Tech

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram started out as a way to connect with friends, family and people of interest. But anyone on social media these days knows it’s increasingly a divisive landscape. Undoubtedly you’ve heard reports that hackers and even foreign governments are using social media to manipulate and attack you. You

While artificial intelligence systems continue to make huge strides forward, they’re still not particularly good at dealing with chaos or unpredictability. Now researchers think they have found a way to fix this, by teaching AI about physics. To be more specific, teaching them about the Hamiltonian function, which gives the AI information about the entirety

By making use of the ‘spooky’ laws behind quantum entanglement, physicists think have found a way to make information leap between a pair of electrons separated by distance. Teleporting fundamental states between photons – massless particles of light – is quickly becoming old news, a trick we are still learning to exploit in computing and encrypted communications

The list of the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world just got updated again, and there’s a new number one: the Fugaku supercomputer built by the RIKEN Institute and the Fujitsu tech company in Japan. IBM’s Summit supercomputer has been comprehensively pushed into second place, because Fugaku can crunch through 415.5 quadrillion computations per second (also

Stripped of any fancy circuitry and complex layers of higher order thinking, the nervous system is little more than a calculator for making smart choices. Food is good, but what if it’s toxic? Empty calories won’t give you energy, but what if they’re satisfying? To better study how a rudimentary brain deals with decisions between

For the first time, US doctors can prescribe a video game. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved EndeavorRX as an effective treatment for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Children aged 8-12 years old can now be prescribed gaming sessions on EndeavorRX, in which players pilot a small aircraft through

Artificial intelligence networks have learnt a new trick: being able to create photo-realistic faces from just a few pixelated dots, adding in features such as eyelashes and wrinkles that can’t even be found in the original. Before you freak out, it’s good to note this is not some kind of creepy reverse pixelation that can

Synthetic gas, or syngas for short, is a crucial building block in the chemical manufacturing industry. Most people may never have heard of syngas, but every day it is used in the production of drugs, fertiliser, plastic, and biofuels. Unfortunately, even when syngas – a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide – is fermented to produce

So much of our everyday tech runs on batteries, the importance of lithium-ion rechargeables cannot be overstated. But they are expensive to produce, with difficult-to-source materials. There is an alternative - sodium-ion batteries have the potential to be cheaper and more easily produced, if we can get past the problem of getting these batteries to work

This summer, the clean energy company SINN Power is showcasing “the world’s first floating ocean hybrid platform” – a high-tech buoy that produces electricity from not one, not two, but three sources of renewable energy.  Using waves, wind, and the sun, the SINN Power floating structure, which can supposedly withstand waves up to six metres

A US Navy ship downed a flying drone with a “solid state laser” in the Pacific Ocean, the service branch announced on Friday. The USS Portland (LPD-27), a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship, deployed its Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) against an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) last week during a demonstration, the

Our neurons talk in melodies; understanding their rhythms has proved key to creating a new device that could join their conversations. Just as glasses can aid our struggling eyes, the hope is that artificial brain matter could one day aid our brain bits that aren’t working as well as they could be. An international team

A tiny device called a micro-comb could one day replace existing internet infrastructure to hit crazy new highs in download speeds, providing millions with ample data at the same time, even during the busiest periods. The lightweight technology has recently been put to the test in a field trial that measured data rates of an

Here’s something you might not have expected to see Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot doing any time soon: herding sheep on a rugged New Zealand mountainside. The slightly bizarre sequence is part of a promotional video demonstrating Spot’s potential in the agricultural industry; it also includes footage of Spot checking on crops and clambering over

Cell phone towers across New Zealand are being set on fire and authorities believe the attacks are linked to the increasing proliferation of conspiracy theories connecting 5G networks to the coronavirus pandemic. As of May 18, 17 cell towers had been attacked in Auckland, Wellington, and Northland, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.

