Robo-bees and drone-seeded forests: can technology mend our broken relationship with the natural world?

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A drone offers a unique bird’s eye view as part of a forest fire surveillance system in the Landes region, France.

I’ve tried many ways to free my brain from my iPhone. I’ve invented rules, bought books, deleted apps, installed other apps. But the only thing that reliably works is to leave the phone at home and to walk along a path through the nearby woods. With trees overhead, and mud below, you quickly forget the last social media notification. You escape the internet of things by surrounding yourself with things that can never be plugged in.

Continue reading… “Robo-bees and drone-seeded forests: can technology mend our broken relationship with the natural world?”

Vertical farms have nailed leafy greens. Next up: tasty peaches

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San Francisco-based Plenty already supplies produce for Google’s kitchens. Now it’s on a mission to expand what hydroponic farms can grow.

Of the many crops that Matt Barnard has developed, he has a particular fondness for his kale. “If you think about what most people imagine when then they think of kale, think again,” he says. “It’s nothing like the tough, bitter leaf we’re used to. It’s sweet and velvety. People say we should find another name for it.”

Continue reading… “Vertical farms have nailed leafy greens. Next up: tasty peaches”

Cross a John Deere with a Roomba, and you get this crop-monitoring robot

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Farms are a hotbed for automation. Robots, drones, and artificial intelligence have been assisting in agriculture for years and 2017 showed they could farm an acre and a half of barley, from planting to tending and harvesting, without a human stepping foot on the field.

Now there is a small but robust robot that could take care of the more tedious agricultural tasks. It’s called TerraSentia and the four-wheeled robot developed by engineers at the University of Illinois boasts a variety of sensors that can monitor and transmit crop data in real time. It won’t take full autonomy over a farm but is designed to serve as a little cog in a bigger machine.

Continue reading… “Cross a John Deere with a Roomba, and you get this crop-monitoring robot”

Tech giants like Google and Alibaba are working to save endangered species

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Black markets have been using popular social apps and platforms to ply their illicit trade.

Google, eBay and other technology leaders are aiming to protect the world’s animals. Why? In a widely unregulated social-media world, many tech platforms have become a haven for the wildlife black market, a $20 billion industry.

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Crypto exchanges are charging up to $1 million per ICO to list tokens: ‘It’s pure capitalism’

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Cryptocurrency exchanges are charging between $50,000 and $1 million to list initial coin offerings, according to a Business Insider investigation.

“The exchanges are where the liquidity is — it’s where the money is — so that’s where the power is just at the moment,” Michael Jackson, a partner at venture capital firm Mangrove Partners, told BI.

Exchanges are dominant now but that may change with tougher regulations and more standardised business models.

Continue reading… “Crypto exchanges are charging up to $1 million per ICO to list tokens: ‘It’s pure capitalism’”

A new AI breakthrough will soon make it much easier to communicate with anyone in the world

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Machines are getting much better at the jobs we humans normally do.

As any translator will tell you, transforming the words from one language into another is a task that draws on an enormous reservoir of training, experience, and art.

Continue reading… “A new AI breakthrough will soon make it much easier to communicate with anyone in the world”

The Population Bomb Has Been Defused

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The Earth and humanity will survive as fertility rates fall almost everywhere.

Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus, a British economist writing in the late 1700s, is the most famous of these. Extrapolating past trends into the future, he predicted that population growth would inevitably swamp available food resources, leading to mass starvation. That didn’t happen — we continued to develop new technologies that let us stay ahead of the reaper.

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Boring Company will prioritize pedestrian transportation over cars, says Musk

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When Elon Musk first unveiled The Boring Company, its plan was to create a network of underground tunnels used to transport vehicles at high speeds to help bypass and eliminate traffic. Now the founder has come out with an updated vision, saying that The Boring Company’s tunnels will first focus on transporting pedestrians and cyclists first, essentially serving as a new form of mass transit, before it begins moving personal vehicles.

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Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent ‘weaponised’ web

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Tim Berners-Lee: ‘What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.’

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has called for large technology firms to be regulated to prevent the web from being “weaponised at scale”.

The web can be weaponised – and we can’t count on big tech to stop it

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The secret to making $115 an hour in the gig economy

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10 highest-paying fields — with lots of growth — for gig workers

This is one hell of a gig.

Millions of workers now participate in the gig economy — loosely defined as the workers who work a series of freelance or temporary jobs rather than one full-time job. Indeed, about one in four Americans now participates in the digital gig economy, using apps or websites like Airbnb or Uber to earn some extra cash.

Continue reading… “The secret to making $115 an hour in the gig economy”

How Did Astronaut DNA Become ‘Fake News’?

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For a brief moment, NASA found itself at the center of a digital misinformation campaign.

“After year in space, astronaut Scott Kelly no longer has same DNA as identical twin,” the headline of a story on the Today show’s website, published Thursday, declared. Seven percent of his DNA, the story says, “has not returned to normal since he returned from space.”

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