Posts

With a state-run media like China’s, there’s already some concern that newscasters are little more than puppets. After an AI news anchor debuted at the World Internet Conference in China this week, we’re one step closer to that reality. The anchor was created in a partnership between Xinhua News Agency, China’s official state-run media outlet, and sogou.com, a Chinese search engine company. The Chinese news, of course, is thrilled and impressed, claiming that the character “can read texts as naturally as a professional news anchor....

Verizon FiOS TV customers woke up today to a pretty big surprise—no more of The Weather Channel. Verizon said it was letting go of the longstanding meteorological network because, well, everyone gets their weather from the Internet now. As a replacement, Verizon customers will get AccuWeather, which at this point has a lot less filler. Like so many other basic cable channels, The Weather Channel gave up on being a single-topic network and took a turn toward broadcasting reality TV and sensationalist filler programs, with shows like “Prospectors: The Million Dollar Mountain,” “Why Planes Crash,” and “Fat Guys in the Woods” filling out the programming block....

The suspected longest walking route on Earth is 14,000 miles from South Africa to extreme north Russia.Pilgrimages like the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail are short by comparison.The real-life walk would be grueling, filled with scary animals and diversely bad weather.Interesting Engineering has the latest reminder of what we believe is the longest walkable single distance on Earth, from South Africa to the far northeastern Russian city of Magadan....

Even if Ben Franklin didn’t fly the kite himself, the image of metal flying in the sky, hoping to attract lightning, has been a powerful image for centuries. With the help of the University of Manchester’s High Voltage Laboratory, Tom Scott takes the experiment to modern-day conclusion: drones.Scott and the lab team let loose on a DJI Phantom 3 with an electrical impulse of of 1.4MV. “Surprisingly,” the Manchester lab notes in a post on the subject, “there were no visible marks on the outside of the drone, but that doesn’t mean that the insides got away unscathed; as it turns out, the electricity took the path of least resistance and fried all the sensitive internal electronics....

Owner: Kristopher GardnerLocation: North Richland Hills, TexasFound on: Online forumPurchase price: $29,750Years owned: 3 1/2Where I grew up in Ohio, the car scene was pretty big, and when a Supra would roll into one of these meets, it was always, “Oh, the Supra’s the best.” Then, The Fast and the Furious came out, which just cemented it even more. The body lines are timeless. It’s reliable. It had the best stopping distance for years until Porsche beat them out....

Last night scores of people stepped onto the glowing white platform of Organic Motion’s Stage at the reception for the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards, and watched as an array of 14 cameras have mapped their movements to a digital, on-screen avatars. But the real litmus test arrived in the form of Will Wright, the visionary creator of Spore. What would he think of the Organic Motion Stage system, a motion-capture system that’s exponentially cheaper than the setups used in movies and games, and doesn’t require a single ping pong ball?...

Media Platforms Design TeamPrice: $250Price Difference Relative to Similar Products: Usually $100, but can be even $200 more than the cheapest models you’ll see in a drug store.Description: Electric razors used to be a last resort that left you with a barely passable shave. Now, if you’re ready to spend the money, a top-quality electric razor will cut almost as close as a wet shave and in less than a minute....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn-Sale Date: August/September 2013Base Price: $63,495 to $79,995Competitors: BMW X5, BMW X6, Infiniti FX50, Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8, Mercedes-Benz M-class, Porsche Cayenne.Powertrains: Supercharged 3.0-liter V-6, 340 hp, 332 lb-ft; supercharged 5.0-liter V-8, 510 hp, 461 lb-ft; 8-speed automatic, AWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 17/23 (V-6), 14/19 (V-8) What’s New: Launched in 2004, the old Range Rover Sport was a bit of a misnomer. Based on the all-steel structure that also underpinned the previous year’s Land Rover LR3 model (now the LR4), the Range Rover Sport was not really a Range Rover and was only borderline sporting....

Your houseplants may hang, droop, cling to window light, and bring a little life to your house, but it’s a sure bet none of them hover. That’s why the Air Bonsai is a new kind of house plant, currently taking pre-orders on Kickstarter after getting fully funded. You can get a magnetically levitating moss ball for $15. But at $200, you get a full plant and levitating kit, with kits going up to around $1000....

