Science & Technology News – Page 211

Clothing, communication, Science & Technology News, Wearables

These ‘smart clothes’ conduct Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to link all your gadgets at once, and can boost your battery life by 1,000 times

February 23, 2020

The clothes can be washed, dried and ironed as with regular garments.

In recent years, wearable devices like smartwatches have become increasingly popular among those who want to keep track of their personal health and fitness.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore invented clothing that conducts Bluetooth and WiFi to connect all your different gadgets, turning the wearer into a pseudo-human circuit board.

The conductive material on the clothing is made from stainless steel in comb-shaped strips attached to the outer surface of the clothing, and can still be washed like any normal clothing.

The team is eventually looking to commercialize the meta-material, particularly in the athletics and healthcare industries where body performance and health monitoring are so important.

Continue reading… “These ‘smart clothes’ conduct Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to link all your gadgets at once, and can boost your battery life by 1,000 times”

AI, communication, Internet, Science & Technology News

AI can automatically rewrite outdated text in Wikipedia articles

February 23, 2020

It’s good to be skeptical of Wikipedia articles for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the possibility of outdated info — human editors can only do so much. And while there are bots that can edit Wikipedia, they’re usually limited to updated canned templates or fighting vandalism. MIT might have a more useful (not to mention more elegant) solution. Its researchers have developed an AI system that automatically rewrites outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles while maintaining a human tone. It won’t look out of line in a carefully crafted paragraph, then.

The machine learning-based system is trained to recognize the differences between a Wikipedia article sentence and a claim sentence with updated facts. If it sees any contradictions between the two sentences, it uses a “neutrality masker” to pinpoint both the contradictory words that need deleting and the ones it absolutely has to keep. After that, an encoder-decoder framework determines how to rewrite the Wikipedia sentence using simplified representations of both that sentence and the new claim.

The system can also be used to supplement datasets meant to train fake news detectors, potentially reducing bias and improving accuracy.

Continue reading… “AI can automatically rewrite outdated text in Wikipedia articles”

Great New Product, privacy, Science & Technology News, Wearables

There’s a privacy bracelet that jams smart speakers and, hell yeah, bring it

February 23, 2020

Smart speakers are creepy recording devices that eavesdrop on unsuspecting people. A new piece of custom technology offers the chance to fight back.

Stylized as a cyberpunk bracelet, a “wearable jammer” was developed by a trio of professors at the University of Chicago. In addition to looking punk rock as all hell, the device emits ultrasonic noise that interferes with microphones’ ability to record yet is inaudible to humans.

Oh, and the professors — Ben Zhao, Heather Zheng, and assistant professor Pedro Lopes — published schematics online so the more technically proficient of you can make one at home.

Notably, this is neither the first time someone has made a microphone jammer nor the first time that ultrasound has been used to screw with smart speakers. This device is special, however, for reasons greater than just its bracelet style.

Continue reading… “There’s a privacy bracelet that jams smart speakers and, hell yeah, bring it”

Architecture, Batteries, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy

These luxury prefabs are going fully off-grid

February 23, 2020

Dvele homes will now come with a new thermal enevelop, solar power, and a backup battery system

High-end prefab home builder Dvele just got a little more high-tech—and eco-conscious. The San Diego-based company, which is known for its luxury prefab designs, announced this week that it would start exclusively building fully self-powered homes going forward.

Since its founding in 2017, Dvele has branded itself as a sustainable option in the prefab space, but its new initiative takes it a step further with homes that run entirely on solar power and stored energy. Dvele’s models are similar to other eco-minded prefab homes in that a major focus is to limit the amount of wasted energy produced in the first place.

Continue reading… “These luxury prefabs are going fully off-grid”

Analysis, Co Working, Employment, Science & Technology News, Trending

The 2020 state of remote work

February 22, 2020

Top insights and data from one of the largest remote work reports.

When some people think of the workplace of the future, they envision futuristic-style holograms having a meeting or robots cooking lunch for everyone in the office.

Increasingly, though, the workplace of the future is looking more simple — people having the flexibility to work remotely from home with teammates all around the world.

With that in mind, the question is no longer “is remote work here to stay?” It seems like remote work might even be the new normal.

The real question now is “what trends are growing across the remote work landscape?”

So, we’re digging into the data.

Continue reading… “The 2020 state of remote work”

Business, Entertainment, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Roku predicts half of US homes will have cut the cord and dropped cable by 2024

February 21, 2020

Roku predicts that by 2024, half of all U.S. homes will have never had cable TV or will have canceled their subscription.

Roku sees this trend boosting its business, which it frames as being a “neutral partner at the center of the streaming ecosystem.”

Roku predicts that within four years, half of all U.S. homes will have never had cable TV or will have canceled their subscription, the company said in a letter to investors on Thursday released along with the company’s fourth quarter 2019 results.

The consumer shift from expensive cable TV packages to cheaper and more flexible “over-the-top” internet streaming services has been driving a wave of investment and competition in the media industry.

Continue reading… “Roku predicts half of US homes will have cut the cord and dropped cable by 2024”

Employment, Future, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

The future of work in technology

February 21, 2020

How technology leaders can reimagine technology work, the workforce, and the workplace

The future of work in technology, encompassing work, workforce, and workplace, is undergoing a transformation. How can technology and business leaders strategize, design, and collaborate to succeed in this journey?

