The hot dog and hamburger unite to create...the hamdog. Would you eat one?
- A video game at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is designed to teach young people about space exploration, but it’s riddled with factual and typographical errors.
- Cosmic Quest, developed by a gaming company called Creative Kingdoms, officially opened at the visitor complex in March 2016. The game costs $19.95, and allows players to “launch a rocket, redirect an asteroid, build a Martian habitat, and perform scientific experiments aboard the International Space Station.” But it doesn’t seem to have been properly vetted. Read More
- Just how does machine learning work? You’ve probably read a primer or two on the subject, but often the best way to understand a thing is to try it out for yourself. With that in mind, check out this little in-browser experiment from Google named Teachable Machine. It’s a perfect two-minute summary of what a lot of modern AI can — and more importantly can’t— do.
- Teachable Machine lets you use your webcam to train an extremely basic AI program. Just hit the “train green/purple/orange” buttons, and the machine will record whatever it can see through your webcam.
- Once it’s “learned” enough, it’ll output whatever you like (a GIF or a sound effect or some speech) when it sees the object or activity you trained it with. Read More
- Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker is flattered that fans of his show are thinking of him whenever they track him down to point out how frightening technology is to them, but he’s getting tired of hearing it.
- At New York’s Paley Fest over the weekend, he told an audience how Black Mirror has changed his life: “I’m immediately alerted to any horrible development in the world. People email me and tweet me about it, saying ‘This is very Black Mirror!’ Oh, thank you so much!”
- Whether he likes it or not, his show, an anthology of horror stories about technologically oppressive futures, has emerged as an uncanny symbol of humanity’s headlong leap into a self-devised digital hell. Read More
- To be human is to fear the unknown. And since only a tiny fraction of people have ever had the experience of riding in a self-driving car, most fear them: the loss of control, the distrust of the technology, the fear of malicious hacking, etc.
- The companies that hope to eventually make lots of money on autonomous vehicles realize their promised riches will never materialize if they can’t convince ordinary people to go for a ride. Which brings us to LeBron James.
- James will headline a broadcast and digital ad campaign aimed at building trust in autonomous vehicles.
- The interesting thing about this campaign is who’s paying for it. Read More
- The first iPhone with Face ID hasn’t even hit stores, but we’re already getting hit with a rumor about where Apple’s new facial recognition tech might turn up next.
- MacRumors and 9to5Mac report that the frequently reliable KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has issued a note predicting that iPad Pro models released next year will include depth-sensing cameras and Apple’s Face ID tech. Read More
- Scientists have built a new rat intestine by combining part of the animal’s own bowel with human stem cells. One day, this method could be used in humans with intestinal problems who currently have to rely on organ transplants.
- A variety of diseases, including Crohn’s disease, lead to people having short bowels, which makes it harder for their bodies to absorb nutrients.
- One common solution is bowel transplant, but there is a shortage of intestines and, as with all transplants, the patient’s body often rejects the new organ. For a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers grew new intestines in the lab. Read More
- The most annoying toy of 2017 is almost certainly the humble fidget spinner. And now, there’s a phone version.
- Made by Hong Kong-based Chilli International, the fidget phone has been around for a while. We saw it on Reddit this week, but PhoneRadar had a hands-on with the device back in September.
- The handset has a 1.4-inch screen, comes in six colors, and features a tiny 32MB of internal memory (though you can expand that up to 8GB with an SD card). Read More
- Mark Zuckerberg put on an Oculus Rift and used Facebook’s new virtual reality platform, Facebook Spaces, to transport himself to Puerto Rico, the Moon, and his house.
- He broadcast the moment live on Facebook in what turned out to be a rather strange demo of a social platform that doesn’t have a clear use yet.
- In particular, Zuckerberg’s choice of locations emphasized just how odd it’ll be to watch other people in any sort of serious situation in virtual reality. Read more
- If you feel like flat Earth theory has gotten unaccountably popular recently, you’re right. According to Google Trends, search interest in the flat Earth conspiracy theory has already had several distinct peaks in the last year. (“The last year” was 2017, not 1519, just to be clear.) It’s funny, weird, and while it’s certainly not at the top of our list of problems as a society, it’s not entirely innocent either.
- Interest surged in February and March, then again in May, then again in August and September. These jumps are mostly tied to a couple of strange outbursts by celebrities, notably 2010’s favorite cheeseball rapper and Gossip Girl backing vocalist B.o.B. and Boston Celtics point guard Kyrie Irving.
