While the real-life version of Tony Stark may be concentrating on building electric cars and sending us to Mars, others are trying to turn his Iron Man suit into reality. Today, Hyundai announced (link in Korean) that it was working on a robotic exoskeleton suit, which it compared to an Iron Man suit, Korean news outlet Yonhap reported.
Today Google released Gboard, which is unfortunately not a Google-branded self-driving hoverboard, but rather a new keyboard for Apple iOS devices.
It’s been called the “Burning Man for the 1%” by its own attendees.
When you’re orbiting the Earth at about 5 miles per second (18,000 mph), nearly anything your ship comes into contact with can leave a mark.
The first step in the future of transportation might have just taken place in a desert in Nevada.
A new patent from Facebook suggests that if we really want to convey our cognitive state through pictograms to the people we send messages to, the best way to do it may not be through emoji, but through ourselves. 😱.
If recent television deals are anything to go by, it seems the US now has a new summer pastime. First-person drone racing, barely even a concept a few years ago, is now going to be on two US cable TV channels this summer.
Even though it’s tried and failed (a few times) to own Android users’ mobile experience, Facebook is still pretty much the king of Google’s mobile operating system.
Long before apps that could bring anything to you in a matter of minutes, Domino’s Pizza had a pledge to deliver a pizza to anyone in 30 minutes or less. But its delivery people were reportedly getting into too many accidents trying to hit their deadlines, so Domino’s stopped.
Snapchat, the ethereal social messaging service, has joined the ranks of apps and sites that travelers aren’t able to access through onboard wifi while flying.
While we worry about a future where robots have taken all of our jobs, there are some we would gladly get rid of. Humans have to operate in so many dangerous situations—oil rigs, nuclear power plants, under water, fighting fires, to name a few—that a team of roboticists and computer scientists at Stanford are creating a future where we won’t have to. Last week, they announced that their robot creation, OceanOne, had successfully explored the wreckage of the French ship La Lune, which sank in 1664, 100 m (328 ft) below the surface of the Mediterranean 20 miles off the coast of France. No human has touched the ship since it sank.
If you could snowboard down the chart of GoPro’s stock price since its IPO in 2014, the ride would be just as extreme as anything people have filmed with its cameras. And things could soon get even more intense.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently said that it’s an “open secret” in Silicon Valley that Apple is working on building some sort of vehicle. While Apple has not confirmed that this is the case, there are an increasing number of signs that suggest Musk is right. The Guardian reported last year that it came across documents that proved Apple was working on a self-driving car, and that the company had met with officials in California over the state’s self-driving car regulations. And now there’s another revelation: Apple has poached a Google employee that had been working on electric charging systems, potentially for its car project.
Fitbit can’t catch a break.
In a not-too-distant future, robots will be driving us around, serving us our coffee, and, apparently, performing our surgeries. New research published in the journal Science Translational Medicine today hints at a time when robots will be able to perform parts of surgeries on their own, without any help from humans.
Google is growing up. It’s ditching the sporty Lexus SUVs and cute panda-shaped vehicles it’s been using for its self-driving vehicle project, and opting to get something far more sensible: a minivan. The company announced today that it will receive 100 custom-built Chrysler Pacifica minivans from Fiat-Chrysler as it expands its tests in autonomous driving.
If you’ve preordered an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and it hasn’t shown up yet, the company has a new idea for you: Cancel your order and go wait in line for one.
And so it was a fairytale ending to the Premier League soccer season. Leicester City FC is the champion of England—even though the team wasn’t playing tonight (May 2).
Apple has been having a rough few days.
In its first two seasons, HBO’s Silicon Valley did a pretty excellent job of lambasting the tech and business culture of the Bay Area. But after the first two episodes of its its third season, the show is quickly moving away from comedic social commentary and into something far more real.
Microsoft has long been the reluctant choice of world wide web-viewers, but today it has finally been dethroned by Google’s Chrome as the world’s most popular web browser. According to web analytics firm NetMarketShare, Google’s browser overtook Internet Explorer as the desktop web browser with the greatest market share.
One of largest, most important research projects in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has been taken offline. The giant particle accelerator that sits beneath the French-Swiss border and used to uncover new information about what happened in the universe right after the Big Bang, has apparently been damaged by a woodland creature, most likely a weasel, according to NPR.
Earlier this week, OpenAI, the nonprofit research group with billion-dollar backing from Elon Musk and other tech luminaries, launched its first program. It’s called OpenAI Gym, and it’s meant to be used as a benchmarking tool for artificial intelligence programs.
3D printing is still in its infancy, but it’s starting to show signs that it might revolutionize the way we manufacture products. That said, current technology won’t allow us to make anything larger than the printing machines themselves. Some smart people have suggested that we should look to nature to see how it builds things—specifically, spiders, and the way they can swarm together to build massive nests for themselves.
