List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

Officials from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection on Monday morning observed that the new "X" on top of the building formerly known as Twitter's headquarters was being dismantled, according to Patrick Hannan, the department's spokesman.

By David Shepardson WASHINGTON A U.S. government committee on foreign investments reviewed a record number of proposed transactions

By Jody Godoy NEW YORK Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon must face fraud allegations brought by

A next-generation energy storage system made of cement and an ancient ink has the potential to massively scale-up renewable energy operations by transforming homes and roads into giant batteries, according to the scientists who invented it. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Wyss Institute in the US unveiled the design on Monday, claiming that supercapacitors made of this material have “great potential” to assist in the world’s transition to clean energy. “The material is fascinating because you have the most-used man made material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material – the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it,” said MIT professor Admir Masic, who was involved in the research. “You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting.” The concrete mix of cement and carbon black only requires water, making it a low-cost alternative to other energy storage systems being developed to allow energy networks to remain stable despite fluctuations to renewable energy sources like solar, wind and tidal power. The researchers say their supercapacitor could be used in the concrete foundations of a house to provide an entire day’s worth of energy without adding any additional construction costs. It could even eventually be used on concrete roadways to provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel. “There is a huge need for big energy storage,” said MIT professor Franz-Josef Ulm. “That’s where our technology is extremely promising, because cement is ubiquitous... [It] offers a new way of looking toward the future of concrete as part of the energy transition.” Early applications will likely be with isolated homes or buildings equipped with solar panels that do not have access to grid power. The concrete mixture can also be adjusted to serve other uses, the scientists noted, such as heating systems. A paper detailing the research, titled ‘Cement supercapacitors as a scalable energy storage solution’, was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. Read More Hundreds of years after it was discovered, one material is about to change the world Battery breakthroughs are about to trigger a transport revolution

E-cigarette company Juul Labs is seeking US authorization to sell a "next-generation" vape with age verification capabilities in the United States.

Nasa has “inadvertently” lost contact with Voyager 2, its pioneering spacecraft. The space agency said that it had sent a series of planned commands to the probe on 21 July. But those moves left Voyager 2 pointing in the wrong direction: its antenna is now pointing two degrees away from Earth, and so it has lost contact with its engineers. It cannot either receive commands or send back data, Nasa said. Ordinarily, it would do so by establishing contact with the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which is a set of ground-based antennas that allow for communications with distant spacecraft. But the data being sent by Voyager 2 is not reaching that network. Voyager 2 is now floating on its own, almost 20 billion kilometres from Earth. Nasa still hopes to be able to re-establish contact with the probe, however. It is programmed to automatically reset its orientation a number of times each year, to push its antenna back to Earth. The next reset is expected to happen on 15 October, Nasa said. Until then, the space agency expects the probe to “remain on its planned trajectory during the quiet period”, it said. As its name suggests, Voyager 2 was part of a pair, both of which were launched in 1977. Voyager 1 is floating even further from Earth – at 24 billion kilometres – and Nasa says it is continuing to operate as normal. The Voyager programme brought with it a host of records: Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune, and together they are the only spacecraft made by humans to ever have entered interstellar space. Even almost 50 years since they were launched, the pair of Voyager spacecraft have continued to send back useful and important information to Nasa for examination by scientists on Earth. They have contributed to a host of new findings about the very distant edges of our solar system. Read More How to take the perfect picture of tonight's supermoon Elon Musk installs huge, glowing letter on top of his office A game where you go to sleep in real life is one of the most popular in the world

Pokémon Sleep, a game in which players go to bed in real life to win, is rocketing up the App Store charts. The app is now sixth in Apple’s charts, suggesting that makers The Pokémon Company may have found a way to replicate some of the success of their previous hit Pokemon Go. To play the game, people download the app onto their iPhone – or use a separate, paid-for accessory that the company says can be used to track sleep as well as make it easier. Once that is done, users mostly play by going to sleep. When they wake up in the morning, they will receive information about their sleep patterns – how long they slept, what kind of sleep that was, and whether players made any noises during the night – and receive rewards of Pokémon that will be caught based on that data. The game has received some negative reviews: on the iOS App Store, one player called it “deeply flawed and predatory”, criticising the fact that tracking sleep with the iPhone app means sleeping with it and leaving the screen on. While players can use the Pokémon Go Plus +, which has been given a confusing name presumably to separate it from the existing Pokémon Go Plus, that costs $60. It also received a critical review in The Verge, which said that while it was “incredibly cute”, it came with some drawbacks, including the fact that it requires players to undertake dull tasks during the day and offered few meaningful ways to actually improve sleep. Nonetheless, the game appears to have proven incredibly successful on the iPhone’s App Store and Android’s Google Play Store, where it has been downloaded millions of times. The game comes amid a growing interest in the benefits of sleep, and the technology that can help promote it. Multiple wearables such as those made by Apple, Garmin and Whoop all track the sleeping habits of their wearers, and other companies have promoted cooling and massaging technologies that are aimed at helping people get more restful sleep.

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is planning to visit China in late August, according to people familiar with

The upcoming iPhone 15 will include a host of changes aimed at letting Apple achieve its long-awaited dream handset, according to a new report. The updated handset will bring a host of new changes, including titanium frames that will make the device stronger and lighter, as well as new display technology that will let Apple shrink down the bezels around the display. That will mean that the black border around the device’s screen will be a third smaller, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Apple has long been working to turn the iPhone into one slab of glass, without bezels or sides, so that the technology can disappear. In recent years, it has got considerably closer to that dream: with the iPhone X in 2017, it removed the “chin and forehead” at the bottom and top of the display, and since then it has further shrunk those bezels and the notch that is still required for cameras and other sensors. Even still, however, the iPhone has a bezel that wraps around the display, where the screen attaches to the side of the phone. Apple has never been able to entirely remove that border. The new device will not achieve that dream. But Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggested that the new device would bring it closer to it, by shrinking those sides down considerable. It will also bring an action button in the place of a mute switch, and the introduction of USB-C in the place of the existing Lightning port. Both of those features have appeared on other Apple devices already, in the Apple Watch Ultra and iPad respectively. Many of those changes have already been rumoured. But Mr Gurman has a strong track record of reporting Apple’s moves before they are publicly announced, suggesting that all those changes are likely to be true. The non-Pro version of the iPhone will also get an improvement, in the form of the “Dynamic Island” that replaced the notch in this year’s iPhone 14 Pro. That allows for more of the display to be seen, and looks to use the black cutout for the sensors as a feature rather than a frustration. All of those changes will bring an increased price, Mr Gurman reported, with prices expected to rise internationally and potentially even in the US. Recent reports have suggested the same, with some analysts indicating that some versions of the new iPhone could cost $200 more than its predecessor. The new versions of the Apple Watch will also get their first meaningful chip upgrade since 2020, bringing a “sizeable performance bump”, Mr Gurman reported. Read More New iPhone might have a mysterious button on its side – and this is what it could do iPhone users urged to check their photo library amid fears they could be deleted Rumours are growing about some bad iPhone news

In a July 20 letter shared publicly Monday, Twitter threatened to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate, accusing the group of a campaign to hurt Twitter by driving away its advertisers.

Dell Technologies on Monday launched new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) solutions in collaboration with Nvidia whose chips enable

TOKYO Japan's Panasonic Holdings posted a 42% rise in first quarter operating profit on Monday, buoyed by a