A few weeks ago, the phrase “social distancing” didn’t mean much to most folks. These days, you hear it frequently. It’s all about flattening the curve by physically staying away from other people to ensure that our hospitals have enough room for those who need it in the wake of the novel coronavirus. (And yes,…
Category: Technology
‘Picard’ finally shows us how Star Trek’s technology evolves
Over seven seasons various TNG episodes continued to explore what the holodeck could do. Deep Space Nine (DS9) even gave us a recurring holographic character, lounge singer Vic Fontaine. But it was Voyager that made a sentient hologram part of the main cast, and spent the next seven years exploring the concept of having a…
Mozilla combines tracker blocking with paid, ad-free browsing
Last year, Mozilla partnered with Scroll — a subscription service that enables ad-free browsing of its partner publications — to analyze if a select group of users preferred paying a small fee rather than being served ads, and if the strategy was cost-effective for the publications. After seeing promising results, the two companies have announced…
You Can See the Coronavirus From Space
Can you see the novel coronavirus from space? You can, as it happens—if you know where to look. Since January, the Colorado-based space technology company Maxar has been taking low Earth orbit satellite photographs of Covid-19 hotspots in places like China, Italy, and America. The company’s four imaging satellites take the highest-resolution commercially available photographs,…
Popular European banking app Revolut is launching in the US today
Mobile banking app Revolut, which has more than 10 million customers in Europe, is launching today in the US, the company announced. Like Monzo, a UK-based banking app that made the jump to the US last June, Revolut is entirely app-based and doesn’t operate any brick-and-mortar locations. That means you can sign up for an…
Apple Music’s Beats 1 station will broadcast from hosts’ homes
Office workers aren’t the only ones who can work from home during the coronavirus pandemic — radio DJs can do so, too. Show hosts on Beats 1, Apple Music’s internet radio station, will be broadcasting from the safety of their homes starting today. According to Apple, they will use FaceTime on their iPhones to conduct…
400,000 new people have joined Folding@Home’s fight against COVID-19
The Folding@Home community has turned its attention toward the fight against COVID-19, and it now has massive computational power at its disposal as a result. The distributed computing project is now working with about 470 petaflops of output in its quest to fold proteins, or enough to eclipse the world’s top seven supercomputers combined. That’s…
If Robots Steal So Many Jobs, Why Aren’t They Saving Us Now?
Modern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread around the world, hobbling any economy in its path. In the United States, where consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity, commerce has come to a standstill as people…
Sacramento Kings arena to use liquor-measuring gadget to control how much guests drink
The Sacramento Kings arena will let guests in its suite and loft areas make their own drinks at the Golden 1 Center using an internet-connected gadget affixed to the top of liquor bottles to monitor how much alcohol is being poured. It sounds like a good idea from the venue’s point of view: the NINA…
Waymo’s first outside investment round includes car industry heavyweights
Alphabet is also contributing, but it appears to be in the minority this time around.Waymo was vague about how it would use the funds, saying only that this would help “our people, our technology, and our operations.” One look at Waymo’s business suggests that it has plenty of need for cash, though. In addition to…