Month: February 2022

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the world’s chipmakers were even more dependent on Ukraine because the country supplied around 70 percent of neon gas. “There were delays in shipments because of border crossing issues,” says Shon-Roy, and the raw materials needed to make neon were also in short supply. “Russia was focusing a lot

On July 17, 1963, Jack Nilles sat for hours in the corridors of the Pentagon, drinking cup after cup of sludgy coffee as he waited for a meeting that would never happen. Nilles, a rocket scientist for the US Air Force, had raced to Washington, DC, from his home in Los Angeles after being summoned

Crypto enthusiasts and government officials are not natural allies, at least outside Miami. And yet Colorado governor Jared Polis received a warm welcome when he appeared onstage at last week’s ETHDenver conference to present his vision for making Colorado the “first digital state.” That’s because he came bearing good news for the crypto faithful. Polis,

When the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 project was announced in 2015, it promised a brave new energy future for Europe. Criss-crossing under the Baltic Sea from western Siberia to make land in Germany, it assured Germany—and the tight-knit European energy market, through which natural gas supplies cross borders with ease—guaranteed supply. Nord Stream 2

Over Zoom, Australia’s communications minister, Paul Fletcher, has the air of a man in the middle of a victory speech. He credits his team and the country’s competition regulator for succeeding where others had failed: forcing tech giants to pay for news. “There were a lot of people saying you can’t really succeed in taking

Last November, the tech giant Yandex unveiled Chervonenkis, Russia’s most powerful supercomputer and the 19th most powerful commercial computer on the planet. Chervonenkis, which Yandex uses to train artificial intelligence algorithms for applications like web search and translation, was built by linking together more than 1,500 chips from the US company Nvidia. Earlier this week,

“It’s startling and disturbing,” says Ashique KhudaBukhsh, an assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who researched the problem with collaborators Krithika Ramesh and Sumeet Kumar at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Automated captions are not available on YouTube Kids, the version of the service aimed at children. But many families use the

Without personal connections, “it’s just a job, it’s just a list of tasks, there’s no loyalty to the company,” says Chris Collins, an assistant professor at Cornell, who runs a research center for HR studies. He compares isolated employees to gig workers, who may do the same tasks for different companies. People can still feel

Energy companies’ sell-off of fossil fuel assets is “obviously a big problem,” says Pieter de Pous, a senior policy advisor at environmental think tank E3G. “It shows that they haven’t really taken this seriously.” Plenty of firms have also closed coal plants and replaced them with cleaner alternatives: In Europe, coal generation has dropped by

Jose Fernando Rico Mercado, 34, who co-owns three childcare facilities in Mexico, has always run side gigs, including designing notebooks sold on demand on Amazon. During the pandemic, his monthly earnings fell from $17,000 at their peak to almost zero. He joined Fiverr and set up a team of illustrators fulfilling orders for new NFT

Emily Christensen knows this sounds a little West Coast, but when she enters the old houses her company has been hired to take apart, she senses an energy. “It’s intense,” she says. “These houses have seen decades of human drama.” Christensen and her partner, David Greenhill, started their firm, Good Wood, in 2016. Portland, Oregon,

Wen Li, a Shanghai marketer in the hospitality industry, first suspected that an algorithm was messing with her when she and a friend used the same ride-hailing app one evening. Wen’s friend, who less frequently ordered rides in luxury cars, saw a lower price for the same ride. Wen blamed the company’s algorithms, saying they

The average TikTok user—of which there are one billion worldwide, more than 100 million in the United States, and 23 million in the UK—spends an hour and 25 minutes on the app every day, according to data shared by TikTok in an private presentation to business clients in late January 2022. The average TikTok user

In May 2021, grocery delivery company Zapp moved into a small garage, squashed between red brick apartment buildings on a residential street called Fagelstraat in northwest Amsterdam. Many locals had never heard of dark stores, the mini warehouses grocery apps use to dispatch local deliveries. “We didn’t know exactly what they were doing or what

Last year, Shirin Nilizadeh got a call from a friend who had been worn down looking for a job. Her friend had sent her résumé to infinite job portals, only for it to seemingly disappear into a black hole. “She was going around asking everyone, ‘What’s the trick?’” Nilizadeh remembers. Nilizadeth didn’t have job advice,