A new partnership between drone giant DJI and thermal camera experts FLIR could bring heat-vision to consumer quadcopters everywhere. With just a small attachment, the Zenmuse XT, these drones can see the world just like the alien hunters from Predator. Military drones—specifically Predator drones, go figure—have had this kind of heat-mapping vision for a while, but the partnership between FLIR and DJI marks the first time this tech will be available for average joes....

It’s not quite full-size but it is big enough to gawk at, slack-jawed. Meet the sixth-scale model of the Millennium Falcon, built by Hot Toys and revealed at the Ani-Com and Games convention in Hong Kong. It’s like whoa. For the unfamiliar, Hot Toys is the maker of fantastically detailed foot-tall miniatures, and this version of the Falcon is scaled to match. These first pictures of the hulking beast were snapped by Shift into Den-O on Twitter (with additional shots on the Toyark forum), and conveniently include a couple real people for scale....

Video footage from the Massachusetts State Police shows a Boston Dynamics robot dog working for the unit’s bomb squad. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) immediately began firing shots, stating that the use of a general purpose robot in a police force setting is potentially dangerous.As per usual, the internet went crazy with hot takes and memes on the latest robo-cop, which the police force leased for 90 days.Dogs come in many helpful forms: seeing-eye dogs, K9 assistants, therapy pets … robotic dogs that can find and defuse bombs....

Never underestimate the power of a great mattress. The average person spends about a third of their life in bed—and, no, we’re not factoring in all the time you spend watching Netflix there. If you waste a lot of that time tossing and turning, upgrading to a better mattress may be what you need to get a better night’s sleep.If your old mattress is well past its prime, now’s one of the best times of year to invest in a new one....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: Fabrice LEROUGE/Getty Images)Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and several other high-profile celebrities had a less-than-relaxing holiday weekend when nude photos from their iCloud accounts surfaced online. The photos were obtained by hackers who accessed the celebrities’ accounts without their knowledge.How could something like this happen? After 40 hours of investigation into the issue, Apple thinks it has the answer: “A very targeted attack on user names, passwords, and security questions....

Facebook is no stranger to “Is this in my terms of service?” experiments, like when they performed a psychology experiment on unsuspecting users. But a report from The Information indicates they didn’t quite learn their lesson. In order to test the limits of how much their user base would put up with constant app crashes, the company intentionally crashed the app multiple times. Partly, the move is over a contentious relationship Facebook has with Google....

In the name of its Clean Space Initiative, the European Space Agency (ESA) put part of a satellite in a plasma wind tunnel and melted it down until there was nothing left but vapor. Sometimes the pursuit of science has its advantages.View full post on YoutubeThe melting took place in Cologne, Germany, at the DLR German Aerospace Center. The satellite part that met its fiery maker was a 4-by-10 centimeter section of magnetotorquer, a reliable electromagnet inside satellites....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhile the auto industry collectively recovers, debates, and conducts other miscellaneous post-mortem Detroit Auto Show things; the Montreal International Auto Show is just, ahem, revving up. Today, Honda unexpectedly debuted the Gear concept: a compact car reportedly “inspired by fixed-gear bicycles.” Honda says the Gear provides “the automotive answer for young, urban, Gen-Y lifestyles.” So, how can car design be inspired by a bicycle with a single gear, is in incapable of coasting, and in some cases feature no brakes?...

The larger the construction project, the more ways there are for it to go wrong. To make matters worse, even a small mistake can lead to serious delays and other problems down the line, which is why it’s super important to be able to identify those mistakes early.A new startup called Doxel hopes to solve this problem, by combining artificial intelligence with robots and LIDAR to scan construction sites and identify problems....

Engineers at Purdue have built a flying robot to mimic one of the most expert flyers in the natural world: the hummingbird.Drones wish they could fly with the agility and grace of the biological family Trochilidae, which includes all 357 types of hummingbirds. Boasting the flying capabilities of birds and the hovering abilities of insects, they represent an intersection of flying philosophies that scientists are eager to unlock. Hummingbirds could lead to leaps forward for search-and-rescue drones, commercial filming robots, military use, and any other flying venture that is punctuated by quick, unexpected stops and starts....

Israel has finally confirmed what was an open secret for more than a decade: that in 2007, the country’s air force struck and destroyed a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. The reactor, built with technical assistance by North Korea, was likely being built to produce weapons-grade nuclear fuel. The country carried out a similar strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.The Israeli Defense Forces admitted it conducted an air strike on the reactor while it was under construction in Deir ez-Zor, Syria....