Your computer keyboard is probably dirtier than a toilet seat. In fact, an Australian study found that the typical desk has 400 times the amount of bacteria found on a toilet seat.   Toilet seats actually harbour around 50 bacteria per square inch, making that a relatively un-germy zone. Not so with the computer, especially those shared by

Today, Microsoft is trying to keep up with other tech giants, but sixteen years ago, the company was regarded as a leader in technology. In 1999, Microsoft released a video segment about the connected home of the future.   While the bulky 90s products, like a cell phone that looks more like a Game Boy, have since

An unexpectedly heavy cardboard box, filled with flat-packed formations. Seemingly superfluous pieces of particle board. A madness-inducing number of screws, nails, and washers, plus the lingering fear that one might be left over.   Even if you like putting together IKEA furniture, you’ve gotta admit that it’s no walk in the park. It’s the ultimate

A realistic-looking video that seemed to show former President Barack Obama cussing and calling President Donald Trump a “total and complete dips—,” went viral on Tuesday, bringing attention to the dangers of a controversial video-editing technology that many have called “the future of fake news.”   About halfway through the video, originally published by BuzzFeed,

The US and British governments on Monday accused Russia of conducting a massive campaign to compromise computer routers and firewalls around the world – from home offices to Internet providers – for espionage and possibly sabotage purposes.   The unusual public warning from the White House, US agencies and Britain’s National Cyber Security Center follows a years-long

Everyone had died – not that you’d know it, from how they were laughing about their poor choices and bad rolls of the dice. As a social anthropologist, I study how people understand artificial intelligence (AI) and our efforts towards attaining it; I’m also a life-long fan of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), the inventive fantasy

The United States, Britain, and France, conducted “precision strikes” on Syria on Friday, in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack that reportedly killed dozens in the rebel-held town of Douma.   The Pentagon said the strikes hit three targets believed to have been involved in creating chemical weapons. The sites included the Barzah Research

Facebook’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faced two days of grilling before US politicians this week, following concerns over how his company deals with people’s data.   But the data Facebook has on people who are not signed up to the social media giant also came under scrutiny. During Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony he claimed

The US Army recently announced that it is developing the first drones that can spot and target vehicles and people using artificial intelligence (AI). This is a big step forward.   Whereas current military drones are still controlled by people, this new technology will decide who to kill with almost no human involvement. Once complete,

Like peanut butter and jelly, like salt and pepper, like that seemingly perfect couple you love (to hate), the two dominant types of computer memory truly complete one another.   Read-only memory (ROM) makes sure our computers and smartphones know how to boot up. Random access memory (RAM), lets us run programs on those computers.

On Tuesday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg took hours of questions from senators about his platform, in a hearing that was mostly about the Cambridge Analytica revelations, and the wider privacy concerns that have plunged the company into a major crisis of trust with the public.   Not all of the questions were on topic. Sen. Gary

To better understand how a nuclear blast would devastate major urban centres, researchers have created the ultimate equivalent of The Sims – a detailed computer model of Washington D.C. complete with its own personalised citizens.   We’ve all been there, creating digital cities that we joyfully smash apart. This one is less about entertaining our

In September of 2016, Elon Musk announced the latest addition to the SpaceX rocket family. Known then as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) – now know as the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) – this massive launch vehicle is central to Musk’s vision of sending astronauts and colonists to Mars someday.   Since that time, the

For years, countries have worried that a hostile foreign power might cut the undersea cables that supply the world with internet service. Late last month, we got a taste of what that might be like. An entire country, Mauritania, was taken offline for two days because an undersea cable was cut.   The 17,000-kilometer African

Sometimes our phones end up in the toilet bowl, or laptops end up covered in tea. It happens. But if they were coated with an ‘omniphobic’ material, like the one created by a team of University of Michigan researchers, your devices would be a lot more likely to come out unscathed.   “I have a 2-year-old

Good news – virtually all traditional types of malware declined in the last few months. Not so good – mainly because hackers are more interested in using your computer to help them mine cryptocurrencies.   It’s likely you, or your employer, aren’t even aware it’s happening. Malware miners latch onto your PC and add its

