The tech-industry is led by sci-fi nerds who want to create the things they read about, or saw on screen.
We all stand to benefit, provided that is, they can avoid the ethical pitfalls depicted in science fiction.
Continue reading “How does science fiction influence the real world?” »
This marks the seventh year that the particle accelerator has been in operation.
At 12:17 p.m. on Friday, March 30, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was switched on once again, making 2018 the seventh year that the world’s largest particle accelerator has been in operation. It is also excitingly the fourth year running now that the LHC will have achieved 13 TeV collision energy.
Over the past four months, much maintenance has been conducted on the LHC, but with the work now completed the ATLAS experiment has begun a glorious new year as the Large Hadron Collider is now back in the business of circulating proton beams, as ATLAS report.
NASA’s latest Mars probe has a couple of very special hitchhikers.
O n the outskirts of Beijing, a policeman peers over his glasses at a driver stopped at a motorway checkpoint. As he looks at the man’s face, a tiny camera in one of the lenses of his glasses records his features and checks them with a national database.
The artificial intelligence-powered glasses are what Chinese citizens refer to as “black tech”, because they spot delinquents on the country’s “blacklist”. Other examples include robots for crowd control, drones that hover over the country’s borders, and intelligent systems to track behaviour online. Some reports claim the government has installed scanners that can forcibly read information from smartphones.
In the last two weeks, Facebook has been mired in a privacy storm in the UK and US over potential misuse of personal data. But such an event might baffle many in China, where the country’s surveillance culture eclipses anything Facebook has done.
Continue reading “No-limits China sets its sights on AI top spot” »
If you rely on WhatsApp to message friends and family, it’s important to know that the service lets your contacts know about when you’re available to chat, and whether you’ve read their texts.
That’s not all: Lifehacker has spotted Chatwatch, a new iOS app that uses WhatsApp’s public online/offline status feature to tell users how often their friends check the app, and estimate when they go to bed each day; it can even correlate data on two contacts you choose to guess if they’ve been talking to each other.
Yeah, there’s no need to give anyone that sort of ammo. I prefer to maintain a low profile on messaging services so I can chat and respond on my own terms, so it’s rather alarming to know that my contacts can keep tabs on me this way.
It’s not a great feeling to know that you scared your doctors. Unfortunately for a man in the UK, he recently did so: he displayed a case of gonorrhea that so dramatically resisted treatment that it chilled his physicians.
That’s partially because gonorrhea isn’t the best thing to leave untreated. But another reason: this case is a harbinger of a looming crisis.
