Archive for the 'Technology' Category
LG to Open Europe’s Biggest Car Battery Factory; Output 100,000 EV Packs Per Year
October 12th, 2017Via: Reuters: South Korea’s LG Chem will open Europe’s largest lithium-ion battery factory in Poland next year as the region’s auto industry gears up to mass produce electric cars. … LG Chem plans to spend 5.9 billion zlotys ($1.63 billion) on the factory near the southwestern city of Wroclaw, according to Polish state industry agency […]
Scientists Can Read a Bird’s Brain and Predict Its Next Song
October 12th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review: “We decode realistic synthetic birdsong directly from neural activity,” the scientists announced in a new report published on the website bioRxiv. The team, which includes Argentinian birdsong expert Ezequiel Arneodo, calls the system the first prototype of “a decoder of complex, natural communication signals from neural activity.” A similar approach could […]
Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner Than You Think
October 12th, 2017Via: NBC: “What the industry is telling me is that they would like to remove one of the pilots fairly soon, and re-design the cockpit around a single pilot,” says Stephen Rice, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. That would involve at least a modest cockpit redesign, so that a single […]
Will Automation Put an End to the American Trucker?
October 12th, 2017Via: Guardian: Finn Murphy, author of The Long Haul, the story of his life as a long-distance truck driver, says the days of the truck driver as we know him are coming to an end. Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers, and, he says, if the […]
Google’s Home Mini Needed a Software Patch to Stop Some of Them from Recording Everything
October 11th, 2017Mmm hmm. Via: The Verge: Categorize this under “one of the worst possible PR nightmares for a Google smart speaker.” According to Artem Russakovskii at Android Police, the Google Home Mini he was reviewing was randomly and near-constantly recording sounds in his home and transmitting them to Google. The company acknowledged the problem and is […]
GM to Buy Sensor-Tech Firm Strobe to Speed Up Self-Driving Car Push
October 10th, 2017Via: Reuters: No. 1 U.S. automaker General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Monday it would buy Strobe Inc, which uses LIDAR technology to help self-driving cars identify objects at a distance, to speed up development of autonomous vehicles and slash sensor costs. LIDAR is one of the major sensor technologies used in autonomous, or self-driving […]
Robotic Farm Completes 1st Fully Autonomous Harvest
October 8th, 2017Via: LiveScience: It’s harvest season in many parts of the world, but on one farm in the United Kingdom, robots — not humans — are doing all the heavy lifting. At Hands Free Hectare, an experimental farm run by researchers from Harper Adams University, in the village of Edgmond in the U.K., about 5 tons […]
Our Minds Can Be Hijacked: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia
October 6th, 2017Via: Guardian: There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein […]
Solar Power Grew Faster Than Any Other Source of Fuel for the First Time in 2016
October 4th, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — Via: Bloomberg: Solar power grew faster than any other source of fuel for the first time in 2016, the International Energy Agency said in a report suggesting the technology will dominate renewables in the years ahead. The institution established after the first major oil crisis […]
‘Australia Presses for More Facial Recognition in Terror Fight’
October 4th, 2017Via: New York Times: The Australian government wants to strengthen its counterterrorism efforts by making use of a fundamental part of all Australian citizens: their faces. On Thursday, at a national security meeting in Canberra, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is expected to pressure states and territories to hand over the driver’s license photos of every […]
