Technology

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Variety magazine reports that Snapchat has purchases a startup called AI Factory which specializes in image and video recognition, using the company's expertise in its Cameos feature that allows users to place selfies into looping videos. The move has reignited concerns about deepfakes, the video equivalents of manipulated bogus images in Photoshop, and how the rapidly improving technology might contribute to misinformation campaigns on social media.

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Samsung has announced that its subsidiary 'Star Labs' has been working on artificial CGI generated humans that are powered by AI. They have been vague as to how this technology works but have said that it can be used for entertainment or as a kind of digital receptionist. It is unclear whether or not this technology will bring anything new to the table.

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Guru, a new tech startup has announced that they have figured out how to wirelessly charge smartphones via radio waves. Their technology will be cheaper and faster than the wireless chargers currently on the market. The company will create its first prototypes early next week in collaboration with some large electronics companies.

smartphone wireless charging start-up wireless-charging

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Dr. Enass Abo-Hamed, heading the H2Go Power team at Imperial College in London, has discovered a novel way to store hydrogen gas in tanks that does not require the use of large, heavy tanks, which has made possible the use of aluminium hydrogen storage tanks that are light enough to power drones. Dr. Abo-Hamed has expressed her hopes that the discovery will help make renewable energy garner more acceptance.

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The Indian government has announced that it will be commissioning a nuclear reactor every year in order to boost commercial use of nuclear energy. They are likely going to build the next water reactor at the Kakrapar nuclear plant in Gujarat. India's Kaiga-1 reactor currently holds the world record for most continuous days of operation.

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German automotive supplier Bosch has announced that it has created a lower-cost version of a lidar sensor, a kind of sensor that provides a full 3-dimensional view of the road using light. This could drastically speed up the development of self-driving cars as no affordable sensors are currently available on the market.

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Google's Health division recently participated in a study where their AI program was put to the test of diagnosing breast cancer from images of mammograms, including scans from over 25,000 UK women and over 3,000 US women. The AI managed to not only perform better than radiologists at diagnosing breast cancer from the scans, but also reported fewer false positives than actual doctors.

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A renowned US navy scientist and researcher has just filed for a patent for a compact nuclear fusion reactor. According to reports, the reactor would be able to fit inside of a vehicle and will be able to produce anywhere between 1 billion and 1 trillion watts of power, making it more powerful than any nuclear reactor in the US.

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US speaker manufacturer Sonos is under fire for its recently launched recycling program, which allows customers to permanently deactivate their Sonos speakers, after which they can choose to recycle it locally or ship it back to Sonos, and receive a 30 percent discount on new speakers. Critics say the program is encouraging users to dispose of operational, resalable speakers and is contributing to wastefulness rather than reducing it.

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Apple is currently suing Corellium for copyright infringement in an attempt to end jailbreaking. Corellium is a company that specializes in replicating the IOS software for jailbroken devices in order to help security officials find bugs in the program. The company has said that Apple's move is disappointing since Apple has benefitted from the jailbreaking community in the past.

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Sources close to the Indonesian government have revealed that the country's e-wallet payment startups, some of which are backed by Chinese retail giant Alibaba, might soon be forced to charge a fixed fee on e-wallet transactions, with the revenue earned being divided between the company itself, any middle man transaction processing business, and the National Electronic Transaction settlement.

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Scotland cabinet secretary Michael Matheson revealed the country's ambitions for leading the rest of the world in the development of self-driving vehicles, with Scotland's transport authority successfully piloting several new programs designed to facilitate autonomous travel, such as the placement of roadside beacons that can be used by self-driving apps to transmit traffic information and plan journeys.

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According to new rumors and renderings, Google's new Pixel 4a smartphone will include a headphone jack and a hole-punch display. These may become standout features for the device in 2020 with many companies moving away from the headphone jack, even among mid-range devices. The phone will likely release sometime in May 2020.

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Tesla, the world-famous electric car manufacturer, has already started delivering cars that it built in its new Shanghai factory. The plant was built earlier this year and cost the company $2 billion. The factory will ensure Tesla is unaffected by any future trade war between the US and China.

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The Irish government has announced that it will make the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030 in order to reduce the total pollution in the country. The government hopes that a third of all cars on the road in the country will be electric by 2030. They hope the area will be carbon neutral by 2050.

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According to a new study, children are better able to remember story details if the book they read was animated in an interactive manner as opposed to not being animated at all. The study found that children learn more if they are more involved in the learning process. These findings only apply to children still in the picture book stage.

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Completing her 298th day on the International Space Station, Christina Koch set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. Set to be there till February, Koch has been studying the impacts of long-term space travel on the human body as NASA considers sending astronauts to Mars. She was also one of the two woman to complete the first ever all-woman spacewalk in October.

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Kerem Albayrak, a 22-year-old north Londoner, emailed Apple security in 2017 falsely claiming he had hacked into over 319 million user accounts and would erase them unless the company paid him 100,000 USD in iTunes gift cards in ransom. When Apple found no evidence of data compromise after investigating his claim, they proceeded to take legal action against Albayrak, who was arrested and given a two year suspended jail sentence.

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There are currently 141 million Spotify users who are on the non-premium, ad-supported model of the music streaming service. Spotify recently announced that for users in the United States, currently the only country where Spotify allows political ads, it would be suspending political advertising in 2020 due to a lack of resources required to validate and verify the ads.

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NASA has revealed the Mars rover they will send to The Red Planet to search for ancient life and also prepare for a future manned mission. The rover is around the size of a car and carries a large number of measuring instruments including 21 different cameras. It is fueled by a mini nuclear reactor.

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Researchers at Columbia University have found a way to use stem cell technology and bioengineering to regrow human teeth. The technology is currently unable to regrow these teeth within the patient's mouth but has had much success with animal testing. This technology should be available to the public in the near future.

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A new guideline proposed by the Federal Aviation Administration will require drones to have remote IDs which will allow authorities to monitor their activities in real time, which it believes will improve the safety and security of the technology. The new rule will exempt recreational drones since they are typically lighter than commercial drones.

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Engineers and scientists at NASA have been working on developing new engines that will make space travel easier and faster. Some of the most promising new technology involves creating propulsion by harnessing solar energy, although currently, this would be too slow to carry a manned mission to Mars, it can be scaled up.

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Electric vehicle company Rivian has announced that it has raised $1.3 billion within the first round of investment alone, receiving funding from the likes of Amazon and Ford. The company has also announced its plan to build an electric pick up truck that will be available for purchase by 2020.

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The Brazilian government has launched a public consultation program to identify the key areas for use and development for Artificial intelligence. This their first step in fully developing a national strategy to deal with emerging field. The government intends for this strategy to make the country more productive and competitive.

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