Technology

Soft robotics is a newer field, so no one is quite sure what to do with them, but sturdy softness could be useful in homes and workplaces where traditional robots could cause injury. Since they are squishy, they could be tools for disaster response. For now, they may play basketball. Or at least pick one up. Maybe eventually they will be a delightful companion that can still get down to business like Baymax from the Big Hero 6 cartoon and comics.  It's balloon art on steroids, an "isoperimetric robot." The shape changes but the total length of the edges - and the amount of air inside -…

Do you want to believe a mom with no credentials who opposes modern agriculture can keep your baby from getting autism?  Do you want to believe fracking will set your tap water on fire or that COVID-19 was caused by 5G cell phone service in Wuhan? There are prominent Facebook pages for all of those. An osteopath named Joe Mercola will even sell you supplements to prevent getting coronavirus, and he makes $100 million a year leveraging social media to latch onto to anything people are willing to believe. Some sources are more resistant than others. A new analysis of vaccine information…

I got an email from an analytics group pitching an article about Valentine's Day movie results.  It promised: "If you’re planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day by watching a romantic film you’ll probably end up watching Isn’t It Romantic, according to the latest" blah blah blah (which) "analyzed Google Trends data of IMDBs list of ‘100 romantic films for Valentine's Day’ to reveal which films were the most popular in February 2019. "The most popular Valentine’s Day film by search interest in the United States was Isn’t it Romantic tied with Two Weeks Notice, followed by Harold and Maude,…

In a new short paper in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, Roger A. Søraa from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and co-authors Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Adam Poulsen from Charles Sturt University in Australia discuss what a queering of robots might entail. They point out that technology is not developed in a vacuum, but instead reflects biases and reproduces societal values and beliefs. Søraa is active in robot and cyborg research through the newly started Immersive Technology and Social Robots Lab at NTNU, and has been…

Have you ever used a public charging station to charge your mobile phone when it runs out of battery? If so, watch out for “juice jacking”. Cybercriminals are on the prowl to infect your mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers and access your personal data, or install malware while you charge them. Specifically, juice jacking is a cyber attack in which criminals use publicly accessible USB charging ports or cables to install malicious software on your mobile device and/or steal personal data from it. Even a 60-second power-up can be enough to compromise your phone’s data.…

When will I die? This question has endured across cultures and civilisations. It has given rise to a plethora of religions and spiritual paths over thousands of years, and more recently, some highly amusing apps. But this question now prompts a different response, as technology slowly brings us closer to accurately predicting the answer. Predicting the lifespan of people, or their “Personal Life Expectancy” (PLE) would greatly alter our lives. On one hand, it may have benefits for policy making, and help optimise an individual’s health, or the services they receive. But the potential…

Last week, Netflix dropped the trailer for Gwyneth Paltrow’s new show The Goop Lab. It is a six-episode docuseries launching on Jan. 24 that, according to the trailers, focuses on approaches to wellness that are “out there,” “unregulated” and “dangerous.” (Read: science-free.) The backlash by health-care professionals and science advocates was immediate and widespread. And for good reason. As noted by my friend, obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter in Bustle magazine, the trailer is classic Goop: “Some fine information presented alongside unscientific, unproven, potentially harmful…

Artificial intelligence (AI) for histopathological diagnosis and grading of prostate cancer has the potential to solve one of the bottlenecks in today's prostate cancer histopathology; by providing more accurate diagnosis and better treatment decisions. A new study finds the AI-system is as good at identifying and grading prostate cancer as world-leading uro-pathologists. The challenge for current prostate pathology is that there is a certain degree of subjectivity in the assessments of the biopsies, different pathologists can reach different conclusions even though they are studying…

Eighty-one years ago, a broadcast of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds supposedly caused mass hysteria in America, as listeners thought Martians had invaded New Jersey. There are varying accounts of the controversial incident, and it remains a topic of fascination, even today. Back when Welles’s fictional Martians attacked, broadcast radio was considered a state-of-the-art technology. And since the first transatlantic radio signal was transmitted in 1901 by Guglielmo Marconi, radio has greatly innovated the way we communicate. Dots and dashes Before Marconi, German physicist Heinrich Hertz…

Last month in Korea a computer scientist struck up a conversation on the subway. He told me in fractured English that he wants to take a PhD in theology. When I meet a theologian I usually ask, “Theoretical, or experimental?” This guy wouldn’t have understood, so I forbore. I did suggest, tongue in cheek, that he would then be uniquely qualified to determine whether A.I.s have souls. “More than that,” he said, taking me seriously, “they could be intermediaries” between us and God. I allowed as that was an interesting notion. Interesting, but like most expert prognostications and…