Enthusiasts lit up social media recently with images of what appeared to be a “doorway” into a hillside on Mars. Was it, some wondered, evidence that the red planet could be, or have been, inhabited by aliens? The “door” was imaged by Nasa’s Curiosity rover on May 7 on the slopes of Mount Sharp, the central massif within Gale crater, where it landed in 2012. Described on one website as a “pharaonic tomb door”, because of its resemblance to some ancient Egyptian remains, it is in fact only about
Machine-learning systems are increasingly worming their way through our everyday lives, challenging our moral and social values and the rules that govern them. These days, virtual assistants threaten the privacy of the home; news recommenders shape the way we understand the world; risk-prediction systems tip social workers on which children to protect from abuse; while data-driven hiring tools also rank your chances of landing a job. However, the ethics of machine learning remains blurry for man
There’s a new development in the Twitter–Elon Musk deal, and this time, it’s a financial one rather than a juicy controversy. In his latest step, Musk has removed Tesla shares as collateral to secure financing for his acquisition of Twitter. He declared the expiry of margin loans in a new filing with the Security and Exchanges Commission (SEC). When Musk first penned the offer to buy Twitter, he committed $21 billion of his own money, and the rest was acquired through loans. He used Tesla shares
Headphones don’t like my hair. That’s an unfortunate truth for someone who has spent half of his life being a little obsessed with headphones. Getting good sound quality out of most headphones requires a good seal, but years of testing headphones have shown most simply don’t try to account for more voluminous hairstyles like the fro I’ve been growing over the pandemic. People who wear glasses often face similar issues, as the glasses can interfere with the seal to a similar extent. It’s a bigger
Sails have propelled earthlings across the seas for millennia, but NASA believes their future is off-world. The space agency has unveiled plans to develop a new solar sail system for a demonstration mission. Dubbed Diffractive Solar Sailing, the project won Phase III of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which supports visionary space technologies. Those picked for Phase III are the closest to becoming real — so a spacecraft powered by solar sails isn’t a quixotic prospect. In
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