Category: EMERGING NEWS

The USS Nimitz, is headed back to its home port in Los Angeles and back into the Navy dockyard. Which is good news because I was hoping to volunteer the ship as a venue for an exchange of video technology between the “vaguely” progressive U.S. state of Washington and the even more vaguely progressive state of Israel. Then I was told that under a Washington law dating back to 1939, taxpayer-funded Washington universities are not permitted to offer hospitality to visitors coming to the state for purposes of learning, holding…

Read More

The search giant has issued guidelines limiting what can be paid for by the company in exchange for placement. Now, advertisers can only buy ad space for which a market-research company has determined the ads “improve the capabilities of the targeted technology.” Market research is a sort of payment for advance sales. In a related move, Google has also reduced the size of the “payload” on any ad placed on Google search results, deleting any data about shoppers’ whereabouts that may have been reported. So, for example, a search for…

Read More

IIT-G students build a pocket-sized device to sanitize surfaces With a lot of upgrades, Dr. Nitish Patel’s invented device may become a household standard. One of the best inventions I know involves a device that could soon be used everywhere. Dr. Nitish Patel has invented a device that rapidly sanitizes whatever it comes in contact with, and there’s some estimate that it could be widespread within a year or two. As Krugman has pointed out, there’s already a competing device on the market, but I suspect this is going to…

Read More

In a separate commentary, Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc says that in addition to taking this step, his company will be adding similar privacy protection measures to its corporate email and cloud service platforms. The EU regulation that will start rolling out in August, GDPR, is the biggest technology change to hit the digital landscape since the opening of the World Wide Web — a rules package that both forms a broad framework and is designed to implement it. While it won’t have a huge impact on daily computing (although, if applied…

Read More

InSilico Medicine today announced a technology partnership with Arctoris Pharma to discover new therapeutics and meet regulatory hurdles to bring important new treatments to patients with blinding diseases of the eye. By working together, the two organizations can reduce clinical trial costs and expedite development of effective therapies for eye diseases. We live in a world that has advanced at an accelerated pace since the emergence of large, complex systems: medical algorithms on computers are able to show us how the biological world functions. And in silico medicine advances are…

Read More

On the morning of Wednesday, June 5, the team at Rocket Lab will attempt to launch the maiden orbital flight of their Electron rocket, a blast-off from their launch pad at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. Electron, which is set to carry its first payload of five satellites for customers including satellite companies and a part of the East Antarctic Ice Shelf Monitoring Program, is the first commercial mission in New Zealand’s history. More importantly, for this, and subsequent launches, this launch will mark a new way of organizing…

Read More

As I write, the COVID-19 contract dies, producing a large-scale 3D printer for the Pentagon. The last of the aluminum plates on the C-16 model are crushed and destroyed — as if to prove that death is permanent, this too is a loss, for the model’s forever. The Pentagon contract came at a point when 3D printers seemed about to explode in all directions, becoming, within a year or two, commonplace household objects. Carbon straightens out the production of metal parts. Dyson makes a new upright personal washer and dryer…

Read More

This week Flipkart announced a new $35 million investment in fashion site Myntra, as the Indian e-commerce juggernaut tries to stay ahead of rival Amazon. To some extent the move is in response to that company’s huge investment in fashion — and its success in penetrating into a young population that would never otherwise spend a dime on clothes. But I suspect Flipkart will still need to make more moves like this in order to ensure its survival. The strength of Indian fashion e-commerce, which has powered Myntra’s growth, is…

Read More

THE “confucius institute” has been a thing in China since at least the 1990s. With its outwardly reverential appearance, it projects an image of uncritical respect for Chinese history and culture: students visit them and there are students who can be seen eating their meals there, too. These institutes were usually housed in off-campus buildings, which in turn were closed off from the rest of the university. Universities with such a facility were able to assign slots for their students to study the Confucian texts taught in the institutes. As…

Read More

Long before I settled in America in 1996, I’d heard from friends that India was home to thousands of well-educated, free-thinking, restless students eager to leave the dusty and oppressive journey of life in a family or village. Yet I had never seen it myself. Until last September, when I packed my bags for a trip to northern New Jersey, where there were thousands of young Indians already having settled in working-class places like Somerset County, and the not-so-struggling borough of Franklin Lakes, where I had grown up. There were…

Read More