Between building electric cars and sending rockets into space, Elon Musk has plenty to keep him busy. But the tech mogul also wants to reinvent public transportation with the Loop and Hyperloop high-speed transit systems.   On Saturday, he said on Twitter that he plans to test a Tesla and SpaceX-branded Hyperloop pod at half

In recent weeks, self-driving cars have raised a lot of concerns. In March, an Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian in what has been reported as the first ever self-driving car fatality in history. And a Tesla vehicle operating in semi-autonomous Autopilot mode was also involved in a fatal crash that month.   This chart by Statista compares the data taken

Artificial intelligence could spur the creation of a robot dictator that could rule mankind forever, the billionaire Elon Musk says in a new documentary. “If one company or small group of people manages to develop god-like superintelligence, they could take over the world,” Musk said in the film.   He continued: “At least when there’s

Artificial intelligence could spur the creation of a robot dictator that could rule mankind forever, the billionaire Elon Musk says in a new documentary. “If one company or small group of people manages to develop god-like superintelligence, they could take over the world,” Musk said in the film.   He continued: “At least when there’s

For nearly a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has relied on the country’s expansive oil reserves to power its economy. But in recent years, oil prices have rapidly decreased, and Saudi Arabia is now looking to diversify its economy and rely less on oil.   The royal family has created a new plan called

Anyone who’s ever bought a new electronic device or a pair of shoes will be all too familiar with those little “DO NOT EAT” sachets that come in the box. Most of us have a vague idea that they’re somehow keeping our products fresh, but we toss them as soon as the box is open

Even if you have no idea how it works or what the letters stand for, chances are you’ve at least heard of the revolutionary technology dubbed CRISPR. Cheaper and far more precise than previous gene-editing processes, the CRISPR/Cas9 molecular toolkit continues to see new applications across the scientific world.   Here are a few ways

MIT researchers have invented a new computer interface that’s totally hands-free and voice-free, but it doesn’t read your brain waves either. Instead it relies on something called subvocalisation, or silent speech – the name for what you’re doing when you say words in your head.   It’s called AlterEgo, and it consists of a wearable

While the thought of having robot companions to take out the rubbish and cut the grass is an appealing one, the same bots could also be used for more violent purposes – and an argument over where to draw that line is causing a huge schism in the AI community.   Now, more than 50

Someday, in the future, our skies will be full of whirring machines delivering anything we could ever want or need, from medical supplies to pizzas to the latest item from our Amazon overlords.   That day is not today. On Monday, Russia’s postal service tested a delivery drone in the city of Ulan-Ude, Siberia. Instead,

The next gene-edited food you eat probably won’t be a GMO (genetically modified organism) – at least not in the conventional sense of the term. Instead, it will probably have been made using CRISPR, a new technique that lets scientists precisely tweak the DNA of crops to give it enhanced flavour, a longer shelf-life, or

In the end, the Chinese space station Tiangong-1’s crash back into Earth’s atmosphere was exactly what anyone could have hoped for. The station’s fiery reentry was close to where scientists would have tried to direct it if they’d had any control over the spacecraft’s return.   But for a long time, the exact return point

We’ve all seen the Terminator movies, and the apocalyptic nightmare that the self-aware AI system, Skynet, wrought upon humanity. And behaviour tests conducted on Google’s DeepMind AI system make it clear just how careful we need to be when building the robots of the future.   In tests in 2016, Google’s DeepMind AI system demonstrated

In 2016, entrepreneur Elon Musk launched the Boring Company with the goal of one day constructing a large urban network of tunnels. The company is working on two projects in the Washington, DC region and Los Angeles. It first broke ground on a test site in LA in late 2017.   In order to bore

Facebook on Wednesday sought to make it simpler for people to control how their data is used as a massive privacy scandal continues to shake the company and has caused its stock price to drop by 17 percent in the last two weeks.   In the coming months, privacy controls that are now in 20

It’s 9am in Sunnyvale, California and Minni Shahi is on her way to work at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Her husband, a former Googler named Vijay Koduri, is meeting his business partner at a local Starbucks to discuss their startup, a YouTube clip-making business called HashCut.   Shahi and Koduri’s two kids, 10-year-old Saurav