EVOLVING strategic business imperatives, trends, and disrupters are driving a seismic shift in the way IT organizations operate. This report—part of a series exploring the merger of business and technology strategies and the reimagination of technology’s role in the business—aims to address fundamental questions about the future of work in technology:

How can organizations leverage technology to redesign current work outcomes to focus on exponential increases in productivity and cost efficiencies and redefine new work outcomes that extend beyond productivity and cost to value, meaning, and impact?

How will tomorrow’s technology workforce be different than today’s? How will jobs and roles change? What skills and capabilities will be needed?

Continue reading… “The future of work in technology”

Analysis, Human Behavior, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

Why aren’t more highly intelligent people rich?

February 20, 2020

A Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Says Another Factor Matters a Lot More

Intelligence is important, but intelligence without effort is sometimes wasted.

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman likes to ask people how great a role innate intelligence plays in financial success. Like how much the difference between my income and yours, for example, is based on our relative IQs.

Most people say about 25 percent. Some go as high as 50 percent. (For a long time, I would gave guessed even more.)

But Heckman’s research reveals something else entirely. Innate intelligence plays, at best, a 1 to 2 percent role in a child’s future success.

Continue reading… “Why aren’t more highly intelligent people rich?”

AI, brain hacking, Games, military drones, Science & Technology News

US Army to study gamers’ brains to build AI military robots

February 23, 2020

A group of experts wants to study the brain waves and eye movements of people playing a video game in order to build an advanced AI that could coordinate the actions of military robots.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, awarded a team from the University of Buffalo’s Artificial Intelligence Institute a $316,000 grant for the study.

Although swarm robotics is inspired by many things, including ant colonies, researchers believe that humans have a lot of potential to improve AI learning systems. The study of 25 video game players will include real-time strategy games such as StarCraft, Stellaris and Company of Heroes.

Continue reading… “US Army to study gamers’ brains to build AI military robots”

brain hacking, Healthcare, Legalized marijuana, Medicine, Science & Technology News

Move over, pot: Psychedelic companies are about to go public

February 20, 2020

The first companies developing medical treatments from psychedelic drugs like LSD, ketamine and the active ingredient in magic mushrooms are gearing up to list on Canadian stock exchanges.

Mind Medicine Inc., which is undertaking clinical trials of psychedelic-based drugs, intends to list on Toronto’s NEO Exchange by the first week of March, said JR Rahn, the company’s co-founder and co-chief executive officer. A NEO spokesman confirmed the listing, which is pending final approvals.

The company plans to list via a reverse takeover under the ticker MMED. It’s not yet generating revenue and is targeting a valuation of approximately $50 million, Rahn said. MindMed counts former Canopy Growth Corp. co-CEO Bruce Linton as a director and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary as an investor.

“Our ambition is to be one of the first publicly listed neuro-pharmaceutical companies developing psychedelic medicines,” Rahn said in a phone interview.

Continue reading… “Move over, pot: Psychedelic companies are about to go public”

Environment, Health & Fitness, New Discoveries, Science & Technology News

What’s in your water? Researchers identify new toxic byproducts of disinfecting drinking water

February 20, 2020

When phenols, compounds that are commonly found in drinking water, mix with chlorine, hundreds of unknown, potentially toxic byproducts are formed.

Mixing drinking water with chlorine, the United States’ most common method of disinfecting drinking water, creates previously unidentified toxic byproducts, says Carsten Prasse from Johns Hopkins University and his collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley and Switzerland.

The researchers’ findings were published this past week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

“There’s no doubt that chlorine is beneficial; chlorination has saved millions of lives worldwide from diseases such as typhoid and cholera since its arrival in the early 20th century,” says Prasse, an assistant professor of Environmental Health and Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University and the paper’s lead author.

“But that process of killing potentially fatal bacteria and viruses comes with unintended consequences. The discovery of these previously unknown, highly toxic byproducts, raises the question how much chlorination is really necessary.”

Continue reading… “What’s in your water? Researchers identify new toxic byproducts of disinfecting drinking water”

Engineering, New Inventions, new technology, quantum computing, Science & Technology News

Engineers just built an impressively stable quantum silicon chip from artificial atoms

February 19, 2020

Newly created artificial atoms on a silicon chip could become the new basis for quantum computing.

Engineers in Australia have found a way to make these artificial atoms more stable, which in turn could produce more consistent quantum bits, or qubits – the basic units of information in a quantum system.

The research builds on previous work by the team, wherein they produced the very first qubits on a silicon chip, which could process information with over 99 percent accuracy. Now, they have found a way to minimise the error rate caused by imperfections in the silicon.

“What really excites us about our latest research is that artificial atoms with a higher number of electrons turn out to be much more robust qubits than previously thought possible, meaning they can be reliably used for calculations in quantum computers,” said quantum engineer Andrew Dzurak of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.

“This is significant because qubits based on just one electron can be very unreliable.”

Continue reading… “Engineers just built an impressively stable quantum silicon chip from artificial atoms”