The Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko who faked his own death isn’t alone.
Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was recently found lying face down on the floor of his apartment in Kiev, Ukraine, blood seeping through his T-shirt. He was quickly driven away by an ambulance, pronounced dead, and delivered to a morgue.
But the three bullet holes were fake, and the blood came from a pig — Babchenko was alive.
Continue reading… “How people fake their own death — and why”
The Crisis Text Line uses machine learning to figure out who’s at risk and when to intervene.
When horrible news — like the deaths by suicide of chef, author, and TV star Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade, or the 2015 Paris attacks — breaks, crisis counseling services often get deluged with calls from people in despair. Deciding whom to help first can be a life-or-death decision.
Continue reading… “How data scientists are using AI for suicide prevention”
A major drone company and a major police-camera company are teaming up, and the possibilities are frightening.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
A company that makes stun guns and body cameras is teaming up with a company that makes drones to sell drones to police departments, and that might not even be the most worrisome part. The line of drones from Axon and DJI is called the Axon Air, and the devices will be linked to Axon’s cloud-based database for law enforcement, Evidence.com, which is used to process body-camera data too. And it could open a vast new frontier for police surveillance.
Continue reading… “The next frontier of police surveillance is drones”
VRstudios is launching its virtual reality platform in 112 Dave & Buster’s entertainment restaurant locations with the new game Jurassic World VR Expedition. That makes it the largest deployment of commercial multiplayer VR to date, the partners said.
It took almost five years of work to make happen, according to Dave & Buster’s executive Kevin Bachus, who was the co-creator of the Xbox video game console. The VR game launches ahead of the film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which arrives in U.S. theaters on June 22, 2018.
Continue reading… “VRstudios launches Jurassic World VR attraction at Dave & Buster’s restaurants”
The U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency aims to create a broad-spectrum detoxification robotic platform.
MRSA bacterium captured by a hybrid cell membrane-coated nanorobot (colored scanning electron microscope image and black and white image below) (credit: Esteban-Fernández de Ávila/Science Robotics)
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed tiny ultrasound-powered nanorobots that can swim through blood, removing harmful bacteria and the toxins they produce.
Continue reading… “Ultrasound-powered nanorobots clear bacteria and toxins from blood”
An optical illusion popular in the 19th century could make trips on the Hyperloop appear to take place in a transparent tube. Regularly spaced, narrow windows wouldn’t offer much of a view individually, but if dozens of them pass by every second an effect would be created like that of a zoetrope, allowing passengers to effectively see right through the walls.
It’s an official concept from Virgin Hyperloop One and design house Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and in fact was teased back in 2016. Now the companies have shared a video showing how it would work and what it would look like for passengers — though there’s no indication it would actually be put in place in the first tracks.
Continue reading… “Zoetrope effect could render Hyperloop tubes transparent to riders”
It was discovered quite by accident – in part of a study of a totally different subject.
One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. As I got older, I understood why. We had addiction in my family. And as I watched some of my other close relatives become addicts, I asked myself several questions, but one in particular seemed haunting and insistent: why does addiction so often run in families? Why does it seem to pass from mother to daughter, from father to son, as though it were some dark genetic twist?
Deadly brain tumours could be heated up by MRI scanners until they die in groundbreaking treatment
Deadly brain tumours could be removed in just ten minutes with a groundbreaking new treatment which uses MRI scanners to heat up cancer cells until they die.
The new therapy, developed by University College London, involves injecting a tiny magnetic metal ‘seed’ into the bloodstream and directing it to the site of the cancer.
Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer, is made up of rows of black refrigerator-size units that weigh a total of 340 tons.
The United States just won bragging rights in the race to build the world’s speediest supercomputer.
For five years, China had the world’s fastest computer, a symbolic achievement for a country trying to show that it is a tech powerhouse. But the United States retook the lead thanks to a machine, called Summit, built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Continue reading… “Move over, China: U.S. is again home to the world’s speediest supercomputer”
Generation Z shoppers share a love of real-world retail experiences, as long as they are augmented by technology.
Gen Z, also called the Instagram generation, lives by visuals and expects retailers to make experiences cool and aesthetic, show how products are used, and feature them in their best light. This requires their favorite brands to empower the use of mobile, the Web, and apps, according to “Gen Z Report,” from Criteo.
Continue reading… “Study: Gen Z craves ‘novelty’ and experience”
Kitty Hawk, the mysterious flying-car startup funded by the Google cofounder Larry Page, unwrapped its updated vehicle on Wednesday.
The Flyer is now open for test flights for prospective customers, and the CNN reporter Rachel Crane was the first journalist allowed to pilot the vehicle.
Kitty Hawk promises to get people in the air in less than an hour because of the Flyer’s simple control system, which comprises just two joysticks.
The startup’s CEO said that securing public acceptance for the Flyer is its biggest priority and that he hopes to learn a lot from the test flights.
Are apps to blame, or are millennials just lazy and poor?
As a “younger millennial,” I will admit that any negative news about the millennial generation gets my defensive hackles up. But a new study about millennials and our socializing habits doesn’t seem totally off-base to me. Apparently, younger millennials aren’t going out to drink and date, and there are a lot of pretty good reasons why.
Continue reading… “Millennials aren’t going out to drink and date, study says – but why?”
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