Worldwide sales of fitness trackers increased from US$14 billion in 2017 to over $36 billion in 2020. The skyrocketing success of these gadgets suggests that more people than ever see some value in keeping tabs on the number of steps they take, flights of stairs they climb, time they spend sitting, and calories they burn. The manufacturers of these devices certainly want consumers to believe that tracking fitness or health-related behaviors will spur them to increase their activity levels and ma
While electric cars are gaining momentum, gradually replacing gas-guzzlers, the electrification of larger vehicles such as long-haul trucks and planes is proving to be a tough challenge. We need more time to make the tech work and, in the interim, a stepping stone fuel between gasoline and electric batteries. That’s where natural gas comes in. Comprising methane as its primary component, natural gas is an intriguing alternative to regular fuel. It’s abundant, has an established distribution netw
This article was originally published on .cult by Neil Green. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries, and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world. Becoming a tech lead is a tremendous accomplishment, and you should be proud to have been given that responsibility. Technology leadership is a stepping stone into management or architecture, so your career progression is on the right
Between remote strikes on people and oil refineries in the Middle East, and multiple Black Mirror episodes, drones get a bad rap. But as their capabilities increase through machine intelligence, mapping, and greater aerial surveillance, they are not only machines of destruction but tools for responding to complex environmental and societal challenges. Let’s take a look: Fighting deforestation Australian start-up AirSeed Technologies uses seed-dropping drones to fight deforestation using seed bo
The FIDO Alliance has been at the forefront of the passwordless movement. The organization has been working with many tech firms for years to urge them to adopt standards that don’t require passwords for authentication. Well, the people at the FIDO Alliance must be jumping for joy. In a new announcement, Google, Microsoft, and Apple have agreed to play nice with each other to enable passwordless sign-ins across their platforms. In March, the FIDO Alliance released a white paper that introduced t
Being able to climb that giant hill on your commute without breaking a sweat is one of the luxuries of riding an ebike. Less luxurious is trying to lug a 70-pound chunk of metal up a narrow staircase when you back get home. Ebikes are often the fastest and most versatile way of getting around cities, but their typically heavy and bulky frames often make them inconvenient to own in the very same neighborhoods. Most city dwellers don’t live on ground floors, nor do they have ground-level storage o
In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi asked a question that torments astronomers to this day: “Where is everybody?” His query has been immortalized in the Fermi paradox. The theory contends that there’s a conflict between the apparent absence of aliens and the probability that they exist. Proponents note that the universe is about three times older than our solar system, and contains more than a billion trillion stars. If stoopid humans can travel to the moon, why haven’t intellige
What happens when science goes wrong, and humankind’s technological hubris causes global calamity? Usually, the credits roll, these types of scenarios are almost always science fiction. But, since it’s black hole week at NASA, we thought we’d have a little fun imagining the complete and accidental annihilation of our planet. Back in the 1930s, there was a brief moment when some of the physicists working with Einstein on the atom bomb stopped to wonder if exploding such a device would end up ligh
The human brain is said to be the most complex biological structure ever to have existed. And while science doesn’t fully understand the brain yet, researchers in the expanding field of neuroscience have been making progress. Neuroscientists have made substantial inroads toward mapping the complex functions of the brain’s 85 billion or so neurons and the 100 trillion connections between them. (To put this astronomical number into perspective, there are upwards of 400 billion stars in the Milky W
Norway is surging ahead in the electrification game again. And yes, you guessed it, the country now has the world’s fastest EV charger. Well, so far. On Tuesday, ABB announced the installation of its Terra 360 charger in the county’s second largest city, Bergen, as well as Geilo, a ski resort. How fast is the Terra 360 really? ABB introduced the charger in September, promising a 360kW maximum output — hence the name. According to the company, this kind of power enables EVs to fully charge in les