Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, tweeted in December that the all-electric carmaker was working on a charger “that automatically moves out from the wall and connects like a solid metal snake. A video shows it’s more bizarre and mesmerizing than we could have imagined. Of its unveiling, Musk tweeted, “Tesla Snakebot autocharger prototype. Does seem kinda wrong :)”
The world is on the brink of a new industrial revolution in which advances in the field of artificial intelligence will obsolete human labor, according to many economists and technologists today. Two Oxford researchers recently analyzed the skills required for more than 700 different occupations to determine how many of them would be susceptible to automation in the near future, and the news was not good: They concluded that machines are likely to take over 47 percent of today’s jobs within a few decades.
Continue reading… “Jobs held by men are most at risk from the robot worker”
With the help of Google Maps, there is a new service called Project Sunroof that aims to provide a “treasure map” of solar energy. Sunroof gives homeowners detailed information about how much solar power their roof can generate and how much money they could save on electricity costs by adding solar panels.
The UK is hoping to significantly boost the range of electric cars by introducing roads in an 18-month trial that can charge the vehicles as they drive along them.
Continue reading… “England is testing out roads that charge electric cars as you drive along them”
Boston Dynamics, a Google-owned company, scared everyone earlier this year with its hive-mind 160-pound robot dogs that can run on almost any terrain. Now the company is taking things to an all-new level with new video of its humanoid robot, which is the closest thing to a real-life Terminator we’ve ever seen.
Continue reading… “Google’s humanoid robot can now chase you like a Terminator”
Vail Resorts is trying something different on its ski slopes this winter. The resort has updated its EpicMix smartphone app to offer its crowdsourced, real-time wait times for ski lifts. The app will collect data from the RFID-enabled season passes skiers carry at the resort. It’s one of the most ambitious efforts yet to bring Waze-style crowdsourced location data into the sports and vacation spheres.
3D-printed widgets and other medical novelties clearly illustrate the potential of 3D printing. They are set to radically change the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. With its extreme versatility and inherent ability to customize products, many experts believe that 3D printing will finally blow the field of affordable personalized medicine wide open. Yet so far it’s been mostly hope — and plenty of hype — with little sign that the radical technology might actually become a medical mainstay.
Thanks to a proposal by Samsung, the Internet might soon become a lot more accessible by lending the world an extra zetabyte of bandwidth every month. The proposal describes a system requiring the deployment of 4,600 Low Earth Orbit satellites, abbreviated LEO.
Continue reading… “Samsung hopes to provide affordable 5G Internet using low Earth orbit satellites”
An online financial services start-up, Wealthfront, has squarely and unashamedly targeted Millennial wallets and raised$64 million last month. That’s on top of $35 million that venture firms plowed into the company earlier this year.
Continue reading… “Millennials have become the Ben Franklin generation”
The labor movement in the U.S. is finally starting to go online. It was born from the shifting economic environment created by the Industrial Revolution—and we are, once again, at a technological turning point: this time, change is driven across transistors rather than by steam engines. Labor issues are as much in flux as any part of the economy, with Uber and other “on-demand economy” companies creating both new opportunities and new perils for workers. Workers’ rights are struggling to keep pace with technological progress.
Continue reading… “Has digital technology created a new labor movement?”
Trend Micro researchers Kyle Wilhoit and Stephen Hilt decided to take a closer look at gas station monitoring systems after one was hacked earlier this hear. They set up fake internet-connected systems called “GasPots” — honeypots that mimic the real ones — in several countries to track hackers’ movements.
Continue reading… “U.S. gas stations under attack by hackers”
Eyeglasses that help users protect their privacy by disabling facial-recognition systems in cameras have been developed and are set to go on sale in Japan, according to the National Institute of Informatics.