Now, in an attempt to enrich its surveillance arsenal, reseachers from the country have developed a 500 megapixel facial recognition camera capable of capturing “thousands of faces at a stadium in perfect detail and generate their facial data for the cloud while locating a particular target in an instant.” The AI-based cloud camera service was developed in collaboration between Shanghai-based Fudan University and Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Changchun, according to Global Times....

The Dutch startup makes it easy for online publishers to charge for small pieces of online content, so rather than having to erect an all-encompassing paywall, individual articles, videos, and even parts of stories, can be made chargeable. It’s a more sensible, less draconian way of taking money from an audience. Now Cleeng has signed up its first major client. La Tribune is France’s second largest financial newspaper and has integrated the plugin to charge for longer, featured pieces (example), rather than news, which seems sensible....

“This was a very exciting, but also extremely challenging project. In only one year we completely redesigned the optics, mechanics, and electronics to achieve the best possible image quality.” said Dr. Lucia Kleint, who led the project. Solar granules shown in the images resemble popcorn. Hot plasma rising from beneath the surface of the Sun produce bright centers at the centers of the granules. As this material moves outward, it cools, falling back at the edge of the convection cells, producing dark rims....

Bitsane’s website, which reportedly boasted 246,000 registered users, has been offline since (at least) June 17, when its Facebook and Twitter accounts were noted to be offline. LinkedIn accounts for key employees have also been scrubbed. The company itself filed for dissolution on May 16, but curious circumstances – including a separate company (Bitsane Limited) incorporated in the UK in 2017 – have attracted doubt. According to Forbes, affected users have been comparing losses in a Telegram group....

The Roman Telescope will study the sky in infrared wavelengths utilizing two methods to detect exoplanets. The first of these techniques, the transit method, measures dips of light seen from a star as a planet passes “in front of” its stellar parent as seen from Earth. The second method, gravitational microlensing, notes slight increases in light caused by the presence of an exoplanet. Keep squinting, you’ll see it… Hit the play button above for a look at how exoplanets are found using the transit method, in this video provided by NASA....

The news comes from a Metro interview with Marthe Jonkers, lead concept artist on the game. When asked about the “difficult subject” of “gender and trans issues,” and the company’s social media controversies (we’ll get to that), Jonkers responded: This is great for all gamers. If the company responsible for one of the greatest video games of all time, The Witcher 3, thinks that people who identify as trans, non-binary, and gender-fluid are important enough to merit consideration from their development staff, then there’s hope that others will start to see transfolk too....

In March, I tweeted a thread about free resources available to pass time while you’re stuck at home. A lot of people resonated with the sentiment and used those tools. Companies were making their resources available for free all over the world, and it was hard to maintain that in a thread. Thus Daily Distraction was born. I had a lot of fun writing a daily column because my work usually involves being deep into the weeds of news....

Do you know what else is a pandemic? Facebook ads. And I’m not saying that because they’re present everywhere and affect a large portion of the world. It was the codename the company used when it was planning to launch its ad platform back in 2007. Here’s an excerpt from Wired editor Steven Levy’s book Facebook: The Inside story: Rather fitting, isn’t it? Here’s what we have in store for you today:...

I point this out because, like the Superbowl or the NBA Finals, the launch of these titles is a very big deal. Madden 21 just released to its largest launch-month sales ever and NBA 2K21 is on pace to do the same. Yet both of the latest games in their respective series have been critically panned, denounced by consumers, and vilified on social media. What gives? The gist of the problem is that these types of annually updated titles – including games using the FIFA, UFC, MLB, and WWE licenses among others – don’t do enough to merit full AAA price tags every year, yet gamers continue to fork out money in record amounts annually....

Scientists at the MIT Media Lab showed almost 6,000 people 16 authentic political speeches and 16 that were doctored by AI. The soundbites were presented in permutations of text, video, and audio, such as video with subtitles or only text. The participants were told that half of the content was fake, and asked which snippets they believed were fabricated. When shown text alone, the respondents were only barely better at identifying falsehoods (57% accuracy) than random guessing....