The chaos and uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic have claimed an unlikely victim: the machine learning systems that are programmed to make sense of our online behavior. The algorithms that recommend products on Amazon, for instance, are struggling to interpret our new lifestyles, MIT Technology Review reports. And while machine learning tools are built to

Scientists have developed a new type of self-assembling silver membrane that could be used to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions before they have a chance to spread in the atmosphere. Using a technique the team says has never been attempted before, the researchers seeded their gas separation membrane with only a tiny deposit of the

Scientists are very keen to find effective ways of getting hydrogen from water, thus unlocking hydrogen’s potential as a clean fuel. A newly developed device manages the feat, using only sunlight as a power source. Using catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells fused together in a single unit, the clever contraption can hit sunlight-to-hydrogen efficiency

NASA engineers have designed a mass-producible ventilator tailored to coronavirus patients, and it could get emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration by the weekend. A team of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, designed and built the ventilator in just 37 days. The device, called VITAL as an acronym for

Whether you use Zoom, Skype or Microsoft Teams, the webcam on your home PC or laptop device has probably never been as active as it is during this pandemic. Most of us have a camera built into our phone, tablet, laptop, or a desktop webcam we use for work, study or virtual socialising. Unfortunately, this

Today, the world is grappling with more than just the climate crisis, and yet even now, in the face of a global pandemic, scientists are marching on with renewable solutions. Just this month, no less than three records have been broken in solar panel efficiency. The first and the second were achieved by scientists in

Much of the work undertaken by artificial intelligence involves a training process known as machine learning, where AI gets better at a task such as recognising a cat or mapping a route the more it does it. Now that same technique is being use to create new AI systems, without any human intervention. For years,

As quantum computers continue to grow in size and complexity, engineers are hitting a major obstacle. All of that added machinery means higher temperatures – and if anything can ruin a perfectly good quantum bit, it’s heat. There are a few possible solutions, but any fix needs to be small and compatible with existing silicon

You may have heard of Folding @ home, the number-crunching app you can run on your computer to help researchers tackle certain medical problems, including the new coronavirus. In the past month, the network of volunteers who’ve installed it has become so vast, the platform is outperforming the most powerful supercomputers in the world. According

Researchers working for industrial development company Carbios have created a mutant bacterial enzyme that can break down plastic bottles for recycling in only a couple of hours, according to The Guardian. The enyzme can break down PET plastic bottles into their individual chemical composites, which could later be reused to make brand new bottles. Conventional recycled

When the end of the world comes, how will you tweet? Thankfully for those of us who didn’t have a plan ready, Motherboard reports that software developer Virgil Dupras has built an operating system — Collapse OS — that can be run on parts salvaged from a post-apocalyptic hellscape. The idea is to find ways

Those Knightscope security robots may not be so great at their jobs. When a woman in a park near Los Angeles saw people fighting and tried to summon help via a police robot patrolling nearby, the robot merely told her to “step out of the way” and continued along its pre-determined route, according to NBC

A new gel-like fluid that sticks to vegetation for months on end could be an ingenious new way to stop mother nature from burning. Devised by an engineer and a former fire-prevention forester, this sprayable retardant could one day be used to drastically reduce the number of forest fires experienced each year. By coating vast

The bigger they come, the harder they fall, the old saying goes – or in this case, the more popular the game, the more user data is at risk, should hackers get access to it. That’s reportedly what’s happened with smash mobile hit Words With Friends. A hacker by the name of Gnosticplayers claims to

Tesla’s “Smart Summon” feature, which lets cars navigate themselves in parking lots, isn’t even out of beta yet. But Tesla owners are already using it in some mind-bogglingly stupid ways, Electrek reports. In a video uploaded to YouTube account “Dirty Tesla”, a Model 3 owner tries to walk in front of his vehicle while the

Autonomous driving will bring us a number of freedoms. Passengers will be able to watch movies, read newspapers – if they still exist – or play video games while the AI drives. But BMW thinks being chauffeured by a self-driving car can get a whole lot more exciting than that. The German carmaker released –

There is such a thing as not enough chaos. In a new study, scientists have discovered that complex calculations performed by computers can be off by as much as 15 percent, due to a “pathological” inability to grasp the true mathematical complexity of chaotic dynamical systems. “Our work shows that the behaviour of the chaotic

