The social media giant on Monday started rolling out Clubhouse-clone Live Audio Rooms, continuing the company tradition of ripping off competitors. Like Clubhouse, Live Audio Rooms lets users listen to and join live conversations. Initially, only public figures and select Facebook Groups on iOS in the US will be able to create Live Audio Rooms, but users on both Android and iOS will be able to join them. Hosts can invite up to 50 speakers to a conversation....

Any number of silly knickknacks and tchotchkes line most people’s desks. While they’re fun momentary diversions or little timewasters, not many also have something to say about science and the world around us. Meanwhile, simple toys really are the best. Taking all of that into consideration, the Flux Original Scientific Toy and Magnet Shield Bundle ($101. 99 after code ANNUAL15; 20 percent off from TNW Deals) are all but guaranteed to fascinate, a cool scientific principle right at the forefront of a fidget style device that can keep the hands busy while it also makes the mind think, how does it do that?...

As far as we know, the Black Death originated in or near China. It then followed pilgrimage routes throughout the Middle East, eventually entering Europe through trade routes from Italy. As with coronavirus, plague outbreaks led to the enforced quarantine of infected households and the creation of specialist task forces that monitored and controlled contagion. But the most alarming similarity between the two is the way the public reacted. During the Black Death in the 14th century, Jewish communities appeared to be dying in fewer numbers than their Christian neighbors....

One of the greatest threats to healthcare systems, around the world, is antibiotic resistance. The lack of effective antibiotics and the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to the drugs we have has resulted in the antibiotic resistance crisis. More than 90% of people will be prescribed an antibiotic at some point in their lives. But prescribing antibiotics is a finite process. We do not have an endless supply of antibiotics to replace those that are no longer effective, and hardly any new antibiotics are being developed....

The company accessed the data through Twitter’s “firehouse,” a real-time stream of all tweets on the platform that’s rarely provided to tech firms. The alerts were sourced from both news reporters and bystanders watching or attending the rallies. According to internal documents reviewed by the Intercept, Dataminr also kept records of upcoming protests to help staff prepare their monitoring plans. Twitter prohibits the use of its data and APIs for surveillance, but it appears that Dataminr has exploited a semantic loophole in the rules by providing police with “public sector alerts” rather than directly surveilling protestors....

Today some print and electronic media remain at the service of coloniality and imperialism. They play out colonialism’s legacy, coloniality – the patterns of power that persist long after the end of formal colonialism. This process has a regressive effect. It betrays the progressive role that is generally associated with media institutions as spaces for sharing ideas and knowledge about modern societies. This leads me to ask: is it possible to decolonize today’s largest global communication platform, the internet?...

Maybe you’ve got a flair for the dramatic. Or maybe you’re an actor at heart. Or maybe you’ve just got a naturally smooth and creamy tone that makes people melt. While everybody else is using their drive, smarts, guile and more to make ends meet, there may be the chance that all you need to build up a nice little side hustle for yourself is your own distinctive voice. The training in the Learn to Become a Successful Voice Over Artist package ($19....

One unexpected benefit of this massive paradigm shift is that startups today are better prepared than before to adapt to the demands of becoming a global organization, including those that I invest into as a General Partner at Frontline X, a growth-stage fund for US companies expanding to Europe. But on the journey to building a global company, there are countless decisions, and a handful has an outsized impact on your growth trajectory....

Last month, I wrote about why it’s so hard to differentiate one USB-C cable from another. Experts I talked to also noted that there are very few visual markers that tell you what a USB-C cable can do — charging, data transfer, audio, video, or all of them? We can certainly do better. And software can play a part too. Thankfully, Google’s showing the way forward with a neat new trick....

The big idea Organizations’ failure to properly manage the servers they lease from cloud service providers can allow attackers to receive private data, research my colleagues and I conducted has shown. Cloud computing allows businesses to lease servers the same way they lease office space. It’s easier for companies to build and maintain mobile apps and websites when they don’t have to worry about owning and managing servers. But this way of hosting services raises security concerns....

