When Google’s photo organising service tagged Blacks as ‘gorillas’ it walked AI into Hall of Shame
When a person dies in a car crash in the US, data on the incident is typically reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Federal law requires that civilian airplane pilots notify the National Transportation Safety Board of in-flight fires and some other incidents. The grim registries are intended...
Mr President, when a regime fails its citizens silence becomes betrayal and inaction treason
I am a Kenyan citizen and resident taxpayer who, alongside 48 million of my fellow citizens, has watched with utter dismay and increasing frustration as your government has run the affairs of our land with criminal negligence, thereby placing in great jeopardy not just our present fortunes but our children’s...
Some Americans refuse to see Covid as a threat, suspect vaccines and institutions
America’s vaccine campaign has collapsed from its previous highs. While at one point in mid-April more than three million people received the shot each day, now only around 1.2 million are – a rate that’s less than half of what it was at the peak. So, the US might not...
NASA sends two spacecraft to Venus roughly 30 years since its last mission
NASA had a surprise in store for planetary scientists on Thursday morning. During a “State of NASA” briefing, the agency announced that roiling, toxic Venus will be the target of the next two missions in its highly competitive Discovery programme. “These two sister missions, both aimed to understand how Venus...
‘Deepfake’ maps that will show you’re in London, not Nairobi, coming soon
Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions. Other aerial images – of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in...
Sexism? Why biomedical research focuses on male rats, mice hormones only
Picture a person having a heart attack – what do you see? Mostly likely a man, looking sweaty and short of breath, clutching his arm or chest in pain. This canonical image has been so deeply impressed into our minds that it may be hard to believe heart attacks could...
Facemask: How condom, car seatbelts and tuberculosis experience eased the stigma
Early in the HIV-Aids epidemic in the 1980s, public-health officials faced a major challenge in trying to slow the spread of the virus. The problem wasn’t necessarily convincing people that a physical barrier – in this case, a condom – could prevent infection. “I don’t think the issue was so...
Risks of remote presence: Your online content can be screenshot, misused
Remote attendance of events, including work, has its own challenges: you leave a lot in your trail that can work against you. Recording of such events has its own social and professional risks that you need to be aware of and give informed consent or decline where appropriate. This may...
Remote sensing: Gear up for virtual weddings, dowry deals and memorials
The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we work and remote work will continue for the foreseeable future, according to media research. Forbes magazine predicts that by 2025, an estimated 70 per cent of the workforce will be toiling at home at least part-time. Also, here to stay – in...
When cool old-school computers prove too good to die, in-demand and impractical to retire
Sometimes cool old-school IT refuses to die, in demand and impractical to retire Some 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory – a solar-monitoring satellite launched in 2010 – bristles with high-tech sensors. Yet one of the Earth-bound systems that supports those sensors was, until 2015, decidedly old-school....
