-based IoT cap
It used to be easy enough to record a phone call on your Android device, but that’s changing starting now. A recent update to the Google Play Store developer policy will force third-party call recording apps to stop offering their services. Google’s reasoning is the potential misuse of the accessibility API, which is utilized by most call recording apps to enable this function. The company noted “The Accessibility API is not designed and cannot be requested for remote call audio recording.” True
Like almost every car company nowadays Lincoln is entering the electrification era. On Wednesday, Ford’s luxury brand revealed its long anticipated Star Concept, which offers a preview of the designlanguage and possible features of its upcoming electric lineup. Behold! Credit: Lincoln Don’t get fooled by its minimalist exterior. Fully-electric concepts from many car makers rely on the idea of a lounge on wheels, but the Star Concept takes the idea to the next level. To maximize the feeling of sp
As car manufacturers and battery cell makers race to develop more efficient and cost-effective EV batteries, there’s one material that’s been gaining significant traction in replacing graphite in the anode: silicon. To that end, California-based startup OneD Battery Sciences has produced silicon nanowires that can be fused directly onto the commercial graphite particles found in the anodes of batteries. The impact? Potentially tripling the energy density of the anode, reducing charging times, an
In the last few days, both the Brave browser and DuckDuckGo search engine announced features that actively block or bypass pages hosted on Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) protocol. That sounds important — and it is — but what does it mean for you? In this story, we’ll break down what AMP is, and why Brave and DuckDuckGo are going on an offensive against it. First, the basics. What’s AMP? Google first introduced AMP in 2015 with an aim to make pages and articles load faster on mobile. The
Instagram this week announced several changes to its platform aimed at empowering creators. Most notably, the company has tweaked its ranking algorithm to highlight original content above reshared content. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said the following about the ranking change: “If you create something from scratch, you should get more credit than if you are resharing something that you found from someone else. We’re going to do more to try and value original content more, particularly compar