The UK’s first commercial lab to trial driverless cars using 5G and satellite technology has been launched as part of a four-year program supported by telco O2 and the European Space Agency. The Darwin SatCom Lab – based at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire – will collaborate with firms looking to test connectivity solutions for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). Companies are being invited to test proofs of concept using two Renault TWIZY electric cars, which the operator has converted into CAVs and fitted with LIDAR sensors to allow them to be controlled from the lab and driven around the Harwell campus....

Small and compact, it’s designed for the urbanites who might want a mini city-vehicle without the hustle of finding (or paying for) a large parking space. Technically, the Microlino is a quadricycle, but we can definitely call it a retro electric bubble car, mainly due to its resemblance with the 1950s Isetta. Unlike the Isetta, the Microlino 2.0 is powered by electricity. It will come in three models with different battery size and capability: Urban (6kWh battery), Dolce (10....

At least it does in the grand scheme of things. The universe has been around some 14 billion-or-so years according to the Big Bang Theory. In that context, 65 million years is just a few flakes of sand in a giant hourglass. And that makes it all the more scary to read a pre-print research paper suggesting that our universe may only have a measly 65 million years of expansion left....

Per the team’s research paper: Up front: There are myriad ways an interested party could track moving objects through dense foliage, including FLIR and other thermal optics systems, but this offers a new AI-powered wrinkle: the ability to track color changes through occlusion. This finding together with the implementation of an initial drone-operated camera array for parallel synthetic aperture aerial imaging allows presenting first results on tracking moving people through dense forest....

Meta? It’s still Facebook to me and this move just proves that a dumpster fire by any other name would still smell as sickly. The company’s not stopping the use of facial recognition. Nor is it deleting facial recognition data for more than a billion users. It’s deleting some very specific facial recognition templates — those used to automatically tag people in photos on Facebook. There’s nothing in the announcement today that would indicate it’s actually deleting the company’s image data or ceasing the use of facial recognition altogether....

It’s never a bad thing to be an individual and do your own thing. When everybody else zigs, you zag. So when Cyber Monday rolls around and everyone else is thinking about holiday gifts for family, friends, or themselves, you can take a different tact. For instance…maybe Cyber Monday can offer deals on some of the tools you might need to help firm up a new career path or get a new business idea off the ground....

Most commentary focuses on Chinese strengths in EV technology and production, or the size of China’s EV market. But this misses crucial factors that will affect how, and even whether, China’s EVs are adopted across the world. The question is not just whether China will dominate the global EV market, but also whether the EV can help China achieve the technological, economic, and geopolitical power it seeks. In other words, even if China gets good at making EVs, will EVs be good for China?...

I’ll give you an example. It never fails to completely blow my mind that the Disney+ streaming interface on desktop doesn’t have a button to play the next episode of a TV show. If you’re binging, this means you’ll have to wait for the credits (sometimes it autoskips them, sometimes it doesn’t) or back all the way out to the show’s information page and manually select the next episode. And this is Disney we’re talking about, so sometimes the credits repeat in like 10 different languages – many of the kid’s shows have credits that last longer than the episodes do....

Since 2002, Daymak has been the biggest distributor and developer of electric light vehicles in Canada. It has over 150 dealers, has sold more than 100,000 vehicles, and exports to 25 countries. For reference, light electric vehicles refer to electric-powered transport like escooters, autocycles, and ebikes. But what we’re most interested in today is one of the company’s latest EVs: the Spiritus. This promises crypto mining capabilities while it charges, as well as solar EV chargers that do the same thing....

Website design projects often fall into one of two categories. You can go the old-school route of building a site from scratch at the coding level, importing graphics, crafting functionality and basically creating something entirely unique. This is like a painter taking an empty canvas and turning it into a portrait. Or you can employ a website builder app, which basically dumbs down your process to simple drag and drop, often with no need for actual coding whatsoever within a mostly rigid, unbending framework....

This is a problem I run into regularly. Last year, I flew about 75 segments, almost all seated in economy. Trying to get things done with a regular laptop is almost impossible. Firstly, when your neighbor in front reclines their seat, it pushes your laptop display downwards, so it’s almost impossible to see the screen. Secondly, the lack of seat width means that if you want to type, your elbows will almost definitely spill over into the seat of the person sat next to you....

Car mounts and chargers are the quintessential unknown soldiers of your tech arsenal. They get little to no attention until something isn’t working quite right. Then they’re all you start thinking about. If your mount grip is too soft or too hard. If the charging connection isn’t 100 percent reliable. If it doesn’t hit the right angle to give you the view of your phone you need for safe hands-free driving....

Earlier this month, Ilford released a fascinating documentary that offers an insider look into the film-making process – and the skills it takes to produce high-quality black and white rolls. The docu is an intimate tour of Ilford’s factory in the village of Mobberley, England, just 20 kilometers south of Manchester, where the company crafts its contrasty 120mm and 35mm black and white film. Part of the secret behind Ilford’s quality and iconic look is its insistence on tradition....

DoNotPay, a company that previously developed an AI-powered bot for legal matters, has launched a new Chrome extension that lets you share your streaming service credentials in an encrypted manner. But the buck doesn’t stop there. The extension even lets you trade or share subscriptions with other folks in order to save money. To share an account, both the sender and receiver will have to install the DoNotPay extension and verify themselves via SMS....

Notetaking is not done with a pair of thumbs. Sure, you can open up the Notes app on your phone and string a couple of words together for safekeeping. But honest-to-goodness notetaking really happens the old fashioned way — with a pad of paper and a pen or pencil. Thoughts and ideas flow with stream-of-consciousness fluidity, sweeping effortlessly from handwritten words and phrases into doodles and drawings and back again....

While the news hasn’t been confirmed by either company, several Jukedeck employees, including its CEO, have changed their LinkedIn profiles, listing ByteDance as their current employer. Jukedeck’s website is also offline, displaying a message that says: “We can’t tell you more just yet, but we’re looking forward to continuing to fuel creativity by using musical AI.” Based on what we know so far, and the eagle-eyed reporters at Music Ally, who first broke the story, it seems to be a done deal For TikTok, the acquisition would make a lot of sense....

Yes, you read that right. According to a new report by The Financial Times, the Beijing-based social media company is developing a “phone preloaded with its own apps — which include newsfeeds, short video platforms and games — in a bid to further spread its reach.” The secretive project follows the company’s acquisition of a number of patents from Chinese smartphone maker Smartisan earlier this year. An unnamed source also told the Financial Times that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming “has long dreamt of a phone with ByteDance apps pre-installed....

“The investigation of Clearview by privacy protection authorities for Canada, Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec remains open,” the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said in a statement. The probe was opened in February, following reports that Clearview was collecting personal information without consent. The authorities still plan to issue findings from the investigation. [Read: Clearview AI can be fun — if you’re dirty, stinking rich] The exit is a big blow to the New York-based startup....

Former president Trump today issued an official statement lamenting his leniency with social media companies during his time in the White House: This statement references news that the president of Nigeria has banned Twitter in the country after the company deleted a tweet where it was believed he was threatening genocide. More COUNTRIES should ban Twitter and Facebook for not allowing free and open speech—all voices should be heard. In the meantime, competitors will emerge and take hold....

I bring this up because there’s a greater chance than zero that they’re the same awful human being. We all know that Pai sold out 80% of US citizens when he chose to ignore the will of the people and repeal the government’s net neutrality guidelines. And now, with Kratsios, we’re seeing the same playbook brought out again for the same reason: money. Only this time, there’s more at stake....