China has denounced a US Senate bill worth about $250 billion as an example of the U.S. hyping up “the so-called China threat”, and accused Washington of attempting to hinder its development, The Guardian reports. In a rare show of unity, the Senate approved by a 68-32 margin the Innovation and Competition Act. In a statement on Wednesday, the foreign affairs committee of China’s ceremonial legislature, the National People’s Congress, expressed its “strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition.” It said: “This...
An internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug, the BBC reports. Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers changed its settings. The outage has raised questions about the potential perils of relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet. The outage, which lasted about an hour, hit popular websites...
Elon Musk's Boring Company opened its underground Loop beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center yesterday, CNET reports. The concept is simple: avoid gridlock by taking traffic underground. Simplify the transport experience by putting high-tech vehicles (read Teslas) on a one-way loop and delivering on-demand rides. The experience is also simple. Get in the car, drive through a tunnel, get out the other side. The 2.7-kilometre Vegas Loop consists of three passenger stations (two above ground, one below), connected...
A new study reveals that at the same time humans are unwilling to co-operate and compromise with machines, and that they will exploit them. Using methods from behavioral game theory, an international team of researchers at LMU Munich and the University of London conducted large-scale online studies to see whether people would behave as co-operatively with artificial intelligence (AI) systems as they do with fellow humans. The study, published in the journal iScience, found that, upon first encounter, people...
A major outage today has affected a number of high-profile websites including Amazon, Reddit, and Twitch, reports the BBC. The U.K. government website - gov.uk - was also down, as were the Financial Times, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Cloud computing provider Fastly said it was behind the problems. In a statement, it said: "We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration." The issues...
In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, scientists found caffeinated sleep-deprived individuals make as many mistakes performing a complex task as people who are sleep deprived but non-caffeinated. The complex task was meant to simulate real-world scenarios in which people need to make many decisions in a certain order, such as performing surgery, flying an airplane, or operating heavy machinery. Kimberly Fenn, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, told CBC Radio's Quirks &...
The popular certified digital objects known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have spawned a new generation of collectors convinced of their huge potential, Tech Xplore reports. NFTs, which are digital objects such as drawings, animations, pieces of music, photos, or videos whose authenticity is confirmed by blockchain technology, generated nearly $2.5 billion in sales over the first five months of 2021, according to the specialized NonFungible website. The big auction houses sell them regularly, as Sotheby's is doing...
A team of Boston University biologists conducted research that reveals it is possible to accurately predict the abundance of different species of soil microbes in different parts of the world. The team recently published their findings in a new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution. "If we know where organisms are on Earth, and we know how they change through space and time due to different environmental forces, and something about what different species are doing,...
Understanding the process and technology of detecting unmarked graves has become a focus following the announcement that preliminary findings from a survey of the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., indicate that the remains of 215 children could be buried at the site, CBC reports. That determination was made by a specialist who used ground-penetrating radar (GPR), a geophysical survey method to examine the site. The technology is used on sites to determine the presence...
A team of researchers has found that among tightly situated wind farms in German waters, wind speeds at the downstream windfarm are significantly slower. As the researchers write in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, this braking effect results in a large-scale low-wind pattern noticeable in mean wind speeds. On average, they extend 35 to 40 kilometers – in certain weather conditions up to 100 kilometers. The output of a neighbouring wind farm can thus be reduced by...
