Tomorrow’s Build (November 7, 2023) – The city of Seville in Spain is implementing measures to mitigate the scorching heat. Called the CartujaQanat, it is a €5 million pilot project that aims to reduce average temperatures by around 10°C in a region of the city.
These systems, developed over 1,000 years ago, consist of the construction of underground channels that transport water across a large area that needs to be cooled. Vertical shafts drilled along the channel bring underground air to the surface, lowering above-ground temperatures.
In summer, people don’t leave their house until 8pm and festivals usually start at 10pm. Built on the banks of the Guadalquivir River during the Middle Ages, the Spanish city regularly records temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) during July and August. And scientists expecting temperatures above 50°C in the near future.
WIRED MAGAZINE (October 31, 2023) – The latest issue features understanding Tik Tok and talent manager Ursus Magana; How Telegram Became a Terrifying Weapon in the Israel-Hamas War; Here’s the Truth Behind the Biggest (and Dumbest) Battery Myths, and more…
The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. Talent manager Ursus Magana can (almost) make sense of it, with a frenetic formula for gaming the algorithms.
Hamas posted gruesome images and videos that were designed to go viral. Sources argue that Telegram’s lax moderation ensured they were seen around the world.
At around 8 am local time the morning of October 7, Haaretz’s cyber and disinformation reporter, Omer Benjakob, was woken by his wife at their home in the historic port city of Jaffa. Something was happening in southern Israel, she said, but Benjakob shrugged it off, presuming “another round of the same shit.” Flare-ups between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and militants in southern Israel are not uncommon. “No, no,” Benjakob’s wife insisted. “It’s more serious.”
Yes, charging your phone overnight is bad for its battery. And no, you don’t need to turn off your device to give the battery a break. Here’s why.
For an object that barely ever leaves our palms, the smartphone can sometimes feel like an arcane piece of wizardry. And nowhere is this more pronounced than when it comes to the fickle battery, which will drop 20 percent charge quicker than you can toggle Bluetooth off, and give up the ghost entirely after a couple of years of charging.
MIT Technology Review – November/December 2023: The Hard Problems issue features the Intractable problem of plastics; Fixing the internet; Exploring what it would it take for AI to become conscious. Also, there are so many urgent issues facing the world—where do we begin? Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jennifer Doudna, and others offer their ideas.
Plastic is cheap to make and shockingly profitable. It’s everywhere. And we’re all paying the price.
Plastic, and the profusion of waste it creates, can hide in plain sight, a ubiquitous part of our lives we rarely question. But a closer examination of the situation can be shocking.
Indeed, the scale of the problem is hard to internalize. To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine, according to a 2020 study published in Nature.
Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.
Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and engineers are grappling with what it would take for AI to become conscious.
David Chalmers was not expecting the invitation he received in September of last year. As a leading authority on consciousness, Chalmers regularly circles the world delivering talks at universities and academic meetings to rapt audiences of philosophers—the sort of people who might spend hours debating whether the world outside their own heads is real and then go blithely about the rest of their day. This latest request, though, came from a surprising source: the organizers of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), a yearly gathering of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence.
0:15 AI can predict your risk of Parkinson’s – RETFound was trained using 1.6 million retinal images which gave it a picture of a healthy retina. Then its creators added images of eyes from people with certain conditions. Our eyes are a window to our health. They’re the only place where doctors can directly observe capillaries, our smallest blood vessels, enabling detection of cardiovascular illnesses such as hypertension. Eyes are also linked to the central nervous system, giving an insight into neural tissue, too. The RETFound tool was best at picking up eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. On Parkinson’s, stroke and heart disease, it performed not quite as well but still beat other AI models.
2:08These are the most detailed heat maps of our planet – They use imagery from a satellite called HotSat-1 which can detect heat and cold at a resolution of 3.5 metres. The satellite can precisely map the fronts of forest fires, detect and monitor heat islands in cities and measure the thermal efficiency of buildings. This information can drive more effective decision-making.
3:51AI designed this robot in 26 seconds – Researchers from Northwestern University gave an AI a simple prompt. ‘Design a robot that can walk across a flat surface’. By the 9th iteration, the AI had successfully met its brief. The robot could walk half its own body length per second. The entire iteration process took just 26 seconds and it ran on a laptop.
