Technology

In the world of activists and pundits, companies making changes involve all reward and no risk, and if companies don't do it they are just greedy. That thinking is why poor people are subsidizing electric cars and solar panels for the rich, which has made reliance on fossil fuels greater in the past decade. In the real world, companies hesitate because there are no answers to the questions that smart people have. When it comes to reusable packaging, there are more science and technology questions than answers, and there are four reasons companies are hesitating. 1.The potential to hurt brand…

A quantum computer is a remarkable device. While, at current, it's still limited in its application, we now know that it can be faster than the fastest computers we currently have access to. As Scientific American reminds us, quantum primacy (also known as quantum supremacy) is the point at which a quantum machine outstrips a classical computer. Computers have helped advance civilization and increased our ability to process data many times over. Even so, there are some problems that not even they can solve. The more answers we find, the more questions we have. Quantum computing was built to…

In a horrendous accident, a cinematographer has died and a director has been injured after Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun while filming in New Mexico. When shooting a film with guns, there are many choices to make: each prop needs to be appropriate for the character, and appropriate for the scene. There is also the choice of whether you will use replica weapons, real weapons, or a mix. But most importantly, everyone on set needs to know how to work alongside guns. A gun with no ammunition – that is, a gun with neither a bullet nor blanks – is not dangerous. But even so, on set there is always…

Proving the universe seems like a gargantuan task, but we might have a chance to do so with exascale computers. As the National Academy of Sciences notes, the future of computing may be in exascale computers, with the capability of doing one quintillion operations per second. The US Department of Energy's exascale computing project intends to use exascale computing to verify the reality of nature that we see around us. This description sounds a bit sci-fi for most people, but the idea seems to be sound. By using Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) and adaptive mesh refinement cosmology…

For most of this century, anyone in London has been photographed and filmed an average of 300 times each day. Their reasoning to start such intrusive scrutiny was that England, Wales, and Scotland led the developed world in crime, and a tourist attraction like London needed extra monitoring. A new article takes the decrease in privacy to task for a few reasons. One is because private companies make the equipment. As if private companies will be less ethical or accountable than the government. While it is true they can avoid accountability, a higher standard is in place for security equipment…

Coffee may be about to get its first significant upgrade in 600 years. That's not to say there haven't been efforts to modernize coffee production since its earliest days in Sufi shrines, but that has been mainly in technology. The pan, like you use in delicious Turkish coffee, gave way to a syphon, which used the awesome power of heat-created vacuum physics, then gave way to its opposite, using good old brute force for espresso, but since then it has been all refinement to make brewing easier. If you have ever used a syphon or a truly old espressso machine you know it can be an artistic…

The US military has quietly led to a lot of technological advancements that few know about. One recent example; before we had a serious COVID-19 infectious disease problem to worry about, the US National Institutes of Health tried to use Ebola in parts of Africa to ask Congress for $100 million in emergency funding to combat it. In the US. Where it did not exist. I noted that with the over $300 billion they had gotten just since 2000, they had never once before cared about Ebola. They even denied funding to a company that had an Ebola vaccine but needed money for a clinical trial. Instead of…

The rapid development of effective mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 has led some observers to suggest that mRNA will push other types of vaccines out of the market completely in the near future. But is that desirable? Is it even possible? To talk about the future of the vaccine industry, we reached out to Jennifer Pancorbo, Gary Gilleskie and Matt Koci. Pancorbo is an expert in vaccine manufacturing and director of industry programs and research at NC State’s Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center (BTEC). Gilleskie is executive director of BTEC and has decades of experiences in…

It has become common for political activists to demand that social media engage in bans and content warnings, because the other side is too stupid to know false facts from the real kind. In reality, everyone who takes their politics too seriously is inclined to believe the worst when it comes to others, and calling for bans is more of a patronizing way to pretend they care about discourse when they most just want to control it. This has led to companies like Facebook and Twitter either outright censoring some content or putting nonsensical fact checking warning labels on it. Here is a case in…

Two approaches in development may lead to an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine that is scalable and can be transported and stored at room temperature. They'll be too late to help with the actual COVID-19 but since coronavirus constantly mutates, like the flu, and 2019 was the third coronavirus pandemic in the last 17 years, it could be valuable for the next iteration. One strategy employs modified bacteriophage particles that can be inhaled to deliver protection via the lungs to the immune system. The other delivers injectable adeno-associated virus-phage particles that directly encode protection…