UpNext, Airbus’s future technology-focused subsidiary, reported on Thursday that it has entered the final three months of testing tech it hopes will automate the process of getting a plane from the air to the gate. The system, called DragonFly, tackles automated operations like diversions, landings, and taxi procedures through a Read more…
An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. “I am very worried,” says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and Read more…
It was meant to be the first-ever orbital mission to take off from the United Kingdom — carried by a Virgin Orbit rocket launched from a private jumbo jet Monday over the Atlantic ocean, according to the BBC. But instead “at an altitude of approximately 180km (111 miles), the upper Read more…
“Say hello to ionocaloric cooling: a new way to lower the mercury that has the potential to replace existing methods with something that is safer and friendlier to the planet,” writes ScienceAlert. It’s all based on the idea that melting absorbs heats. “The landscape of refrigerants is an unsolved problem,” Read more…
According to CNN, the Federal Aviation Administration system outage on Wednesday has been traced to a corrupt file. In a statement late Wednesday, the FAA said it was continuing to investigate the outage and “take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.” “Our preliminary work Read more…
An investigation recently revealed how images of a minor and a tester on the toilet ended up on social media. iRobot said it had consent to collect this kind of data from inside homes — but participants say otherwise. When Greg unboxed a new Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in December Read more…
On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything — and do it in a way that attempts to Read more…