(images created by AI via @nightcafe studio) The recent ruckus over Google engineer Blake Lemoine and the LaMDA AI has generated a fair amount of buzz in the world’s media. But now the fuss has subsided, it’s probably a good time to ask what Mr Lemoine was hoping to achieve with his outlandish claim. Things may not be as simple as they appear.
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Reports of a mass stranding of Cruise robotaxis in the center of San Francisco a week or so ago have triggered a lot of speculation by the media corps. The upshot is that these VRE (vehicle retrieval events) are happening fairly regularly at the moment, as the company struggles to keep the autonomous car fleet working properly.
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(click on the image above for a larger version) The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope has arrived and it’s an absolute beauty. Up above we’ve created a little montage to give you an idea of how sensational this new piece of equipment is. Top left is the new deep space image from the Webb. Top right is the famous Hubble deep space image taken a few years ago. You can immediately see the difference in resolution of…
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The energy used to heat and cool our homes is a big source of carbon emissions, hence the drive to build more new ‘zero carbon’ buildings. But what if you’re already happily living in your home, is there nothing you can do to reduce your bills and emissions? Well of course you can insulate and double glaze etc, but that only goes so far. But now Ecoworks, a German company based out of Berlin, has developed a full retrofit process…
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The mighty Amazon has just announced a new e-cargo delivery service in parts of London, which will replace a portion of their conventional van deliveries. The company has rolled out this initiative as part of a scheme will include deliveries ‘on foot’ as well, and the company hopes this new micromobility scheme will deliver over 5 million packages across East London over the coming year.
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Researchers from the University of Texas have developed a new gel film which can grab gallons of drinking water from thin air every day. The new tech, dubbed SHPF, is also cheap and easy to make, which suggests that this could be a breakthrough process in the AWH (atmospheric water harvesting) field.
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Fed up with those relentless cookie consent popups which appear ever time you land on a web page nowadays? Join the club. It’s like every time you’re trying to get something done, you have to waste 5 minutes clicking on tedious close box icons, just to read a web page. Grrr. Now some enterprising researchers from Denmark’s Aarhus University have come up with a solution. A small web browser plugin called Consent o’Matic.
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A research team at Concordia University in Canada has come up with some truly science fiction health tech which takes the idea of non-invasive surgery to its ultimate state. Direct Sound Printing uses the cavitation caused by ultra high-frequency sound waves to create solids out of liquids. Which means you can create a solid implant by injecting a liquid resin into the body and then vibrate it into shape using precise instrumentation aka a ‘print head’.
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Every day millions of tons of fresh food is spoiled and wasted through faulty or inadequate cooling. Power cuts, dodgy generators and fuel poverty make it extremely hard to guarantee stable cooling in very hot countries. Now French company Koolboks has launched the Koolhome Solar Freezer, which provides reliable, low cost freezing for consumers and small business owners in Nigeria and other African countries.
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A team of researchers at the University of Austin in Texas, has come up up with a new enzyme based method – Fast-PETase – of breaking down PET plastics in a matter of days, rather than years. The method, which was reported in the prestigious Nature journal last month, used machine learning to create the mutations of enzymes they needed. More than twelve percent of all global waste is made up of PET. The plastic we use for our disposable soda…
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The UK’s first autonomous bus service – codenamed Project CAVForth – has completed testing without passengers and is now scheduled to run with passengers starting in two or three months time. The route will cover some 14 miles of scenic Scottish countryside near Edinburgh. Well maybe not that scenic, the bus will operate on a Park and Ride route across the Forth Road Bridge delivering 36 passengers to an Edinburgh bus station.
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With fuel prices rocketing up in price, it’s no wonder that many of us are looking for alternatives. Waiting times for a new EV range between six and eighteen months, and there are even reports of price gazumping on certain models. So it’s great news to read that Low Tech Magazine has an article on building your own DIY home bike generator. Now the article is a weeny bit tongue in cheek, but there’s no question that this sort of…
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Canadian solar company Mitrex has developed a new product called Solar Brick which mimics the effect of a brick wall while delivering traditional solar panel electricity. The clever facade panels can produce 330W per panel and can be used for new builds or retrofits of older buildings. The advantages of being able to add a layer of solar cladding to an older surface opens up a whole new market for building upgrades.
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There’s no question that a lot of current carbon emissions come from private car transportation. Cut out the super short shopping trips for ‘some milk and a paper’, and we would dramatically cut the emissions from our suburban and country living. But it’s hard to shift our habits, unless we can make local shopping so convenient that it’s a no-brainer to use. Now a French company has started to fight back. Boxy convenience stores are made out of recycled shipping…
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The boffins at MIT have come up with a super low cost desalination plant which they say will deliver continuous clean water to a family. What makes it special is the fact that it doesn’t get clogged up by salt residues, which means it stays operative after long periods of use without cleaning. The trick? Using a non-wick system which instead uses 2.5 cm holes which don’t get clogged up with salt.
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