Science fiction is a genre very much associated with technological marvels, innovations, and visions of the future. So it may be surprising to find so many of its writers are drawn to Shakespeare – he’s a figure associated with tradition and the past. Sometimes his plays are reworked in a science fiction setting. The 1956 film Forbidden Planet is just one of many variations on a “Tempest in space” theme. Sometimes the playwright appears as a character caught up in a time travel adventure. The Dr
We’ve all been there before: we need to send a file from our phone to our laptop or vice versa, only to find that it can still be a surprisingly clunky process even in 2022. While most of us will resort to sending ourselves an email or uploading a file to cloud storage, Google is apparently working on a way to make it easy and intuitive to send files to yourself. The company recently launched Nearby Share on ChromeOS and Android as a competitor to Apple’s AirDrop, allowing you to easily send fil
If you want artificial intelligence to have human ethics, you have to teach it to evolve ethics like we do. At least that’s what a pair of researchers from the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, India proposed in a pre-print paper published today. Titled “AI and the Sense of Self,” the paper describes a methodology called “elastic identity” by which the researchers say AI might learn to gain a greater sense of agency while simultaneously understanding how to avoid “c
NFT art has exploded in popularity, but it faces an uncertain future on Wikipedia. Editors of the online encyclopedia recently voted against categorizing non-fungible tokens as art. The result sparked fury in the crypto community. The poll stemmed from discussions about Wikipedia’s list of the most expensive artworks by living artists, Cointelegraph reports. The editors debated whether NFTs such as Murat Pak’s $91.8M The Merge and Beeple’s $69M Everydays should join the list. A majority of edito
The idea of a road that can collect and harvest energy from the vibrations of passing cars, buses, and trucks sounds like science fiction. Fortunately, energy harvesting is an idea that’s been alive and well in the scientific community. But it has only recently made the pivot into real-world commercial applications. So, let’s take a look at the most prominent that are working towards making science (fiction) a reality: ElectReon (Israel) ElectReon is an Israeli firm developing an in-road induct
In most cities, highways encompass a massive surface area that is expensive to maintain considering the cost of surface maintenance, lamp posts, signage, and electric vehicle charging stations. But over the last decade, scientists and startups have been working on a solution: the EVs themselves. By harnessing some of the energy generated from the road’s surface, electric vehicles can reduce road infrastructure and charging costs. But how did we get here, and what does it mean for the future of
You may think the metaverse will be a bunch of interconnected virtual spaces – the world wide web but accessed through virtual reality. This is largely correct, but there is also a fundamental but slightly more cryptic side to the metaverse that will set it apart from today’s internet: the blockchain. In the beginning, Web 1.0 was the information superhighway of connected computers and servers that you could search, explore and inhabit, usually through a centralized company’s platform – for exam
Lithium-sulphur batteries may well be the next generation of power cells that we use in our electric vehicles — if scientists can get them to last longer. And that’s exactly what a team of researchers at the University of Michigan has tried to accomplish with the development of a 1,000-cycle battery that could quintuple EV range. What’s the potential of lithium-sulfur batteries? Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries have a series of advantages over their lithium-ion (Li-ion) counterparts: The theoret
Apple has benefited a lot from the App Store and the developer ecosystem. Heck, it’s probably made more than $100 billion from its fees since 2008. However, many companies and lawmakers across the world are scrutinizing this tech giant’s monopoly. As a result of this, we’re seeing many regulations and court cases that may force Apple to allow alternative payment methods in the App Store. Before we take a look at the countries cornering Apple, let’s understand how App Store’s payment structure wo
In a previous article, we discussed how a whopping 78% of enterprises fail on their digital transformation initiatives and that banks experience specific issues like legacy processes, tightly coupled technical systems, failure of innovation labs, lack of proper incentives for being risk-savvy, and underestimation of the scope of change. There’s so much information out there about creating the right strategies and processes to tackle digital transformation, but what’s often overlooked is the mind