Science

Hong Kong saw its first electric taxis hit the streets on Saturday in a step towards reducing the city's high levels of roadside pollution.

Pakistan is set to become the fifth Asian country to use China's domestic satellite navigation system which was launched as a rival to the US global positioning system, a report said Saturday.

Morocco is ploughing ahead with a programme to boost wind energy production, particularly in the southern Tarfaya region, where Africa's largest wind farm is set to open in 2014.

(AP)—Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says pessimists who are forecasting that the economy will not reap sizable benefits from the computer revolution are likely to be proven wrong.

Johnny Cash may have preferred this galaxy's burning ring of fire to the one he sang about falling into in his popular song. The "starburst ring" seen at center in red and yellow hues is not the product of love, as in the song, but is instead a frenetic region of star formation.

(Phys.org) —Yawn. Two startup visionaries claim they have just the device to replace keyboard and mouse forever and ever. Where have you heard that before. But maybe these two have something important. Meron Gribetz, the startup founder and CEO and Ben Sand, the co-pilot and evangelist, are behind something called the Meta wearable computer headset, which consists of stereoscopic glasses and camera. It's the way computers always should have been: wearable, viewed through both eyes, and directly controlled using the entire arms and hands, according to its founder and CEO Gribetz. The belief is that the future of computing is in this technology that can display information from the real world and control objects with one's fingers, Tony Stark-style, at low latency and high dexterity. Meta founder and CEO Gribetz referred to the technology as the keyboard and mouse of the future.

Yahoo Japan Corp. has said it suspects up to 22 million user IDs may have been stolen during an unauthorised attempt to access the administrative system of its Yahoo! Japan portal.

This is not the first time Jaron Lanier gets a post on Weird Things, in fact we met him before as he quickly went off the rails in describing AI, then became more incoherent while bemoaning all social media as a dehumanizing waste, all the while trying to pick a fight with the Singularitarian version of a machine-directed utopia. Now, the former virtual reality pioneer has moved on to a book length rumination on how technology is killing the middle class by eliminating jobs. And as per his current modus operandi, he starts off with a tiny kernel of a reasonable statement, and proceeds to strap it to the Hyperbole Rocket and launch it into deep space. Is it true that a new software package or a robot might make your job obsolete? Yes, it absolutely can. But does the technology prevent you from getting a new job? No, it doesn’t because the reasons why you’re going to have trouble finding work in a globalized economy are more political than technological, and it’s short term greed, partisan bickering, and ignorance of the powers that be at fault. Here’s an example. Lanier’s opening salvo says that when Kodak was at the height of its market domination of personal photography, it employed more than 140,000 people. Now, he says, the face of personal photography is Instagram which has only 13 employees. Therefore, jobs were lost because of technology, Q.E.D. Um, no. First and foremost, Kodak died the slow and painful death it did because it first refused to adapt to a world of digital photography, then couldn’t, as it wasted years assuming that as long as they can at least sell the tools to develop all those digital photos on glossy paper, they’ll be fine. They never even thought that paper may be useless for most of the pictures being taken today as social media and smartphones took off. Secondly, as much as tech blogs may have hyped it, Instagram was not "the new face of photography." Take away cheap, mainstream digital photography and it couldn’t exist. It was a distribution network, a network that Kodak could’ve built. But instead of innovating, it slowly withered away. All right, so what happened to those tens of thousands of people laid off by Kodak? Well, they could find new jobs because among those laid off were managers, assistants, chemists, and IT specialists who could’ve applied their skills in other companies, doing other things, and I assure you that there aren’t 140,000 middle class workers out there who haven’t worked a day since a Kodak executive pink slipped them to meet the quarterly numbers. Eeyore would’ve been more optimistic about their future than Lanier, but then again, for optimism, Lanier would’ve needed to see technology as something more than a nefarious tool to use and abuse the populace. Where the disciples of Ray Kurzweil see immorality, sunshine rainbows, and unicorns frolicking in the meadows, he seems to see impending chaos, destruction, and socioeconomic dystopia adapted from the pages of very gloomy science fiction. And yet, Lanier plans to live with this grim future. For a fee of course. You see, in his version of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them, he’s suggesting that if social media sites use our data to survive, they should pay us for it, and that’s how we will start solving the impending job crisis caused by these evil machines taking our place. Certainly, while being paid to mess around on Facebook would be a great deal, the problem is that paying all of its users even pennies a day would leave the company insolvent. Social media sites simply don’t make all that much money because they fell short of the promises they give a lot of advertisers when it comes to moving product for them. All the data you submit simply won’t give them nearly as good of a picture of who you are and what you like as Lanier and so many tech pundits think it does when they fall for the company’s wil

NASA's senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is driving to a new study area after a dramatic finish to 20 months on "Cape York" with examination of a rock intensely altered by water.

This week saw the 70th anniversary of the World War II Dambuster raids. On 16–17 May 1943 an attack on German dams, carried out by Royal Air Force No. 617 Squadron, subsequently known as the "Dambusters", used a specially developed "bouncing bomb" invented and developed by Barnes Wallis. The BBC has put together an interactive map that retraces the mission. The interactive uses a hand-drawn map from the official June 1943 British Air Ministry report on the Dambusters raid. The map shows the routes taken by the planes, the location of the planes that crashed and the location of the German dams. The MapBox Blog has this week been showing off the power of their MapBox Streets with vector tiles. Using vector tiles ensures the speed and scalability of MapBox maps. It also allows for some amazing styling of the map tiles. Using MapBox anyone can make "a totally custom branded map, of the entire globe, that is lighting fast on every device." The blog post includes a number of beautiful examples of styled maps. I think my favourite is the hand-drawn map style (shown in the screenshot above).