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
“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
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
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
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
Ever had to make the difficult choice between a chunky knit scarf and a new keyboard as part of your monthly budget? Boy, does the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) world-famous Media Lab have the piece of convergence culture for you! Seizing on the observation that most of the world’s keyboards up until this point Read more
Virtual and augmented reality. 3D printing. Natural language processing. Deep learning. The smart home. Driverless vehicles. Biometric technology. Genetically modified organisms. Brain-computer interfaces. These, in descending order, are the top 10 most-invested-in emerging technologies in the United States, as ranked by number of deals. If you want to get a sense of which technologies will Read more
There’s that iconic moment in many a Superman story in which the Man of Steel is soaring through the sky when, thanks to his super hearing, he picks up the faint, frightened voice of a person calling for help. Without a second thought, Supes zeroes in on the audio source and flies off in that Read more
“Seagulls,” said Andy Stanford-Clark, excitedly. “They’re quite a big obstacle from an image-processing point of view. But, actually, they’re not a threat at all. In fact, you can totally ignore them.” Stanford-Clark, the chief technology officer for IBM in the U.K. and Ireland, was exudingnervous energy. It was the afternoon before the morning when, at Read more
Travis DeShazo is, to paraphrase Cake’s 2001 song “Comfort Eagle,” building a religion. He is building it bigger. He is increasing the parameters. And adding more data. The results are fairly convincing, too, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. “Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god Read more
