Naming your daughter after a voice assistant isn’t catching on — in fact, just the opposite has occurred. Since 2015 when Amazon introduced the Echo smart speaker with its now ubiquitous “Alexa” wake-up command, the incidence of newborn girls named Alexa has tumbled, Recode reports. In 2015, according to Recode, 6,050 baby girls were named […]
The largest supplier of law enforcement body cameras in the U.S. is exploring pairing its cameras with new AI capabilities — including real-time face recognition. Axon, formerly known as Taser International, sparked controversy late last month when it announced the creation of an ethics board to examine the implications of coupling artificial intelligence with its […]
The City of Reno along with the company, Flirtey, have been chosen by the U.S. Department of Transportation and just one of 10 locations across the nation to spearhead new drone technology. “This means that Flirtey has the opportunity to make the city of Reno the biggest little city in the world for drone delivery,” […]
iPhone batteries can be troublesome at times, especially in the case of an iPhone that exploded in a Las Vegas repair store in May 2018. This iPhone Explosion In Las Vegas A male employee in a Las Vegas repair store was just a few feet away when an iPhone exploded on his desk. Surveillance footage […]
You’re probably more likely to associate Subaru with high-powered rally cars than any kind of eco-friendly transportation, but the automaker is determined to change that perception: it just unveiled plans for its first-ever plug-in hybrid. The 2019 Crosstrek Hybrid (not yet pictured) will combine Subaru’s familiar four-cylinder boxer engine and all-wheel drive with a hybrid […]
The Russian Mission Control Center on Sunday adjusted the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) by 600 meters in the run-up to manned Soyuz missions, a mission control official told TASS. “The maneuver was conducted with the help of Progress MS-08 thrusters that remained switched on for 172 seconds,” the source said. As a […]
Although LISA isn’t expected to launch until 2034, scientists are excited about the observatory’s potential discoveries, including the aforementioned binary systems. It won’t be another 15 years or so before the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) observatory is launched into outer space, but astronomers are already excited about the potential discoveries its launch could yield. […]
One of the most interesting tidbits of news to come out of Microsoft’s Build developer conference earlier this week was the company’s upcoming Your Phone app, which attempts to bridge the gap between mobile and desktop messaging by letting you send and receive texts (along with some more advanced screen sharing and file transferring features) […]
In Google’s demonstration of its new AI assistant Duplex this week, the voice assistant calls a hair salon to book an appointment, carrying on a human-seeming conversation, with the receptionist at the other end seemingly unaware that she is speaking to an AI. Robots don’t literally have ears, and in order to “hear” and analyze […]
Two companies run by individual billionaires are taking the space tourism mission by storm. People are almost close enough to spend their vacation for the first time beyond our Earth in the latter part of this year. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are hitting significant achievements in this regard. In the […]
NASA will include a small, autonomous helicopter in the agency’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission, officials announced today (May 11). The craft will undergo a 30-day test campaign once it reaches the Red Planet to demonstrate the viability of travel above the Martian surface with a heavier-than-air craft. “NASA has a proud history of firsts,” […]
Samsung never reports how many smartphones it sells into channels or to end users each quarter, so we’ll never know exactly how many Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ handsets the South Korean company has sold. That said, every indication suggests that sales of Samsung’s latest flagship phones have been anything but impressive. A number of […]
