A pair of researchers, Ujué Agudo and Helena Matute of Universidad de Deusto in Spain, recently published a fascinating study demonstrating how easy it is to influence humans with algorithms. Up front: The basic takeaway from the work is that people tend to do what the algorithm says. Whether they’re being influenced to vote for a...
Tag: Disruptive 5G
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A New Haunted Mansion Movie Is Creeping Forward With Director Justin Simien
Get on the Doom Buggy, a Haunted Mansion movie is moving forward.Photo: Disney Parks The possibility of a new movie based on Disney’s Haunted Mansion continues to rise from the grave. Last summer, Disney hired Katie Dippold to pen a script and now it’s in talks to bring director Justin Simien aboard the Doom Buggy....
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Greta to Congress: ‘End Fossil Fuel Subsidies Now’
Tell ‘em, Greta.Photo: Alex Wong (Getty Images) Between releasing new climate commitments under the Paris Agreement and organizing an international Earth Day summit, it’s clear that President Joe Biden wants to reposition the U.S. as an international climate leader. At a hearing on Thursday, 17-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg offered him some advice on...
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How to Watch the Launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 Mission to the ISS
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2, as photographed during a training session. From left are, Mission Specialist Thomas Pesquet of the ESA, Pilot Megan McArthur of NASA, Commander Shane Kimbrough of NASA, and Mission Specialist Akihiko Hoshide from JAXA.Image: SpaceX Early Friday morning, NASA will attempt to launch a CrewDragon to the International Space Station. The occasion will...
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Hey, Sony, We Don’t Need a New Streaming Service. Make PS Now Better
Photo: Sam Rutherford/Gizmodo After days of rumors that Sony is adding a video streaming service to its existing PlayStation Plus, the company confirmed today that it’s testing one such service in Poland. I don’t know about you, but I’m so over new video streaming services. There are just too many of them. PlayStation Now, Sony’s...
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Jack and Elon Are Promoting Bitcoin on Earth Day for Some Reason (It Makes Them Richer)
Feel the clean bitcoin energy.Photo: Tobias Schwarz/AFP (Getty Images) Earth Day is prime time for brands and people to promote their pre-existing products to the masses, swaddled up in a green package. So perhaps it’s no surprise that area shaman Jack Dorsey and meme enthusiast Elon Musk are pumping bitcoin, a cryptocurrency both men hold...
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Scientists Look in an Ancient Meteorite and Find Evidence of CO2-Laced Water
Fragments of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite.Image: Wikimedia Commons (Fair Use) A team of researchers recently took a close look at an ancient meteorite and determined that it contained carbon dioxide-rich water, a discovery that has implications for the theory that water (and thus, life) first arrived on Earth by way of these rocks. Advertisement The...
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A Harvard Scientist Is Selling His Genetic Code as an NFT
Image by Futurism Famed geneticist and Harvard University professor George Church has launched a genetic sequencing service called Nebula Genomics — and the company is putting Church’s own DNA for sale as a non-fungible token (NFT). “As one of the first genomes ever sequenced, Professor Church’s DNA carries a great deal of historical significance to...
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AI forensics reveals a Grassy Knoll-style ‘second author’ mystery surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls
AI has helped discover new insights about the authors of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls. Researchers in the Netherlands used AI and pattern recognition to analyze the handwriting of the mysterious scribes. They found evidence that the manuscripts were penned by two different writers. Mladen Popović, professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the...
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The new iMacs have ‘force-canceling’ speakers — here’s what that means
Apple loves throwing around buzzwords in product reveals and spec sheets, and one that caught a few eyes was the use of ‘force-canceling‘ in the new iMac‘s sound systems. Apple claims these are the best speakers in an iMac yet, but what does a force-canceling woofer actually mean? Is that some kind of Jedi fighting...