Category: Technology

Any species reaching for the stars is bound to have its fingertips singed. Probably more than once. One of NASA’s latest posts on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website is an iconic reminder of the mishaps in our spacefaring history. “A flying saucer from outer space crash-landed in the Utah desert after being tracked […]

With Samsung now having reported earnings for the first three quarters of the year, we can safely say that all three of its 2018 flagship smartphones have underwhelmed. The company’s mobile division dragged down stellar performance in Samsung’s semi business over and over, thanks in large part to a trio of premium smartphones that are […]

Productivity in the United States’ health care industry is declining — and has been ever since World War II. As the cost of treating patients continues to rise, life expectancy in America is beginning to fall. But there is mounting evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) can reverse the downward spiral in productivity by automating the […]

Imagine a country with an army of techies, a government that supports AI and blockchain by setting a mandate and investing billions, large scale tech companies that are rapidly experimenting and implementing at scale, and an abundance of data to feed the application of these technologies. This just about covers the AI and blockchain playground […]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers and Chicago-area scientists are working to create a communications network that can withstand hacking. The University of Illinois announced last month that it will be joining the Chicago Quantum Exchange in its effort to explore quantum technology, an emerging field of physics and engineering that involves studying matter and […]

Last month, Motorola announced two new Android One devices for international markets — the Moto One and One Power. Both phones look remarkably like the iPhone X, and both have three years of promised security updates. It seemed unlikely that either phone would ever be officially sold in the United States, but Motorola has announced […]

Consumers around the world may know Huawei as a maker of Android phones — some may prefer its more affordable Honor brand. But in its primary business as a telecommunications industry vendor, its reputation is being trashed by investigations of sanction breaches and claims that the company may be falliable to become a pawn of […]

For the 100th year, we get to turn our clocks back an hour, alleviating the gloom of dark mornings but robbing us of daylit evenings. According to a recently added section of The Indoor Generation, a survey from YouGov and Velux, many of us feel less productive as the clocks roll back — 74 percent […]

The first images of the Bennu asteroid, target of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft mission, have been shared by NASA. The craft, fully titled the “Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security – Regolith Explorer” (OSIRIS-REx), set out on September 8 2016 and is currently around a month out from its destination. It will collect a sample from […]

Using solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) techniques, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory discovered a new quantum criticality in a superconducting material, leading to a greater understanding of the link between magnetism and unconventional superconductivity. Most iron-arsenide superconductors display both magnetic and structural (or nematic) transitions, making it difficult to understand […]

Driverless cars remain on a slow but steady march toward widespread deployment. This week proved as much. On Tuesday, Google spinoff Waymo became the first to obtain a driverless testing permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). A 40-strong fleet of fully autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans — overseen by remote operators — will […]