Japan is overhauling how its ubiquitous 24-hour mini-police stations are operated nationwide as more crime fighting moves from the streets to the web. Called koban in Japanese, officers at these small police boxes handle a variety of tasks from responding to crime and patrolling neighborhoods to handling lost items. There Read more…
The FDA on Thursday approved the first hearing aid software for Apple’s latest AirPods Pro earbuds. According to Apple, the feature will be pushed to eligible devices through a software update in the coming weeks. The move, which comes two years after the FDA first approved over-the-counter hearing aids, could Read more…
Employees’ negative daily emotions and lack of well-being can ultimately hurt worker engagement — and the economy, according to a new report released this week. Gallup, in its “State of the Global Workplace,” estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy $8.9 trillion, or 9% of global GDP. The Read more…
Two astronauts, billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, completed the world’s first private spacewalk outside a SpaceX capsule, testing new spacesuits and procedures in a risky mission that pushes the boundaries of commercial spaceflight. The astronauts on the Polaris Dawn mission went one at a time, each spending Read more…
Mistral AI has launched Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model with language and vision processing capabilities, positioning it to compete with AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. You can download its source code from Hugging Face, GitHub, or via a torrent link. While the official details of the new model, Read more…
A new survey released on Tuesday found that Americans used over 100 trillion megabytes of wireless data last year — a 36% increase from the previous year and the largest single-year increase in the history of wireless data consumption. The increase — 26 trillion MBs over 2022 — comes as Read more…
Microsoft has updated a key cryptographic library with two new encryption algorithms designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. The updates were made last week to SymCrypt, a core cryptographic code library for handing cryptographic functions in Windows and Linux. The library, started in 2006, provides operations and algorithms developers Read more…