We’ve watched the Spot robot quadruped grow up and evolve, from its earliest days as a larger, more cumbersome beast to a carefully refined machine capable of pulling trucks. Now maker Boston Dynamics is putting the robo-dog on sale. The idea is not to provide a friendly pet that curls up in front of the

We just entered a fundamental new epoch in computing. Maybe. Google scientists said we did. Then their declaration mysteriously vanished. Last week, a scientific paper by Google and affiliated researchers was uploaded on a NASA website. Its contents – if legitimate – are not insignificant. In the paper, the scientists claim that quantum processors have

Quantum computers exist today, although they’re limited, cut-down versions of what we hope fully blown quantum computers are going to be able to do in the future. But now, researchers have developed hardware for a ‘probabilistic computer’ – a device that might be able to bridge the gap between genuine quantum computers and the standard

Here’s your dismal fact of the day: if the world’s cement industry was a country, it would sit just behind China and the US as the third leading producer of carbon pollution. It doesn’t need to be that way, though. We just might be able to change that ugly statistic by producing the ingredients for

Wi-Fi just turned 6. Not in terms of years old (Wi-Fi is a lot older than that), but in terms of its version number: Wi-Fi 6 officially launched this week. What does that mean for you? Well, if you’re anything like me – meaning you spend a lot of time indoors using the internet –

Two years ago, one freezing December night on a California rooftop, a tiny light shone weakly with a little help from the freezing night air. It wasn’t a very bright glow. But it was enough to demonstrate the possibility of generating renewable power after the Sun goes down. Working with Stanford University engineers Wei Li and

Scientists have invented a new method for turning carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can efficiently store energy in fuel cells.  The fuel could one day be the future of green transport, cramming more energy into the tank than the same volume of hydrogen while also serving as a building block for a whole

China’s iPhone users have found a new craze – a new app called Zao which lets people convincingly and hilariously transpose their faces onto actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kit Harrington from Game of Thrones, and many others. Zao topped the Chinese iOS download chart over the weekend after first launching on the App Store on

Silicon has had a very good run as the material upon which all of our electronics are based, but it’s starting to reach its limits. Now there’s a new contender for running our computers and smartphones: carbon nanotubes. Scientists just made the largest working computer chip to date out of this hugely promising material. And

Sounds like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was just kicked out of mom’s basement. In an inexplicable tweet, DARPA asked for help finding “commercially managed underground urban tunnels and facilities able to host research and experimentation.” And nobody knows why. The ideal space would be a human-made underground environment spanning several city blocks w/

The brain is the ultimate computing machine, so it’s no wonder researchers are keen to try and emulate it. Now, new research has taken an intriguing step in that direction – a device that’s able to ‘forget’ memories, just like our brains do. It’s called a second-order memristor (a mix of “memory” and “resistor”). The clever

Underwhelming sound quality while listening to music on Spotify is most likely a result of poor quality headphones, but maybe the equaliser settings in Spotify can help, at least a little. Even with a high quality pair of headphones, using the equaliser settings in Spotify can help mould the sound to your preference. In fact,

Popular video platform YouTube took down a number of combat robotics videos – robot vs. robot competitions popularised by the show BattleBots – on the grounds that they include “deliberate infliction of animal suffering or the forcing of animals to fight”, including “cock fighting”. A recent video by YouTube channel Maker’s Muse brought the strange phenomenon

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the Moon in 1969, they helped to cement the idea of a “moonshot” – a goal or achievement that challenges what we thought was possible. While few moonshots measure up to the Apollo program, many of the world’s greatest inventions were once thought of as similarly

Researchers have developed an electronics heat shield just 10 atoms thick, a shield that has the potential to make our gadgets both safer to use and more compact in the future. Heat and electronics don’t mix well, which is why you might find your laptop shutting down in protest if you use it in the

As wearable technology grows ever more delicate and minute, some medical gadgets are on the brink of merging seamlessly with our skin. Researchers at Stanford University have now created a flexible electronic sticker that can wirelessly monitor a person’s pulse, respiration and muscle activity at the same time. A recent description of the unique system, known