Honda’s Sensing level 2 driver assist system (AcuraWatch, if you bought upscale) will be growing more capable in the coming years, the automaker revealed on Wednesday. This decision comes as part of the company’s efforts to advance its Safety for Every…
The USGS warning system that knows when rumbling volcanoes will blow their mountain tops
More than 120 volcanic eruptions have occurred in the United States in the 42 years since Mount St. Helens erupted over Washington in 1980, killing 57 and inflicting over a billion dollars in property damage. While none have been nearly as destructive,…
The best winter car accessories for 2022
Winter is objectively the least wonderful time of the year, especially for anyone who has to brave black ice and whiteout driving conditions on top of the normal jackholery of their morning commute. The gifts listed here may not be enough to keep your …
Hitting the Books: Social media’s long, pointless war against sex on the internet
From the moment that people started getting nasty with Johannes Gutenberg’s newfangled printing press, sexually explicit content has led the way towards wide-scale adoption of mass communication technologies. But with every advance in methodology has i…
Water recycling technologies developed for space are helping a parched American west
Whether you live in the rapidly drying American West or are aboard the International Space Station for a six-month stint, having enough water to live on is a constant concern. As climate change continues to play havoc on the West’s aquifers, and as hum…
San Francisco police seek permission for its robots to use deadly force
The San Francisco Police Department is currently petitioning the city’s Board of Supervisors for permission to deploy robots to kill suspects that law enforcement deems a sufficient threat that the “risk of loss of life to members of the public or offi…
Add ‘Diplomacy’ to the list of games AI can play as well as humans
Machine learning systems have been mopping the floor with their human opponents for well over a decade now (seriously, that first Watson Jeopardy win was all the way back in 2011), though the types of games they excel at are rather limited. Typically c…
Hitting the Books: How Dave Chappelle and curious cats made Roomba a household name
Autonomous vacuum maker iRobot is a lot like Tesla, not necessarily by reinventing an existing concept — vacuums, robots and electric cars all existed before these two companies came on the scene — but by imbuing their products with that intangible qui…
Black market fears are hampering cannabis waste recycling efforts in California
As American cannabis has grown from cottage industry to $25 billion-a-year commercial enterprise that employs 428,059 folks nationwide, the product that weed has become now often bears little resemblance from the product that used to be sold raw. Flowe…
MIT solved a century-old differential equation to break ‘liquid’ AI’s computational bottleneck
Last year, MIT developed an AI/ML algorithm capable of learning and adapting to new information while on the job, not just during its initial training phase. These “liquid” neural networks (in the Bruce Lee sense) literally play 4D chess — their models…