News

Uber self-driving car crashes into another car in Pittsburgh

An Uber self-driving car collided with another vehicle in Pittsburgh on February 24 in an incident first reported by Pittsburgh’s channel 11 last week. No one was seriously injured, but the incident caused serious damage to the vehicles. Uber and the driver disagree on exactly what happened in the seconds before the crash.

Train Your Machine Learning Models on Google’s GPUs for Free

Open Location Code: Easier location encoding

Open Location Codes are a way of encoding location into a form that is easier to use than latitude and longitude. They are designed to be used like street addresses, especially in places where buildings aren’t numbered or streets aren’t named.

‘Not welcome here’: Amazon faces growing resistance to its second home

Ford recalls 1.3 million cars for steering wheels that might fall off

Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

Geneticist David Reich used to study the living, but now he studies the dead. The precipitating event came in the form of 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found in a Croatian cave. So well-preserved were the bones that they yielded enough DNA for sequencing, and it became Reich’s job in 2007 to analyze the DNA for signs that Neanderthals interbred with humans—a idea he was “deeply suspicious” of at the time.

Making music using new sounds generated with machine learning

Technology has always played a role in inspiring musicians in new and creative ways. The guitar amp gave rock musicians a new palette of sounds to play with in the form of feedback and distortion. And the sounds generated by synths helped shape the sound of electronic music.

The German entrepreneurs celebrating their mistakes

The Berlin-born business owner is addressing an unusual audience – young techies gathered on a Thursday night to celebrate catastrophe. With the help of an amusing slideshow, featuring wisdom from TV’s The A-Team, Max tells the tale of multiple blunders made in the early days of his events company, Holi Concept, which runs festivals and races in cities across Europe. ‘In the last four or five years, I think I made 20 or 25 hard mistakes,’ he says, barely suppressing a cheeky grin.

The Blood Unicorn Theranos Was Just a Fairy Tale

It has been pretty obvious for a few years now that Theranos Inc. was a huge fraud. Theranos is a blood-testing startup that developed devices, which it called ‘TSPUs’ and ‘miniLabs,’ that were supposed to be able to do a wide range of laboratory tests on a finger-prick blood sample. It seems like Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes really wanted to build devices that would actually do these things, and thought she could, and tried to.

To Test Einstein’s Equations, Poke a Black Hole

In November 1915, in a lecture before the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Albert Einstein described an idea that upended humanity’s view of the universe. Rather than accepting the geometry of space and time as fixed, Einstein explained that we actually inhabit a four-dimensional reality called space-time whose form fluctuates in response to matter and energy.