As car manufacturers and battery cell makers race to develop more efficient and cost-effective EV batteries, there’s one material that’s been gaining significant traction in replacing graphite in the anode: silicon. To that end, California-based startup OneD Battery Sciences has produced silicon nanowires that can be fused directly onto the commercial graphite particles found in the anodes of batteries. The impact? Potentially tripling the energy density of the anode, reducing charging times, an
In the last few days, both the Brave browser and DuckDuckGo search engine announced features that actively block or bypass pages hosted on Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) protocol. That sounds important — and it is — but what does it mean for you? In this story, we’ll break down what AMP is, and why Brave and DuckDuckGo are going on an offensive against it. First, the basics. What’s AMP? Google first introduced AMP in 2015 with an aim to make pages and articles load faster on mobile. The
Instagram this week announced several changes to its platform aimed at empowering creators. Most notably, the company has tweaked its ranking algorithm to highlight original content above reshared content. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said the following about the ranking change: “If you create something from scratch, you should get more credit than if you are resharing something that you found from someone else. We’re going to do more to try and value original content more, particularly compar
Like many lonely children, Lucas Rizzotto had an imaginary friend: a talking microwave called Magnetron. As the years passed, the pals drifted apart. But Rizzotto never forgot about Magnetron. When OpenAI released the GPT-3 language model, Rizzotto saw a chance to rekindle the friendship. The self-described “full-time mad scientist” chronicled the resurrection in a YouTube video. Some of the story sounds too good to be true. We’ve asked Rizzotto for further evidence that it’s real. But while we
Tech hiring trends in the US indicate what the Wall Street Journal is calling “a giant shock to the workforce” as record numbers of controversially-called “blue-collar” workers are breaking into ICT roles on technical teams — sans the once prerequisite four-year college degree. Dubbed “new-collar jobs” by former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty in an open letter to then-president-elect Donald Trump way back in 2016, the push to make technical job opportunities accessible through unconventional education an
I recently heard about an Israeli DJ operating his decks through the electric power of five Teslas. According to this PR machine, DJ Black “creates an audiovisual journey that propels the viewers behind the wheel of a Tesla, in a progressive journey into the future.” Sure, whatever. You can listen to his set below. Beyond the tunes, I was interested in the capacity for an EV as a reliable energy conduit. We’ve written a fair bit about Vehicle-to-home or (V2H) charging, where an electric car ca
Takeovers are usually friendly affairs. Corporate executives engage in top-secret talks, with one company or group of investors making a bid for another business. After some negotiating, the companies engaged in the merger or acquisition announce a deal has been struck. But other takeovers are more hostile in nature. Not every company wants to be taken over. This is the case with Elon Musk’s US$43 billion bid to buy Twitter. Companies have various measures in their arsenal to ward off such unwan
According to experts and recent statistics, the future looks cloudy. And no, we’re not talking about the weather forecast, we’re talking about the exciting and emerging cloud computing sector. In the last decade, cloud computing has grown exponentially. It has become such a huge part of our lives that it’s almost become unnoticeable. But, if you’ve used Google Drive, shared photos with friends or even watched a movie on Netflix this week — then you’ve been making the most of this technology. In
Netflix seems poised to implement some of the biggest changes to its business model in years. In the company’s Q1 2022 earnings call, CEO Reed Hastings dropped two bombshells. Netflix lost subscribers First: Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in a decade — 200,000 to be specific. That’s a far cry from the 2,000,000 subscribers the company predicted it would gain just three months ago. It’s worth noting that Netflix is in the red on its subscriber count in part because of Russia’s invasi
A team of scientists recently conducted an exciting quantum physics experiment allowing them to demonstrate that reality might actually be real. Well, don’t everybody applaud all at once. It’s actually an amazing feat of science. Let’s start with a simple question. How do you demonstrate that reality is real? You can pinch yourself. But that only demonstrates that you’re capable of perceiving pain. Fictional characters can experience pain, so that doesn’t give us anything to go on. In fact, as I