Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. There are different schools of thought when it comes to getting your vocals perfect for any project. The easiest way, surely, is building a million-dollar studio and filling it with […]
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Samsung’s Space Monitor is a clever gadget whose sum is greater than its parts. On first glance, it’s simply a decent screen mounted on an innovative bracket. But it’s hard to overstate how huge an impact it’s had on my workflow as both a tech reviewer and a musician. There’s a lot of great displays […]
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Possessions are going out of fashion. An endless stream of media reports claim millennials – that amorphous mass of people born in the 1980s and 1990s who have grown up with the internet and digital technology – are in favor of accessing rather than owning stuff. And yet my research shows that owning possessions is […]
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For the ongoing series, Code Word, we’re exploring if — and how — technology can protect individuals against sexual assault and harassment, and how it can help and support survivors. This story explores how the podcast, After: Surviving sexual assault, gives survivors a voice to speak out about their experience with sexual trauma. While it […]
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Hackers have stolen a massive trove of sensitive data and defaced the website of SyTech, a major contractor working for Russian intelligence agency FSB (Federal Security Service). BBC Russia, which reported the breach, said “it’s possible that this is the largest data leak in the history of the work of Russian special services on the […]
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When the anonymous social media app YOLO was launched in May 2019, it topped the iTunes downloads chart after just one week, despite the lack of a major marketing campaign. Designed to be used with social network Snapchat, YOLO lets users invite people to send them anonymous messages. Its viral popularity followed that of other […]
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Now he’s looking to goats to see if the ancients’ theory that animals “know” about imminent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions holds water. Sure, it’s still a controversial idea, but perhaps 24/7 data collection around big events could provide scientific credence one way or another. Immediately after a powerful earthquake shook Norcia, Italy, in 2016, Wikelski […]
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You have to carry your phone, and you have to carry a wallet (for now), but there’s no rule saying that they can’t be one thing. The Zero Grid card holder sticks onto the back of basically any phone or case, and holds up to 8 cards, or or fewer cards plus some cash, all […]
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The English rock band Joy Division released their debut studio album “Unknown Pleasures” 40 years ago. The front cover doesn’t feature any words, only a now iconic black and white data graph showing 80 wiggly lines representing a signal from a pulsar in space. To mark the anniversary of the album, we recorded a signal […]
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To keep tabs on things that can’t yet be seen from space—or to follow up on interesting sightings—some activist groups are deploying drones into the skies and oceans. Last winter, autonomous sailing robots built by Saildrone set off from South America to circumnavigate Antarctica. The months-long mission gathers data for scientists at NOAA and CSIRO on how […]
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You’re outta here! Professional baseball‘s first AI umpire – in the form of an automated strike zone – didn’t take long to chalk up its first ejection after 1988 Cy Young winner and current pitching coach of the Atlantic League’s Highpoint Rockers, Frank Viola Jr., was tossed for his profanity-laced disagreement with the machine’s ruling. […]
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Google‘s reportedly on the verge of demonstrating a quantum computer capable of feats no ordinary classical computer could perform. The term for this is quantum supremacy, and experts believe the Mountain View company could be mere months from achieving it. This may be the biggest scientific breakthrough for humanity since we figured out how to […]
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Transforming the red planet to support life has long been a dream of science fiction. Mars is now too cold to support life. Its atmosphere is also too thin to protect any living organisms from harmful radiation. But a new study suggests that local conditions could be changed using an inch of “aerogel” – a […]
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The Israeli company behind WhatsApp hack earlier this May has developed new technology that can clandestinely steal a user’s data from Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. According to The Financial Times — which reported the development — NSO Group’s Pegasus malware “has now evolved to capture the much greater trove of information stored beyond […]
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Do you remember your first kiss? What about your grandma dying? Chances are you do, and that’s because emotional memories are at the core of our personal life story. Some rare moments are just incredibly intense and stand out from an otherwise repetitive existence of sleeping, eating and working. That said, daily life, too, is […]
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The Kazakhstan government has started to intercept all HTTPS traffic from all devices within its borders effective July 17, reports ZDNet. Local internet service providers (ISPs) have been instructed by the government to force their citizens to install a state-authorized certificate on all devices, and all browsers. This certificate allows the Kazakhstan government to decrypt […]
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You can’t fool all the people all the time, but a new dataset of untouched nature photos seems to confuse state-of-the-art computer vision models all but two-percent of the time. AI just isn’t very good at understanding what it sees, unlike humans who can use contextual clues. The new dataset is a small subset of […]
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For the ongoing series, Code Word, we’re exploring if — and how — technology can protect individuals against sexual assault and harassment, and how it can help and support survivors. Google has pulled seven tracking apps from the Play Store after Avast, a cybersecurity company, found they allowed people to stalk on their employees, children, or […]
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Ugh, the Gregorian calendar is so boring. That’s why we’re disrupting monthly series with a lunar cycle-based series about the best patents of the last synodic month, picked by the PatentYogi team. Get ready when that moon gets gibbous, y’all. This June-ish roundup lands on the tasty Strawberry Moon! Since my last post, the US patent office issued […]
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Five years ago, global funding for the femtech sector had barely reached $100 million total. But now the femtech industry is set to see a huge increase with more than $400 million funneling in — the largest amount of funding the industry has ever received. This is long overdue. historically, femtech hasn’t received much venture capital funding […]
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