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... Read more ›
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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... Read more ›
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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... Read more ›
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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 uses a... Read more ›
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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... Read more ›
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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... Read more ›
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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... Read more ›
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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... Read more ›
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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,... Read more ›
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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... Read more ›
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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... Read more ›
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At last: Apple’s apparently upgrading the selfie camera on the upcoming iPhone 14. That’s from a report from a South Korean outlet Electronic Times Internet, which noted that the company has placed an order with LG Inno for front cameras that might cost thrice as much as that of the iPhone 13. Sure, there’s no guarantee that using a costlier component translates to the iPhone 14’s selfie camera being otherworldly.... Read more ›
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The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that, worldwide, nearly one in three (27%) women aged 15-49 years have been subjected to some form of physical and/or emotional violence by their partners. Domestic violence hasn’t decreased in the digital era, as abusers often use technology to stalk, exploit, and control their victims. According to research, such technology-based abuse features everyday tools, from smart devices to online platforms and mobile apps. For... Read more ›
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Renault’s newest concept car isn’t just a looker — there’s a lot more to this prototype than just design. And yes, milk bottles are involved. Credit: Renault An unusual hybrid Called the Scenic Vision, the vehicle is a hybrid, but not in the usual sense. Its 215hp electric motor and 40kW battery are coupled with a 16kW hydrogen fuel cell. The car maker explains that by combining electric and hydrogen... Read more ›
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Several companies, including Apple and Microsoft, are betting that the world of tomorrow will, at least in part, be carried out in the metaverse. To this end, Microsoft recently acquired the video game giant Activision Blizzard for US$68.7 billion. As more of our daily activities take place online, we believe it’s time to consider how this may eventually play out; if tomorrow’s city dwellers prefer the metaverse to brick-and-mortar stores... Read more ›
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The United States Congress recently held a hearing into US government information pertaining to “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs). The last investigation of this kind happened more than 50 years ago, as part of a US Air Force investigation called Project Blue Book, which examined reported sightings of unidentified flying objects (note the change in name). The current hearings are the result of a stipulation attached to a 2020 COVID-19 relief... Read more ›
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In this episode of our video series Unwind With Boris — where TNW co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten talks shop with Dutch entrepreneurs and innovators — Crisp co-founder Eric Klaassen discusses the future of online supermarkets. When online supermarket Crisp launched in 2018, it wasn’t as if the Dutch didn’t have any grocery stores to pick from. There are several big supermarket chains in the Netherlands, such as Jumbo and... Read more ›
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Once upon a time, 8 megapixels on a smartphone camera was a big deal. 50 megapixels used to be impressive. Then 100 MP phones arrived and that was neat too, I guess. But does anyone really want 200 megapixels? That’s what Motorola seems to be banking on with its upcoming flagship phones. Lenovo’s general manager posted an image teasing a 200-megapixel smartphone on Weibo (Lenovo owns Motorola). Read more ›
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MIT researchers recently made one of the boldest claims related to artificial intelligence we’ve seen yet: they believe they’ve built an AI that can identify a person’s race using only medical images. And, according to the popular media, they have no idea how it works! Sure. And I’d like to sell you an NFT of the Brooklyn Bridge. Let’s be clear up front, per the team’s paper, the model can... Read more ›
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Everyone knows about recycling, from when you throw boxes in the paper bin to taking bottles back to the store in exchange for a deposit. But a growing movement now throws recycling on its head: circular design. Circular design completely reimagines product design from the original blueprints to various product lifecycle stages and what happens to each product after it has fulfilled its original purpose. It’s a big deal in... Read more ›
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10.05.2026 16:50
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