Hitting the Books: NASA’s Kathy Sullivan and advances in orbital personal hygiene
For the first couple decades of its existence, NASA was the epitome of an Old Boys Club; its astronaut ranks pulled exclusively from the Armed Services’ test pilot programs which, at that time, were exclusively staffed by men. Glass ceilings weren’t the only things broken when Sally Ride, Judy Resnik,…
The ARC nerve-stimulation system could help quadriplegic patients move their arms again
The ARC nerve stimulation therapy system from startup Onward Medical passed another developmental milestone on Wednesday, as the company announced the first successful installation of its brainwave-driven implantable electrode array to restore function and feeling to a patient’s hands and arms. The news comes just five months after the researchers…
Hitting the Books: Beware the Tech Bro who comes bearing gifts
American entrepreneurs have long fixated on extracting the maximum economic value out of, well really, any resource they can get their hands on — from Henry Ford’s assembly line to Tony Hsieh’s Zappos Happiness Experience Form. The same is true in the public sector where some overambitious streamlining of Texas’…
Google’s Bard AI can tap the company’s apps — and your personal data — for better responses
We’ve already seen OpenAI and Salesforce incorporate their standalone chatbots into larger, more comprehensive machine learning platforms that span the breadth and depth of their businesses. On Tuesday, Google announced that its Bard AI is receiving the same treatment and has been empowered to pull real-time data from other Google…
Hitting the Books: The programming trick that gave us DOOM multiplayer
Since its release in 1993, id Software’s DOOM franchise has become one of modern gaming’s most easily recognizable IPs. The series has sold more than 10 million copies to date and spawned myriad RPG spinoffs, film adaptations and even a couple tabletop board games. But the first game’s debut turned…
Google’s new sustainability APIs can estimate solar, pollutant and pollen production
Way back in 2015, Google launched Project Sunroof, an ingenious Maps layer that combined location, sunlight and navigation data to show how much energy solar panels installed on a home’s roof might generate — it could be your house, could be your neighbor’s, didn’t matter because Google mapped it out…
Hitting the Books: Why AI needs regulation and how we can do it
The burgeoning AI industry has barrelled clean past the “move fast” portion of its development, right into the part where we “break things” — like society! Since the release of ChatGPT last November, generative AI systems have taken the digital world by storm, finding use in everything from machine coding…
Snapchat’s My AI chatbot glitched so hard it started posting Stories
My AI, the in-app digital assistant that rides herd on your Snapchat Plus experience, has suffered numerous breakdowns and technical malfunctions since its debut in February. Tuesday was more of the same as the chatbot took it upon itself to post single-second-long Stories to users’ feeds and then go unresponsive…
An Iowa school district is using AI to ban books
It certainly didn’t take long for AI’s other shoe to drop, what with the emergent technology already being perverted to commit confidence scams and generate spam content. We can now add censorship to that list as the Globe Gazette reports the school board of Mason City, Iowa has begun leveraging…
Hitting the Books: The thirty-year quest to make WiFi a connectivity reality
The modern world of consumer tech wouldn’t exist as we know it if not for the near-ubiquitous connectivity that Wi-Fi internet provides. It serves as the wireless link bridging our mobile devices and smart home appliances, enabling our streaming entertainment and connecting us to the global internet. In his new…