This week research comparing the environmental impact of different forms of last-mile delivery was published in the scientific journal Patterns. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University compared the energy consumption of quadcopter drones against diesel and electric medium-duty trucks, small vans, and electric cargo bicycles on a per-package basis. They found that greenhouse-gas emissions per parcel were 84% lower for drones than for diesel trucks. Unsurprisingly, drones consumed up to 94% less energy per parcel than trucks....

In a blog post published earlier today, the exchange announced what it’s calling “Binance Lending.” A platform which Binance CEO, Chanpeng Zhao, touted would let users “earn crypto in their sleep.” Binance is positioning the platform as a “value-add” service for exchange users that hold idle digital assets. In other words, if you have some tokens or coins on Binance that you’re just letting sit there, you could make some money by offering them for use in Binance’s lending platform....

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2020 Musk tweeted the “name” early yesterday, and has sent the world into a downward spiral of concern and confusion. Luckily, the youngster’s mother, musician and artist Grimes came to the rescue with an obviously logical explanation. — ꧁ ༒ Gℜiꪔ⃕es ༒꧂ ??? 小仙女 (@Grimezsz) May 6, 2020 There are mountains of explorations into what all this might mean, but let’s take a look what the A-12 bit is all about....

Listings for two multimillion-dollar houses reported to be owned by Musk recently showed up on real estate website Zillow. [Read: Elon Musk bought $45M in Tesla stock since ‘that weed joke’ — now it’s worth double] Just three days ago, Tesla’s CEO tweeted that he was selling (almost) all physical possessions and vowed to own no home. When asked why, Musk replied: “Freedom.” — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020 Around the same time, Musk declared he thought the price of Tesla stock was too high — a tweet that caused a 10% crash and wiped $14 billion from the company’s market value....

But that would be nearly impossible: you’d need to build a skyscraper to accurately represent the tycoon’s self-importance. With budgetary constraints and planning permissions presumably in mind, investing app Public.com has instead constructed a six-foot statue of Musk to mark the great man’s 50th birthday — and plonked it in Manhattan. Go say hi. ? pic.twitter.com/fBO81PF5bR — Public.com (@public) June 28, 2021 The pose encapsulates Musk’s characteristic sense of smugness, but Public....

But billionaires don’t have these problems. If they want to get away from the earth, they just fly to space. Elon Musk, Tesla’s Technoking, is also doing the same by buying a ticket on a plane of Virgin Galactic, owned by Richard Branson. That makes me wonder, is Jeff Bezos feeling left out? A report from the Wall Street Journal suggests that Musk has bought a $250,000 ticket for a short visit to space....

This time though, I curse softly. There’s a bright satellite. And another following behind. And another. And another. I used to be excited about seeing artificial satellites, but now I know what’s coming. We’re about to undergo a dramatic transition in our experience of satellites. No longer will you escape your city for a camping trip and see the stars unobstructed: you will have to look through a grid of crawling, bright satellites no matter how remote your location....

Sony revealed this news itself ahead of a Wired spread detailing more about the console. In addition to the release date, we also know more about the controller, and the kind of internal updates we can expect. While Sony won’t confirm the console looks like this V-shaped spaceship-looking thing we saw earlier this year, it hasn’t denied it either. The biggest hardware revelation is probably the new haptic controller. Sony claims to be replacing the “rumble” that’s become de rigueur as a form of feedback with something more nuanced....

Technology, materials science, and engineering are creating longer-lasting, more resilient, more sustainable tires. Let’s take a look at some of the latest trends: Airless The SMART Tire Company is working to create “super elastic” airless tires in partnership with NASA. SMART stands for Shape Memory Alloy Radial Technology. And the tires are something special. They’re made of NiTinol+ (nickel-titanium), a shape memory alloy that’s elastic like rubber, yet strong like titanium....

Amongst the 1,031 American respondents, nearly two-thirds preferred sticking to conventional gas-guzzlers for their next vehicle purchase. Some 17% would consider a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), while only 5% would get a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), or a battery electric vehicle (BEV). Conversely, consumer interest in BEVs is highest in South Korea (23%), China (17%), and Germany (15%). Unsurprisingly, range anxiety and lack of public charging infrastructure are the main reasons why respondents from all countries wouldn’t consider an EV as their next vehicle....