Linking ideas with the world
Much fuss has been made over city trees in recent years. Urban trees reduce crime and help stormwater management (yay!). Cities and towns across the U.S. are losing 36 million trees a year (boo!). But, hold up—climate change is accelerating the growth of urban trees in metropolises worldwide (boo/yay?). Urban trees are under such scrutiny Read more about Mapping All of the Trees with Machine Learning[…]
An Amazon user in Germany recently requested data about his personal activities and inadvertently gained access to 1,700 audio recordings of someone he didn’t know. Germany’s c’t magazine reports that in August the Amazon user—exercising his rights under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation—requested his own data that Amazon has stored. Two months later, Amazon Read more about The Amazon Alexa Eavesdropping Nightmare Came True: Creepy Recordings sent to random stranger[…]
An extraordinarily promising new technique using ultrasound to clear the toxic protein clumps thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer’s disease is moving to the first phase of human trials next year. The innovative treatment has proven successful across several animal tests and presents an exciting, drug-free way to potentially battle dementia. The ultrasound treatment was Read more about Breakthrough ultrasound treatment to reverse dementia moves to human trials[…]
Thousands of people trusted Blind, an app-based “anonymous social network,” as a safe way to reveal malfeasance, wrongdoing and improper conduct at their companies.But Blind left one of its database servers exposed without a password, making it possible (for anyone who knew where to look) to access each user’s account information and identify would-be whistleblowers. Read more about At Blind – a whistleblower site -, a security lapse revealed private complaints from Silicon Valley employees. Turns out it’s not very safe to blow your whistle there after all.[…]
The system, called Photo Wake-Up, creates a 3D animation from a single photo. In the paper, the researchers compare it to the moving portraits at Hogwarts, a fictitious part of the Harry Potter world that a number of tech companies have tried to recreate. Previous attempts have been mildly successful, but this system is impressive Read more about New Photo Wake-Up System Turns Still Images Into 3D animations[…]
A team of Japanese researchers from Keio University in Tokyo have demonstrated that an amoeba is capable of generating approximate solutions to a remarkably difficult math problem known as the “traveling salesman problem.” The traveling salesman problem goes like this: Given an arbitrary number of cities and the distances between them, what is the shortest Read more about An Amoeba-Based Computer Calculated Approximate Solutions to an 8 city Travelling Salesman Problem[…]
Swarm Technologies Inc will pay a $900,000 fine for launching and operating four small experimental communications satellites that risked “satellite collisions” and threatened “critical commercial and government satellite operations,” the Federal Communications Commission said on Thursday. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) logo is seen before the FCC Net Neutrality hearing in Washington February 26, 2015. Read more about FCC fines Swarm $900,000 for unauthorized satellite launch[…]
The European Union’s network used for diplomatic communications, COREU, was infiltrated “for years” by hackers, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, with the unknown rogues behind the attack reportedly reposting the stolen communiqués to an “open internet site.” The network in question connects EU leadership with other EU organizations, as well as the foreign Read more about EU Diplomatic Comms Network, Which the NSA Reportedly Warned Could Be Easily Hacked, Was Hacked. But contents were boring.[…]
n some states, solar energy accounts for upwards of 10 percent of total electricity generation. It’s definitely a source of power that’s on the rise, whether it be to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power, or the energy grid, or simply to take advantage of the low costs. This form of energy, however, Read more about This AI Just Mapped Every Solar Panel in the United States[…]
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Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook’s access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she “Never” wants the app to get her location. She doesn’t “check-in” to places and doesn’t list her current city on her profile. Despite Read more about Turning Off Facebook Location Services Doesn’t Stop Tracking – you have to hide your IP address[…]
A server containing personal information, including social security numbers, of current and former NASA workers may have been hacked, and its data stolen, it emerged today. According to an internal memo circulated among staff on Tuesday, in mid-October the US space agency investigated whether or not two of its machines holding employee records had been Read more about NASA fears internal server hacked, staff personal info swiped by miscreants[…]
Facebook gave more than 150 companies, including Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Yahoo, unprecedented access to users’ personal data, according to a New York Times report published Tuesday. The Times obtained hundreds of pages of Facebook documents, generated in 2017, that show that the social network considered these companies business partners and effectively exempted them Read more about Facebook Allowed Netflix, Spotify and A Bank To Read And Delete Users’ Private Messages. And around 150 other companies got to see other private information without user consent.[…]