An alarming study that claimed the gene-editing technique CRISPR could produce hundreds of unexpected mutations in edited genomes has now been followed up by its authors, who say they cannot replicate their controversial result.   The acknowledgment – which comes in a report of new mice experiments that didn’t introduce such mutations – isn’t technically

Facebook is back in the hot seat over revelations that data on millions of its users was taken and used by a company working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit vote.   Specifically, a company called Cambridge Analytica (CA) took data from a reported 50 million Facebook users and built personality profiles in

The stratospheric rise of Bitcoin over the last decade has left the world struggling to keep up, breaking records, spawning rivals, and forcing us to face the epic challenges posed by a volatile crypto-universe.   Now, one LA-based artist is having his say on our obsession with cryptocurrencies, and he’s putting his money where his

The Tesla and SpaceX Facebook pages have vanished, minutes after Elon Musk – the CEO of both companies – said that he had never seen the SpaceX Facebook profile and planned to delete it.   It started when Musk replied to a tweet earlier in the week from WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton, when he tweeted

The data on millions of Facebook users that a firm wrongfully swiped from the social network probably has spread to other groups, databases and the dark Web, experts said, making Facebook’s pledge to safeguard its users’ privacy hard to enforce.   Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the company will notify users whose data may

For the US Department of Defense (DoD), killing people isn’t all that complicated. A budget of more than US$600 billion per year buys a whole lot of tanks, guns, and bombs. But not killing someone proves to be a bit more complicated. How about just stunning them a bit from far away? Or maybe setting

The Bitcoin world is coming to grips with a shocking revelation that could potentially threaten the very existence of the world’s foremost cryptocurrency. An analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain – the publicly accessible ledger of transactions upon which the system is built – has revealed this vast trove of data is irrevocably tainted with unremovable

Facebook is currently facing a scandal over the use of its data by British political research company Cambridge Analytica. The company reportedly obtained the personal information of 50 million Facebook users.   It didn’t get the data through a hack, but reportedly through a Facebook app which gave a researcher user data – and also the

Uber Technologies Inc. has halted autonomous vehicle tests after one of its cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona, in what is likely the first pedestrian fatality involving the technology.   The 49-year-old woman, Elaine Herzberg, was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk when the Uber vehicle operating in autonomous mode under the

Do you have free will? Can you make your own decisions? Or are you more like an automaton, just moving as required by your constituent parts? Probably, like most people, you feel you have something called free will. Your decisions are not predetermined; you could do otherwise.   Yet scientists can tell you that you

Graphene is definitely a wonder material – you can use it to make filthy water drinkable, feed it to spiders to make the strongest material on Earth, or hit it with a bullet to turn it into diamond.   You know, just everyday stuff. The newest application for graphene isn’t quite as world-changing, but it’s

Earlier this week, tech genius Elon Musk admitted that he considered purchasing satirical news site The Onion four years ago, but ended up deciding against it. Instead, he poached some key members of The Onion’s staff for work on his own secret project.    Now, The Onion is firing back with its own beautiful brand of satire. And as

Like an episode out of Black Mirror, Walmart has filed a patent for autonomous robotic bees, technically called pollination drones, that could potentially pollinate crops just like real bees.   The drones would carry pollen from one plant to another, using sensors and cameras to detect the locations of the crops. First spotted by CB

What are we going to do with ourselves in the coming years when our autonomous vehicles are doing all the hard work of driving for us? If the latest video from Waymo is anything to go by, we’ll be checking our phones, taking selfies, and… nodding off to sleep.   Waymo – the self-driving car

For a smartphone with only a few incremental updates over its predecessor, the Galaxy S9 made quite the impression. It’s a fantastic smartphone, and I’ve had to reshuffle the top five phones in this list as a result.   After some more time with the iPhone X, I’ve also reshuffled the order for the latest

A top Russian General announced on Tuesday that Russia’s military will conduct a second test of its new, most powerful nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile amid rising tensions with NATO.   “The first launch of this missile took place at the end of December last year. At the moment preparations are in full swing at the