It’s easy to forget that Marques Brownlee is all of 26 years old, until he says that he’d never played a game on a Nintendo Game Boy until recently, or that he was in high school when the first iPhone was released. The New Jersey native, also known as MKBHD, recently crossed the 10-million-subscriber mark …
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Several US tech companies are being accused of benefiting from cobalt that’s mined by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nonprofit group International Rights Advocates this week filed a lawsuit in the US District Court in Washington on behalf of 14 plaintiffs who are the guardians of children either killed or seriously injured in tunnel or wall collapses while …
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Apple’s new Mac Pro is available to order Tuesday. Though the price of the entry-level configuration is $5,999, if you go with all the many upgrades, the powerhouse computer tops out at more than $50,000 — and that doesn’t include software or a display. The beastly Mac Pro, along with its $5,000 6K Pro Display XDR monitor “accessory,” stole the …
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A human defeated a computer-piloted drone in the Drone Racing League’s first man-vs.-machine competition. But the programmers behind the AI-powered drone, Team MAVLab from the Netherlands, can take consolation in a $1 million prize for creating the fastest self-piloting aircraft this season. The Drone Racing League mostly involves human pilots, but this year it began its first computer-piloted drone competition, …
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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai issued a proposal Wednesday to dedicate slivers of the 5.9 gigahertz spectrum band to unlicensed Wi-Fi use and the use of Qualcomm’s cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) protocol. The move is considered somewhat controversial since it goes against recommendations from the US Department of Transportation. The Qualcomm technology promises to let vehicles wirelessly communicate with one …
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Self-driving cars can already see and think for themselves. But a newer technology that will run on soon-to-launch 5G networks promises to give them another advanced skill: the ability to talk with one another. C-V2X, a communications technology using the same 5G networks coming to our phones, will allow vehicles to communicate wirelessly with each other, with traffic signals and …
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Designing your own chips is hard. But Tesla, one of the most aggressive developers of autonomous vehicle technology, thinks it’s worth it. The company shared details Tuesday about how it fine-tuned the design of its AI chips so two of them are smart enough to power its cars’ upcoming “full self-driving” abilities. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk and his colleagues revealed …
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Tesla has announced the Megapack battery, its largest energy storage product to date. The company aims to support energy grid usage during peak hours by storing up to 3 megawatt hours of clean wind and solar energy, supplanting natural gas “peaker” plants. The Megapacks are intended to be linked together and will be deployed in four California locations, Tesla said …
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Microsoft has invested $1 billion in OpenAI and reached a multiyear deal with the artificial intelligence research startup to jointly develop new supercomputing tech, the companies said Monday. OpenAI will run its services on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. San Francisco-based OpenAI, which launched in 2015, has repeatedly emphasized its focus on the ethical use of artificial intelligence that “benefits all of …
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Computer storage technology has moved from wires with magnets to hard disks to 3D stacks of memory chips. But the next storage technology might use an approach as old as life on earth: DNA. Startup Catalog announced Friday it’s crammed all of the text of Wikipedia’s English-language version onto the same genetic molecules our own bodies use. It accomplished the …
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