Back in 2015, a woman named Imy Santiago wrote an Amazon review of a novel that she had read and liked. Amazon immediately took the review down and told Santiago she had “violated its policies.” Santiago re-read her review, didn’t see anything objectionable about it, so she tried to post it again. “You’re not eligible Read more about Amazon and Facebook Reportedly Had a Secret Data-Sharing Agreement, and It Explains So Much[…]
Five minutes away from the town of Tiquina, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, archaeologists found the remains of an ancient civilization under the waters of the lake. The find was made 10 years ago, by Christophe Delaere, an archaeologist from the Free University of Belgium, by following information provided by the locals. 24 submerged Read more about Ancient Hidden City Discovered Under Lake Titicaca[…]
Machine-learning research published in two related papers today in Nature Geoscience reports the detection of seismic signals accurately predicting the Cascadia fault’s slow slippage, a type of failure observed to precede large earthquakes in other subduction zones. Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers applied machine learning to analyze Cascadia data and discovered the megathrust broadcasts a Read more about Machine learning-detected signal predicts time to earthquake[…]
With Microsoft’s decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That’s a worrying turn of events, given the company’s past behavior. […] Google is already a company that exercises considerable influence over the direction of the Web’s development. By Read more about Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to: why MS switching to Chromium is a bad idea[…]
Google is adding its flight delay predictions feature to the Google Assistant. That means starting this holiday season, you should be able to ask the Google Assistant if your flight is on time and get a response showing the status of your flight, the length of a delay (if there is one), and even the Read more about Google’s Feature for Predicting Flight Delays[…]
For the first time, an object in our solar system has been found more than 100 times farther than Earth is from the sun. The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center announced the discovery Monday, calling the object 2018 VG18. But the researchers who found it are calling it “Farout.” They believe the spherical object Read more about ‘Farout,’ the most-distant solar system object discovered yet[…]
A team of researchers from Austria, Italy and Sweden has successfully demonstrated teleportation using on-demand photons from quantum dots. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group explains how they accomplished this feat and how it applies to future quantum communications networks. Scientists and many others are very interested in developing truly Read more about Researchers demonstrate teleportation using on-demand photons from quantum dots[…]
AI systems can now create images of humans that are so lifelike they look like photographs, except the people in them don’t really exist. See for yourself. Each picture below is an output produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN), a system made up of two different networks including a generator and a discriminator. Developers Read more about An AI system has just created the most realistic looking photos ever[…]
An explosive new report by Reuters released Friday may upturn the narrative surrounding the potential cancer risks of talcum powder. According to the report, Johnson & Johnson—the makers of the most popular consumer talc product, Baby Powder—knew for decades that its products at times contained carcinogenic asbestos, but did everything possible to keep its findings Read more about Report: Johnson & Johnson Knew About Asbestos in Its Baby Powder Products for Decades[…]
Follow along to see the most interesting data points amassed by our team of statisticians, all presented with colorful charts and insightful commentary. Enjoy! The Year in Numbers Top Searches & Pornstars Traffic & Time on Site Gender Demographics Age Demographics Devices & Technology Celebrity Searches Movie & Game Searches Events, Holidays & Sports Top Read more about Pornhub 2018 in review[…]
MIT researchers have invented a way to fabricate nanoscale 3-D objects of nearly any shape. They can also pattern the objects with a variety of useful materials, including metals, quantum dots, and DNA. “It’s a way of putting nearly any kind of material into a 3-D pattern with nanoscale precision,” says Edward Boyden, an associate Read more about Team that invented way to enlarge objects now invents method to shrink objects to the nanoscale, decreasing their volume 100x[…]
Another day, another tech company being disingenuous about its privacy practices. This time it’s Microsoft, after it was discovered that Windows 10 continues to track users’ activity even after they’ve disabled the activity-tracking option in their Windows 10 settings. You can try it yourself. Pull up Windows 10’s Settings, go to the Privacy section, and Read more about How to Stop Windows 10 From Collecting Activity Data on You – after disabling activity tracking option[…]