Rhee said Traptic stood out from other companies in the space because its robot doesn’t touch the strawberry. Instead it grabs strawberries by the stem, pulling strongly enough to detach the fruit but lightly enough to avoid damaging the rest of the plant. Such tasks are an ongoing challenge. A recent study reviewed nearly 50

Lately I have been trying to get through the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s big report, the one that came out late last year, called “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.” It’s a challenge because (a) I must, um, learn as I go, and (b) the PDF is nearly 4,000 pages of aggregated,

Gil Tal lives in Davis, California, where winter daytime temperatures are in the mid-50s and annual rainfall is well below the national average. But the Sierra Nevada mountains are two hours away, so Tal made sure his latest car had four-wheel drive. “One day, I will go to the snow,” he says. It turns out

If you look at the time-use diaries of mothers and fathers, mothers’ working hours are tainted, especially during the pandemic. But fathers are relatively protected because of their roles. And children won’t expect fathers to be available when working from home, whereas they expect mothers to be mothers first. This is why employers will stigmatize

Sports fans who tuned in to watch the Beijing Winter Olympics on YouTube are instead being served propaganda videos. An analysis of YouTube search results by WIRED found that people who typed “Beijing,” “Beijing 2022,” “Olympics,” or “Olympics 2022” were shown pro-China and anti-China propaganda videos in the top results. Five of the most prominent

Such problems led the IRS and many others to switch to alternatives, such as sending a code to a phone number checked against credit agency records. They also informed a 2017 overhaul of the federal guidelines for digital identity, which recommended that access to systems that can leak sensitive data or cause financial harm should

Joy Nazzari, the founder of British proptech startup Showhere, is desperately trying to hire 16 people—a combination of senior-level developers, project managers, and designers. But her pool of candidates is running dry. “It’s never been harder or more expensive to hire new people,” she says. “Yet you also have to defend who you already have,

What is a real ape? On OpenSea, the internet’s most popular NFT marketplace, answering that question incorrectly can be costly. Last year, Bored Apes—cartoon primates linked to unique cryptocurrency tokens—skyrocketed in popularity. Now the cheapest cost $309,000, and OpenSea is crawling with imitations and rip-offs. Two projects featuring flipped versions of original Bored Apes, called

On February 3, the group started accepting ether donations on crypto crowdfunding platform Juicebox, eventually raising some $52 million. In exchange for their contributions, all donors received cryptocurrency $JUSTICE tokens, which give holders a voice in how AssangeDAO’s resources are used. That element, Taaki says, makes the DAO mechanism more effective at raising funds than

Takuma Miyazono began driving virtual race cars at age 4, when his father brought home the highly realistic motorsport game Gran Turismo 4. Sixteen years later, in 2020, Miyazono became the Gran Turismo world champion, winning an unprecedented “triple crown” of esports motor racing events. But he had never faced a Gran Turismo driver quite

The collapse of the biggest chip deal in history will complicate the future for its intended target. The mega-deal would have seen Nvidia, the world’s largest chip company by market capitalization, acquire Arm, a UK company that licenses chip designs that are increasingly vital across the tech industry. The deal’s collapse is a blow to

The Internal Revenue Service is dropping a controversial facial recognition system that requires people to upload video selfies when creating new IRS online accounts. “The IRS announced it will transition away from using a third-party service for facial recognition to help authenticate people creating new online accounts,” the agency said on Monday. “The transition will

In Myanmar, the phone records of pro-democracy activists connect them together like suspects on a cork board. When many of those activists fled the military crackdown and went into hiding after the coup in February 2021, they believed the trails of phone calls, mapping out their association with family members and colleagues, were safe on

Since January 6, 2021, meanwhile, the app’s position among the Trump movement has continued to consolidate. Channels owned by far-right figures are mushrooming: Trump lawyer turned election conspiracy theorist Lin Wood is nearing a million subscribers; former 8chan administrator Ron Watkins has almost half a million. Among the Trump-backed elected politicians who have opened thriving

The current wave of artificial intelligence can be traced back to 2012, and an academic contest that measured how well algorithms could recognize objects in photographs. That year, researchers found that feeding thousands of images into an algorithm inspired loosely by the way neurons in a brain respond to input produced a huge leap in