Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineer – has spent more than two decades staring at maps and spatial data. Sharif finds one connection especially fascinating: the link between spatial reasoning and why taxi drivers seem to have lower rates of Alzheimer’s. From the report: Taxi and ambulance drivers are Read more…
Three years ago environmental regulators discovered garbage burning deep inside California’s Chiquita Canyon Landfill. Few imagined the calamity that would follow. Somehow the landfill’s pollution control system introduced oxygen below, causing decades-old waste to rapidly decompose, generating intense heat and eventually widespread smoldering, federal and state environmental agencies say. The Read more…
On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it Read more…
With nearly 70% of the market, Meta wants its smart glasses to be a big hit. But after some users found ways to disable the light that warns people they’re being filmed, “the high-tech specs have also turned into a liability, as some are calling the gadget ‘pervert glasses…’” Some Read more…
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. — Perlis’s Programming Proverb #58, SIGPLAN Notices, Sept. 1982
Researchers believe they’ve found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies. Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children’s tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent Read more…
If you call 911 in New Orleans, you may hear the sound of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent answering your call instead of a human voice. The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is currently testing out the new tool designed to reduce the volume of calls human dispatchers must handle, Read more…