Forget digital. The future of A.I. is … analog? At least, that’s the assertion of Mythic, an A.I. chip company that’s, its own words, taking “a leap forward in performance in power” by going back in time. Sort of. Before ENIAC, the world’s first room-sized programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, buzzed to life in 1945, Read more
Author: Luke Dormehl
It’s part drone, part plane, and headed to the skies in 2025
At nine-thirty in the evening, one otherwise nondescript day in November 1954, a Belgian man named Roelants was riding his bicycle in the village of Dudzele, West Flanders. As he passed a dairy, he witnessed a bright light rapidly descend from the sky. As he cycled closer, the light — which he now realized was Read more
Fighting football injuries with 3D-printed, personalized pads
If you’ve ever watched a movie about sports, you’ve seen it. It’s that moment that occurs two-thirds of the way into the story, when the protagonists’ inevitable victory suddenly seems a lot less certain. Maybe the inspirational mentor winds up in the ER, muttering motivational slogans from a hospital bed. Perhaps the unorthodox coach wins Read more
Solving VR’s ‘infinite walking’ problem with moon boots
“It’s about the continuity of the experience,” said Brad Factor. “It’s about maintaining that immersion. It’s about ease of use and the learning curve: not needing to teach somebody how to use VR, but just being able to put on the headset and experience the virtual world naturally. That’s a lot of what we’re focusing Read more
This is the year 2022, according to old sci-fi movies
One of the many repercussions of the global pandemic is that it has made planning for the future extremely tough. That tropical vacation you’re saving for this summer? Who knows whether you’ll be able to fly to that country at that time. That mid-January drink with buddies? Better hope nothing changes before then. However, in Read more
The most important personal computers in history, ranked
Forty years ago this week, the iconic IBM PC made its debut, cementing the personal computer as a mainstream product category to be reckoned with. Within a few years, America — and the world — went computer wild, with home computers suddenly the province of ordinary people. But which desktop computers go down as the Read more
Performance enhancing shoes? How Nike’s controversial Vaporfly line redefined running
“Fast” is the word that Rachel Bull, senior footwear product director at Nike Running, uses to describe the company’s Vaporfly series of running shoes. As word choices go, “fast” doesn’t seem particularly inspired. It’s safe to say that it’s not exactly going to have scholars scratching their heads over due to its ambiguity. Saying that running Read more
Intel’s incredible athlete-tracking A.I. is the ‘holy grail’ of training tech
Jonathan Lee, director of sports performance technology in Intel’s Olympic Technology Group, has flown 11 hours and quarantined for 14 days to stitch skeletons together on a computer. And if it works as well as he hopes, it’ll be an amazing innovation for action replays at the 2020 Toyko Olympics. “Part of our artificial intelligence Read more
The incredible engineering inside an Olympic archer’s bow
Ronald Hoogendoorn/BSR Agency/Getty Images For a long time, the most popular cultural conception of archery came from the likes of Robin Hood: Hollywood imaginings of medieval folk tales featuring technology no more complex than a simple wooden bow and corded bowstring. More recently, a generation corn-fed on Marvel movies has had a new go-to archery Read more
The most infamous failures in tech history, immortalized as desk toys
Silicon Valley has a strange relationship with failure. The Valley rewards success first and foremost, of course. It loves its “unicorns,” its college dropouts-turned-twentysomething-billionaires, and its disruptors with no time for the status quo. But it also doesn’t, at least not outwardly, penalize failures. Whether it’s a comeback story like that of Steve Jobs or Read more