- But interest in the topic has been climbing steadily since late 2014, shortly after a faction of Daniel Shenton’s “Flat Earth Society” broke away to create its own website and forum. Read More
- Twitter has blocked current Tennessee Representative and Senate hopeful Marsha Blackburn from paying to promote a campaign announcement that falsely claimed she “stopped the sale of baby body parts.”
- According to the Associated Press, Twitter told vendors for the campaign that the statement was “inflammatory,” and stopped the ad from being promoted on the service.
- The ad can still, however, be posted as usual on Twitter, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Verge. The spokesperson pointed to Twitter’s advertising policy, which bans “inflammatory or provocative content.” Read More
- Seeing what’s happening on the other side of a corner isn’t as impossible as it sounds. Scientists have been working on the problem for years, using lasers to bounce light off unseen objects and detect what’s going beyond their line of sight. Now, researchers from MIT’s CSAIL have gone one step further: they’re using footage from an ordinary smartphone to “see” around corners by spotting subtle changes in light and shadow.
- The premise of the work is simple: all objects reflect light, and, by closely studying the floor near a corner, you can see if something is moving on the other side based on changing shadows.
- These fluctuations are invisible to the human eye, but researchers were able to spot them by tweaking the footage from ordinary commercial cameras, and even an iPhone 5s. Read More
- With all the recent talk of AI posing existential risks to humanity and our privacy, Japanese company Omron is taking a softer, more innocuous approach. Specifically, with its table tennis robot Forpheus, which strives to pursue “harmony of humans and machines” by patiently teaching us how to play ping-pong.
- Although ping-pong ball-pitching machines like TrainerBot exist, Forpheus can actually live up to the feeling of playing against a real opponent.
- It uses a robotic arm that is controlled by the AI through a 5-axis motor system to swing the paddle. The motion controller, or the “brain,” tells the machine how to hit the ball, advising it on timing and direction within a 1,000th of a second. Read More
- The Trump administration announced today that it will take steps to repeal a federal policy that would have pushed states to abandon coal and switch to renewable energy. The move was long expected, and it’s likely to be fought in the courts by environmental groups and attorneys general from several states.
- The announcement targets the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a core climate change policy passed under President Barack Obama that aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. “The war on coal is over,” said Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt at an event in Kentucky. “Tomorrow in Washington, DC, I will be signing a proposed rule to roll back the Clean Power Plan. No better place to make that announcement than Hazard, Kentucky.”
- President Donald Trump had signed an executive order in March directing Pruitt to repeal the CPP, which the administration sees as an overreach in presidential power that kills jobs. In reality, the CPP was Obama’s attempt at tackling climate change by ordering fossil fuel-fired power plants — which are the largest concentrated source of CO2 emissions in the US — to cut carbon pollution by about 30 percent by 2030. Reducing carbon pollution has health benefits — including fewer asthma attacks in children. The regulations would also lead to an estimated $55 billion to $93 billion per year in 2030 in climate and health benefits, Obama’s EPA said. Read More
- Millions of years ago during the early Jurassic period, a baby marine reptile called an ichthyosaur gorged itself on prehistoric calamari. Then, it died abruptly — its belly full of squid.
- Roughly 200 million years later, paleontologist Dean Lomax was examining this creature’s fossilized remains at the University of Birmingham’s Lapworth Museum of Geology when he realized he was seeing a few fossil firsts.
- The two-foot-long skeleton was the first fossilized newborn of its species. So it was certainly the first to be found with leftover squid in its guts. He and paleontologist Nigel Larkin published their findings last week in the journal Historical Biology. Read More
- Internet messaging is one of those things that has been undergoing reinvention pretty much since the internet began. Last week we were reminded of the existence of AIM just long enough to reminisce about our youthful indiscretions on AOL’s messenger before its overdue termination in December.
- Facebook Messenger, the regular variety, is definitely one of those guilty parties that is carrying too much weight for most people to like and enjoy. App extensions and a bot store, Stories, customizable chat colors, animated and oversized emoji, scannable profile codes ... you can even order an Uber and play chess while you wait, all without leaving Messenger.
- In grand business strategic terms, this is a logical move for Facebook as it competes with every other tech company to be the one dominating your attention on the omnipresent phone in your hand. But in terms of customer service, it’s a pile of hot mismatched garbage. Read More
- Do you enjoy the sensation of petting a cat or dog, but hate the unconditional love and the fact that they have heads and limbs? Japanese company Yukai Engineering has unveiled the solution to this classic conundrum.
- Qoobo is a soft, round cushion with a robotic tail that reacts to strokes, just as a loving pet would. Read more