- Some VCs are so into the future they’re investing in prehistory – one start-up’s got $15m to bring back woolly mammoths.
- Reading sci-fi makes you better at business. Tell that to your English teacher.
- Furby Organ Guy is at it again. This time, it’s tidal-waving Teletubbies.
- Tech marketers! Fed up with talking about digital transformation? Sadly, it appears it’s barely started…
- Finally, without wanting to worry anyone, a coronal mass ejection (i.e. nasty solar storm) could fritz the Internet.
Category: Work
- President Biden nearly caused a national security incident using Venmo to send money to his grandkids.
- Amazon probably doesn’t understand what it sells.
- Mushrooms. Mycelial networks. Motorways. Mind blown. READ.
- Net zero by 2050? We haven’t invented half the tech we’ll need yet, says the IEA.
- The world’s first teleportation tech? It could only be 6G.
- Buy a NFT digital house to hang your NFT digital artworks in
- What are you worth on the Dark Web? Facebook credentials cost nearly the same as GMail ones these days (h/t Michael)
- Talking of Facebook – telling interview with its head of AI on its struggles with fairness v disinformation
- More on the (micro) chips shortage. OEMs often use extreme queue jumping tactics when supplies get tight
- Confusing causation and correlation is dangerous. Delays to AZ covid vaccinations over thrombosis concerns will cost more lives
- MIT Technology Review’s picked 10 breakthrough technologies for 2021
- Blood oxygen meters (aka pulse oxymeters) don’t work that well if you’re black. It’s not a new problem
- Scientists have recreated quantum entanglement in the lab. Unbreakable quantum encryption comes a step closer
- Want to keep journalism alive? Don’t legislate, buy a newspaper
- Microsoft wants to bring AR to Teams. God help us
- Joe Biden wants a (micro)Chips Race with China. Reminiscent of the 1960’s Space Race against the USSR?
- The world’s biggest surveillance cam maker had code on Github for recognising ethnicity. Its kit (and code) is available everywhere
- Making a vaccine is hard. This piece explains how RNA ones like Moderna’s and Pfizer’s are made
- Quantum Fluctuations is an artwork created from particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (best viewed in 4K)
- The world’s first AI robot artist turns its (her?) hand to self portraiture
- Roll over Minecraft. Most pre/teens spent lockdown in Roblox. Brands are now piling in to its “metaverse” and a $30b IPO looms
- CV Dazzle is a makeup technique for foiling facial recognition cameras – see below (June ’20 article but v good)
- Handy set of e-commerce stats from across the EU: usage, spending all up, but digital divides emerging
- Cardboard’s turned into “beige gold” thanks to the glut in lockdown home deliveries and resulting demand for packaging. Gamestop, schmamestop
- Google’s developed a “private” alternative to cookies. Which is proprietary to Google, natch
- First and Last of Men is a mesmerising, haunting message from two billion years into our future. Tilda Swinton narrates
- Meet Dall-e, the OpenAI app that turns words into pictures (try it for yourself)
- Unicorn hunt: worthwhile list of 50 high-potential startups for 2021 compiled by CB Insights
- Car production is grinding to a halt globally – for lack of microchips (rather than, say, nuts or tyres)
- An app for managing early-stage cancer from Leeds University could mean fewer trips to hospital
- Lignosat is a satellite made of wood – it combusts completely in the atmosphere, meaning less debris and pollution
- Graphika has mapped the social conversation about Covid vaccines. It shows right-wing outlets are most susceptible to anti-vax misinformation
- Been up to no good? Your car could dob you in
- Some of us marked the passing of Flash (the plugin which made the early 2000s web fun, not the scourge of Ming the Merciless)
- Citroen’s Tesla-a-like from 1979 is a thing to behold
- Teddy Ruxpin, meet Alexa. Frankenstein’s monster for the 2020’s? (I remember Ruxpin freaking me out when I first saw one in about 1985)
- Listening to music during surgery means patients recover faster and need fewer pain meds. The soundtrack to this experiment? The temptingly entitled Trancemusik
- What comes after smartphones? Worthwhile musings on the future of consumer tech
- There’s more snogging in unequal societies. Stonker from 2020’s (virtual) Ig Nobel Awards
- VR game Cyberpunk 2077 is barely a week old but already has an intimidating troll army
- And finally: the biggest lie of the year (2020) is announced
- Protein structures – Unfolded! Google AI subsidiary DeepMind has cracked the problem of predicting protein structures – a major breakthrough with implications everywhere from medicine to recycling. It won hands-down at this year’s ‘Protein Olympics‘, held every 2 years since 1994.
- Spray-on robots: researchers in Hong Kong have invented a harmless spray that turns inanimate objects into magnetically-controlled robots – precision medicine delivery is a potentially key application. The video’s awesome.
- Ain’t no power: Protestors against police brutality in Nigeria are using bitcoin to channel funds to community organisers, sidestepping the local banking system which has locked them out.
- Oxygen on Mars? The Mars Perseverance rover, launched in July, includes an experiment to extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. Terraformers stay cool – its aim is to test the viability of making rocket fuel on the red planet.
- Unfolded before. Is IBM Watson an AI or a mechanical Turk? IBM hailed it as a silver bullet for cancer treatment; the reality was very different. Terrific long read from 2017 on the hype vs reality of AI when lives are involved.