Let’s get this straight: NFT is pronounced “nay-fey-tay.” That’s all there is to it. You might have read Corin Faife at the Verge claiming it should be said as “neft” — but they’re wrong. It’s nay-fey-tay. Forever and ever, nay-fey-tay. I can see where Faife is coming from, I really can. “Neft” is an elegant solution to saying those three letters. As it doesn’t appear NFTs are going anywhere, this pronunciation approach would save us all a lot of time. But here’s my issue: why should we have an
Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Back in 2019, Twitter introduced a feature called Topics to bring you tweets related to your areas of interest, without having to follow more people. On paper, it’s a great idea to keep your core timeline the same while getting updates about topics you might be interested in. But it’s a bit tricky managing your feed so you’re not overwhelmed by all those sugge
The “metaverse” seems to be the latest buzzword in tech. In general terms, the metaverse can be viewed as a form of cyberspace. Like the internet, it’s a world – or reality, even – beyond our physical world on Earth. The difference is that the metaverse allows us to immerse a version of ourselves as avatars in its environment, usually through augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR), which people are and will increasingly be able to access using tools like VR goggles. While it all seems ve
If cats can be simultaneously dead and alive, can space aliens exist and not exist at the same time? It might sound like the kind of thing you’d ask while sitting around a campfire with two kinds of smoke lingering in the air, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an important question. At the center of our capacity for scientific inquiry lies a simple query: are we alone in the universe? For millennia we’ve gazed at the skies with a binary perspective. Either they’re out there and we haven’t found the
If Meta thought a rebrand would put the nightmare of 2021 to bed, the company was in for a rude awakening on Thursday. The company was hit by the worst one-day slump in stock-market history. But that unwelcome landmark merely scratches the surface of Meta’s problems. To truly capture the turmoil, we need to dig into the numbers that are spooking investors. $200 billion: Meta’s loss in value After Meta reported a rare decline in quarterly profit on Wednesday, shares in the company plummeted by mo
Understanding when and why a cell dies is fundamental to the study of human development, disease, and aging. For neurodegenerative diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, identifying dead and dying neurons is critical to developing and testing new treatments. But identifying dead cells can be tricky and has been a constant problem throughout my career as a neuroscientist. Until now, scientists have had to manually mark which cells look alive and which look dead under
Artificial intelligence (AI) has now closely matched or even surpassed humans in what were previously considered unattainable areas. These include chess, arcade games, Go, self-driving cars, protein folding, and much more. This rapid technological progress has also had a huge impact on the financial services industry. More and more CEOs in the sector declare (explicitly or implicitly) that they run “technology companies with a banking license”. There is also a rapid emergence and growth of the f
The tech world can’t stop talking about Spotify — but it doesn’t seem like the streaming giant is actually listening. For the uninitiated, Neil Young and others have removed their music from Spotify, because they believe Rogan’s podcast — something consumed by millions — contains vaccine misinformation. You can read about the saga here. The streaming service responded with a blog post saying it will publish its platform rules, and a COVID-19 hub containing globally verified information about the
Wi-Fi is everywhere and we can’t really do without it. But the current-gen Wi-Fi standard is limited to data transfer between devices, and with every new iteration, we just see better speeds and throughput. For IEEE — the body that overlooks formations of networking-related protocols like ethernet — the challenge is to enhance the standard’s capabilities beyond data transfer. The aim of this upcoming protocol is to enable devices like phones and laptops to sense things in the environment — like
Apple’s object-tracking AirTags have been rife with controversy since their launch, particularly around the unfortunate fact that they make good tools for thieves and stalkers. It is therefore my sad duty to inform you that one of the security measures Apple has implemented for the AirTags is already being circumvented. Long story short: people are modifying AirTags to have the internal speaker — which can serve as a warning for those being stacked — disabled. Long story long: for those of you w