TECH_PEOPLE

There’s been a major shift in how America makes electricity over the past two decades. Each state has its own story.

Via THE OFFICIAL ANDREASCY

Artificial intelligence and brain–computer interfaces must respect and preserve people's privacy, identity, agency and equality, say Rafael Yuste, Sara Goering and colleagues.

Via Spaceweaver

From cranberry bogs to cattle feedlots, George Steinmetz captures the grand and disturbing nature of our expansive food system.

Via Alessio Erioli

Brixo's chrome coating allows it to conduct electricity.

Via THE OFFICIAL ANDREASCY

French designers Philippe Starck and Jerome Olivet have proposed a radical concept for the future of smartphones based around holograms and voice control.

Via Manuel Muehlbauer

Via S P H E R I C A L

Via S P H E R I C A L

Westworld recently wrapped its first season with a few stunning twists and a stunning statistic: With a 12-million-viewer average,…

Via Alessio Erioli

At a presentation today, Elon Musk basically said that his life's mission is to make humans an interplanetary species. In addition to reinforcing his passion and commitment to Mars travel, Musk also laid out his plan to get us to the Red Planet in great detail.

Via Alessio Erioli

Via S P H E R I C A L

A team of young Japanese engineers is developing a flying car with the goal of launching it in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The futuristic vehicle – dubbed Skydrive – is fitted with three wheels, a motor and four rotors, enabling it to take off and land vertically from public roads without the need of a runway.

Measuring only 9.5 feet by 4.3 feet, Skydrive claims to be the world’s smallest flying car, with a target top flight speed of 62 mph, while travelling up to 32 feet above the ground.

Tsubasa Nakamura, 31, from Mikawa in Aiichi prefecture, is heading a team of about 20 engineers and designers from across Japan’s car industry to build the new generation flying vehicle.

The goal is to provide a new form of personal transport in part to help avoid disruption caused by Japan's earthquakes.

“Our vision is to initiate a new era [in which] everyone can fly freely. We are developing the world’s smallest flying car with vertical taking off and landing (VTOL) system and it can fly anywhere and anytime," said the team on its website. "It enables us to go places where we cannot go now or to live on water, by releasing [us from] transportation on roads.”

Via Wildcat2030

Biology student Mattia Menchetti performed an experiment on a colony of European paper wasps which yielded some very colorful results. Paper wasps are known f…

Via Alessio Erioli

The bill is believed to be the first in the country to push for open sourcing of the algorithms used by courts, police, and city agencies.

Via Manu Fernandez

Finally, soft robots with a little backbone

Via Alessio Erioli

There's only one downside to getting a coffee from Starbucks: now you only have one hand to do so stuff with. Well, Chinese Starbucks have effectively solved this annoying problem, by inventing a handy drink carrying bag.

Via THE OFFICIAL ANDREASCY

The team behind Amazon’s Rekognition API dropped a nifty feature today that lets anyone upload their photos to get the company’s best guess of their age.

Via THE OFFICIAL ANDREASCY

Modern buildings with floor-to-ceiling windows give spectacular views, but they require a lot of energy to cool. Doris Kim Sung works with thermo-bimetals, smart materials that act more like human skin, dynamically and responsively, and can shade a room from sun and self-ventilate.

Via Manuel Muehlbauer

Via S P H E R I C A L

In the world of 3D scanning, most of the low-cost options produce less-than-desirable results. A new Kickstarter campaign for Ponta Scan gets you high resolution results without breaking the bank.
Via Kalani Kirk Hausman

Scientists in Germany have achieved internet speeds averaging a sustained 1 terabit per second (1 Tbps) on an optical fibre network.

At that speed, you're getting a data transmission rate that's a whopping 1,000 times faster than services like Google Fibre, which delivers 1 gigabit per second (1 Gbps).

While Google Fibre's 1 Gbps itself might be considered sufficiently drool-worthy for those of us constrained to the even slower speeds of ADSL and cable, it can't hope to compete to the almost ludicrously fast possibilities of an internet connection that's 1,000 times faster, delivering 1 terabit per second.

At that speed, you can download 125 gigabytes every single second. That's about the same amount of data as the storage capacity of the (ageing) MacBook Air that I'm writing this story on. In a second.

For a little more in the way of perspective, at that speed, you could download an entire Game of Thrones series in 1 second (in high definition, no less).

Or, if you're more of a film person, in the same sliver of time, you could grab 25 movies weighing in at 5 GB a piece, as William Turton at Gizmodo points out.

The choice is yours. And good luck maintaining that social life of yours.

All of these absurd entertainment possibilities come courtesy of a new modulation technique called Probabilistic Constellation Shaping, which let researchers from the Technical University of Munich, Nokia Bell Labs, and Deutsche Telekom T-Labs hit a net transmission rate of 1 Tbps on Deutsche Telekom's existing optical fibre network.

In other words, this wasn't achieved using any kind of special setup in the lab, but on fibre infrastructure that's already been deployed in the field.

Via Wildcat2030

Developed specifically to explore the possibilities of multi-color, multi-material 3D printing, the starting point for ZHA was to design a relativel

Via Alessio Erioli

Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention, the third show curated by Greg Lynn at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, explores the digital origins of 15 projects by world-renowned architects including Zaha Hadid, Office dA and Morphosis.

Via Alessio Erioli

I started writing this column while I was in Manila, Philippines for a talk with UnionBank, one of the most innovative banks I’ve ever come across. Driving across Manila is often a painful experience with far too many cars locking up all possible arterials, and nowhere near enough money to redesign and build the needed infrastructure. But this is not Continue Reading

Via Alessio Erioli