The software’s pretty simple to use. You open the DoNotPay client, input the details of the fraudulent business including any evidence you can provide, and hit send. The IRS (for US users) or HMRC (for UK users) will then contact you concerning any cash rewards. In the case of the IRS, reporters could be eligible for up to 30% of the total value of assets recovered by the US government....

But one use of AI is showing serious promise: Drug discovery. [Read: Stanford teams up with Fitbit to detect coronavirus through wearables] Earlier this month, BenevolentAI, a London-based startup worth a cool $1bn, announced that it had uncovered a potential treatment for COVID-19. Yesterday, The New York Times’ Cade Metz revealed how they did it. AI’s search for treatment BenevolentAI produces a machine learning platform that analyzes data to find new medical treatments....

The dodgy drug delivery eventually led police to search a property in Marangaroo, Perth and seize AUD$1,524,102 ($1,022,827) worth of cryptocurrency. Detective Senior Sergeant Paul Matthews, the officer in charge of the drug and firearm squad, said the confiscation is believed to be the biggest single haul obtained by the Western Australia police. A 25-year-old woman and a 27-year-old man have also been arrested in connection to the bust. The assets have been frozen and the pair are due to appear in court on Wednesday....

Autonomous vehicle company Cruise will launch its first international robotaxi service in Dubai, with plans to have up to 4,000 vehicles in operation by 2030. The firm, which is backed by General Motors, will roll out taxi services in 2023, and establish a new Dubai-based company to handle the deployment. The city wants 25 percent of all trips in Dubai completed via driverless modes of transportation by 2030. RTA Director General, Mattar Mohammed Al Tayer, said: “Self-driving vehicles contribute to raising the level of traffic safety on the roads, as human error is the main cause of more than 90 percent of accidents....

SpaceX just completed a successful uncrewed test of its Crew Dragon capsule’s in-flight launch escape capabilities last night. — SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 19, 2020 [Read: SpaceX aims to provide consumers broadband through Starlink by next year] Speaking with the press after the test, Musk said the company expects the crewed mission’s hardware to be ready by the end of Q1: NASA’s initial plan was to send astronauts for a couple of weeks, but now it’s considering keeping them on ISS to conduct research for a longer duration....

That doesn’t mean the event was empty of news though; in fact it was jam-packed with major changes to Apple’s software ecosystem, even if there was little in the way of new hardware. Here’s some of the biggest news of the day. Macs are switching from Intel processors to ARM-based Apple silicon Apple has learned a lot about processors over the years since it began making its own silicon for the original iPhone so many years ago....

That is why, despite six decades of research and development, we still don’t have AI that rivals the cognitive abilities of a human child, let alone one that can think like an adult. What we do have, however, is a field of science that is split into two different categories: artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), what we have today, and artificial general intelligence (AGI), what we hope to achieve. Read: [Everything you need to know about narrow AI]...

One of the most influential technologies of the past decade is artificial neural networks, the fundamental piece of deep learning algorithms, the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence. The concept and science behind artificial neural networks have existed for many decades. But it has only been in the past few years that the promises of neural networks have turned to reality and helped the AI industry emerge from an extended winter....

Coming up with funny or catchy monikers is hard. But… what if an AI did all the heavy lifting? The algorithm behind this not super complex by today’s standards. The bot uses Open AI’s GPT-2-simple to generate band and album names. For generating album art, it uses the big-sleep library that converts texts into images. [Read: How do you build a pet-friendly gadget? We asked experts and animal owners] As the headline suggests, Evil Chicken is definitely my favorite non-existent metal band, but I’m also including some of my other top picks....

I’ve been working remotely for years, so I’ve mastered the art of not getting bored by petting my cats and spending time in the kitchen. But that might not be everyone’s cup of tea. So, here are a bunch of tools that lets you explore space and different museum artifacts. ESA Sky The European Space Agency (ESA), has a tool called ESA Sky, which lets you explore the space through the eyes of different space-related telescopes and satellites such as Hubble and Akari....