These days, polls seem to be everywhere. Hell, you just need to check out our Twitter account to see how much we love them. But there’s one place polls don’t exist: WhatsApp. Well, this won’t be for much longer. According to a report by WABetaInfo, the company is working on a polls feature for groups. As per the screenshot in the report (and below), the function is still in its early stages, and we don’t have many details about what it’ll look like. The screenshot doesn’t tell us much about th
For years, Samsung and Apple have traded punches for the mindshare of phone buyers around the world. Once upon a time, Huawei was a contender for the top phone maker as well, but the US blacklist has left the company fighting for scraps. In the last couple of years, Oppo has vied to occupy the space once held by Huawei, and the company’s newest flagship, the Find X5, is an indication it’s fighting harder than ever for wider recognition. Truthfully, the company is already in a pretty comfortable
Deep neural networks have a huge advantage: They replace “feature engineering”—a difficult and arduous part of the classic machine learning cycle—with an end-to-end process that automatically learns to extract features. However, finding the right deep learning architecture for your application can be challenging. There are numerous ways you can structure and configure a neural network, using different layer types and sizes, activation functions, and operations. Each architecture has its strength
The Earth exists in a dangerous environment. Cosmic bodies, like asteroids and comets, are constantly zooming through space and often crash into our planet. Most of these are too small to pose a threat, but some can be cause for concern. As a scholar who studies space and international security, it is my job to ask what the likelihood of an object crashing into the planet really is – and whether governments are spending enough money to prevent such an event. To find the answers to these question
On Feb. 4, 2022, SpaceX launched 49 satellites as part of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet project, most of which burned up in the atmosphere days later. The cause of this more than US$50 million failure was a geomagnetic storm caused by the Sun. Geomagnetic storms occur when space weather hits and interacts with the Earth. Space weather is caused by fluctuations within the Sun that blast electrons, protons and other particles into space. I study the hazards space weather poses to space-based asset
War is expensive. The United States spent about US$1.1 trillion (£830 billion) on the 2003 Iraq war in today’s money, while the Falklands war cost the UK the equivalent of about £2.6 billion. Funding is, therefore, an important resource in any conflict, similar to that of artillery, fuel and boots on the ground. The burden of finance traditionally falls to governments, often in the form of issuing war bonds. Ukraine is currently issuing US$270 million in war bonds for that very purpose. Interest
This article was originally published by Sarah Wray on Cities Today, the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders. For the latest updates, follow Cities Today on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, or sign up for Cities Today News. A new shared ebike scheme in the UK will recruit and train unemployed and vulnerable people, paying them a Living Wage and providing access to support and services. The initiative from
You know times are finally changing in Australia, when a mining company run by the country’s second-richest person, Dr. Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, opens a green hydrogen and renewables business. And when they acquire a bunch of engineers doing something amazing with trains, that’s when things start to get really interesting. This week, Fortescue Future Industries (FFI), the green arm of Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group, acquired UK company Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE). To mark the purchas
Governments and authorities all around the world are trying to control the information flow by putting restrictions or blocking websites in a particular region. So people are searching for tools like VPN to jump these fences and access the open internet. One of the effective ways to do this is to use Tor Browser. How does Tor browser work? In its simplest form, Tor uses a set of nodes — called relays — to mask your identity when you try to visit a website. These relays help keep your data privat
It seems straight out of an action movie: As the capital city becomes a war zone, the defiant president looks into the camera and delivers a clear and compelling message: “I am here. We will not lay down any weapons.” That’s exactly what Ukrainian President and onetime actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy did on Feb. 25, 2022, in a selfie-style video viewed 3 million times within an hour – part of an effort to mobilize international opinion against the Russian invasion of his country. And it appears to be