6:26 Norway completed it’s largest rewilding project – It’s centred around Sveagruva, a 100-year-old mining town on the Arctic island of Svalbard. Norway decided to close the town and its mining operations in 2017 and return the area to its natural state, restoring biodiversity and the local ecosystem.
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The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.
CNET (October 19, 2023) – The Pebble Flow electric trailer boosts towing efficiency, parks itself with remote robotics and can even power your house in an emergency thanks to its big battery and electric motors.
Video timeline: 00:00 Pebble Flow RV 00:10 Development of the Pebble Flow 00:48 Dual Electric Motors 01:36 App-controlled Remote Parking 02:02 45 Kilowatt-hour Battery 02:31 Magic Hitch 03:10 Instant Camp Feature
Financial Times (October 18, 2023) – The rush back to the Moon has begun. The US and China are planning permanently crewed bases on the lunar surface. Billions of dollars in contracts are up for grabs as companies are launching ambitious new support projects, from growing food in space to a new lunar internet.
The FT’s Peggy Hollinger asks if the next great leap forward in space is a lunar economy?
Summary: The average U.S. household contains a trove of potentially reusable goods worth roughly $4,500. That’s a lot of trapped value, and companies are at last getting serious about accessing it—by developing new resale capabilities. Resale has been with us for a very long time, of course—at yard sales, on used-car lots, in classified ads.
An advanced AI model considers much more than what competitors are charging.
Summary: In today’s fast-paced world of digital retailing, the ability to revise prices swiftly and on a large scale has emerged as a decisive differentiator for companies. Many retailers now track competitors’ prices via systems that scrape rivals’ websites and use this information as an input to set their own prices manually or automatically. A common strategy is to charge X dollars or X percent less than a target competitor. However, retailers that use such simple heuristics miss significant opportunities to fine-tune pricing.
World Economic Forum (October 14, 2023) – This week’s top stories of the week include:
0:15Why engagement in the news is in decline – A massive media survey looked at trust and engagement in the news and found both are in steady decline. Just 48% of people say they are very or extremely interested in the news in 2023 down from 63% in 2017. Trust in the news has fallen 2 percentage points in a year. Now, only 40% say they trust the news most of the time and 36% say they actively avoid the news sometimes or often.
1:53This robot can help people with disabilities dress – The robot was designed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). They used a simulation to teach it how to perform its task. The team used an AI-driven approach called ‘reinforcement learning’. The robot was rewarded each time it correctly placed a shirt further along an arm.
3:25Company captures and stores CO2 with limestone – Heirloom takes crushed limestone and heats it in a kiln powered by renewable energy. The reaction generates two products. These are CO2, which can be permanently stored underground or in materials like concrete and a powder, which is hydrated with water to make calcium hydroxide. When the calcium hydroxide is spread onto trays, it absorbs CO2 from the air to become limestone and the whole process can begin again.
5:24How to use ChatGPT more safely – ChatGPT is an AI tool that gives detailed, natural language answers to prompts based on a database of 300 billion words drawn from books and articles. The AI learns from its interactions with you, so here are 5 ways to ensure you’re using it safely.
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The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.
Wall Street Journal (October 13, 2023) – NASA launched a spacecraft on Friday to study the Psyche asteroid, which is believed to be made out of metal.
Video timeline: 0:00 NASA’s mission 0:46 The psyche asteroid 1:45 Why metal matters 3:04 What we can learn from the mission
The rocky inner planets of our solar system are thought to have mostly metallic cores. WSJ breaks down why this mission matters and what it could tell us about Earth’s origins.
ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE (FALL 2023): The latest issue of @ISSUESinST features Lessons from Ukraine, Quantum Workforce, The Energy Transition, Why Space Debris Flies Through Regulatory Gaps and more…
Blue Dreams is an immersive video experience inspired by microbial networks in the deep sea and beyond. Using stunning undersea video footage, abstract imagery, and computer modeling, the work offers a glimpse into the complicated relationships among the planet’s tiniest—yet most vital—living systems.
Orbital debris has been a looming issue for decades, and it’s only getting worse as activities in space increase. With technical expertise and authority over space activities widely distributed across the US government, officials need to determine the appropriate regulations and policies to address how space is changing.
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