According to a new study, the energy costs of mining Bitcoin alone could cause a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures within 20 years. Bitcoin might be promising a brave new world of financial freedom, but it’s also responsible for a huge spike in electricity use, so the new study has attempted to put a number
Month: October 2018
This Halloween, the creepiest event to attend might be a mass online social experiment hosted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is famous for churning out some of the world’s top engineers, programmers, and scientists. But the university’s Media Laboratory is increasingly known for launching experimental projects in October that are
When you’re high above the clouds at cruising altitude in a giant passenger jet, probably the last thing on your mind is the threat of a mid-air collision with a drone. But at take-off and landing, that danger isn’t so distant. Last year, a drone did in fact collide with an in-flight US Army Black
We’ve all been guilty of ripping our USB Drive out of our computers instead of ejecting them properly, only to receive the judgemental pop up telling us we really shouldn’t have done that. But when everything on the USB works fine next time you plug it in, you can’t help but wonder: does it actually
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is having trouble keeping track of its trash. For the second time in the past year, rocket debris from a SpaceX launch has washed up on shore in North Carolina. The huge chunk of metal was discovered on an Outer Banks beach in the US state. The rocket component, which was
Facebook has said 30 million accounts were compromised in a major hack. That’s down from the 50 million accounts the social network first estimated, but it’s still not great news. Though Facebook has taken steps to protect users in light of the attack, the company said hackers had access to millions of people’s personal
It’s the stuff of nightmares: a stuffed animal with a beating heart. After spotting viral posts on social media about users strapping fitness trackers to rolls of toilet paper, Chinese website Abacus tried it with a Xiaomi wristband. The surprise result: The fitness tracker detected a heartbeat. The toilet paper’s “heart rate” ranged from
Leaked documentation reveals new Macs contain a hidden mechanism designed to make them inoperative if they are independently repaired, reports show. According to technical memos obtained by a number of outlets, any Mac with Apple’s new T2 chip conceals a security feature critics describe as a ‘kill switch’, which effectively bricks the devices if they
Google kept quiet for more than six months about its discovery of a bug that put at risk the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ users, the company said Monday, a delay that could spark a new round of regulatory and political scrutiny. The decision to not immediately report the software bug
A new font can help lodge information deeper in your brain, researchers say, but it’s not magic – just the science of effort. Psychology and design researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne created a font called Sans Forgetica, which was designed to boost information retention for readers. It’s based on a theory called “desirable
China secretly inserted surveillance microchips into servers used by major technology companies, including Apple and Amazon.com, in an audacious military operation likely to further inflame trade tensions between the United States and its leading source of electronics components and products, Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thursday morning. The article – which the companies vigorously denied –
We tap away on our mobile devices all day long. Isn’t it about time they tapped us back? Human-computer interaction researcher Marc Teyssier clearly thinks so. He’s the brains behind MobiLimb, a horrifying finger-like robotic attachment for smartphones and tablets that somehow simultaneously evokes The Addams Family and Black Mirror. Today, he published a
Facebook announced on Friday that its engineering team had discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. Due to a flaw in Facebook’s code, hackers were able to take over an account and use it in the same way you would if you had logged into the account with a password. The company
Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds. It works through a combination
Life just got worse for the 50 million people caught up in what may be the biggest hack of Facebook ever. On Friday, the Silicon Valley tech firm revealed that it had detected a security breach in which an as-yet unknown attacker, or attackers, managed to gain access to tens of millions of users’ accounts by exploiting vulnerabilities