Jak Wilmot, the co-founder of Atlanta-based VR content studioDisrupt VR, spent 168 consecutive hours in a VR headset – that’s a full week – pent up in his apartment. “This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but welcome to a week in the future,” he said in a video about the experiment.

When a child first does something without being asked, their parents want to celebrate. Researchers at the University of Southern Carolina (USC) are having that moment right now. The team claims to have created the first AI-controlled robotic limb that can learn how to walk without being explicitly programmed to do so. The algorithm they

By combining math with 3D printing, researchers from Boston University have created a new material that seemingly defies logic: light and air have no trouble passing through it — but sound cannot. “The idea is that we can now mathematically design an object that can block the sounds of anything,” researcher Xin Zhang said in

Facebook just had a very bad day. Facebook, including Messenger, and Instagram users across North America experienced outages for most of Wednesday, starting in the afternoon and ending late the same night. Third party outage sites suggested it affected users across the entire globe. The media reported it was perhaps the longest interruption ever experienced

A California family is outraged that a doctor told their elderly relative his lungs were failing and he was going to die imminently – via a telepresence robot. “You might not make it home,” the doctor at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center told the patient, according to local television channel KTVU, which broke the story. The

There’s a little-known feature built into your iPhone that keeps a history of everywhere you’ve been – and how many times you’ve been there. This “Significant Locations” list can be found in your settings, but it’s rather hard to find, whether purposeful or not. Apple tracks and stores where you’ve been and how often (and

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests autonomous driving systems may have more difficulty detecting pedestrians with dark skin than those with light skin. The researchers responsible for the study had eight image-detection systems analyse images of pedestrians. The people in the photos were separated into two groups based on how their

Your bags are packed, your rooms are booked, you’re all set for your vacation; there’s just one problem, the government has canceled your tickets. As early as 2014, China began conceptualizing a Social Credit System (SCS), sort of like a credit score for citizen behavior where behaviors deemed good for society are rewarded with privileges

Lab-made marijuana is coming. In a move that’s expected to transform the marijuana and pharmaceutical industries, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced on Wednesday that they had for the first time created cannabis compounds in a lab, instead of by harvesting them from a plant. If the technique can scale, it could

Lots of video games let you take on the role of the anti-hero: Grand Theft Auto, Hitman, even Mario’s mischievous alter-ego, Wario. But there’s never been a video game anti-hero quite like Plague Inc. – in this massively successful pandemic simulator, you actually play the role of a deadly and contagious pathogen, hell-bent on wiping

The newly launched Nokia 9 PureView has something no other smartphone has: a five-camera array on the back. But before the handset has even got into people’s hands, there are claims that it’s triggering trypophobia – a fear of clusters of small holes. While those with trypophobia will no doubt try their best to avoid

Facebook’s treatment of its legions of content moderators is under scrutiny after the publication of a report alleging tough working conditions and low pay that saw some employees break down under the weight of the content they were reviewing. On Monday, The Verge’s Casey Newton published an extensive investigation into a content-moderation workplace in Arizona. These

A man died after crashing a 2016 Tesla Model S into a tree in Miami, Florida yesterday afternoon, according to local news. The car reportedly swerved through multiple lanes of traffic before hitting a median and some trees and bursting into flames – and the death may have been related to the electric carmaker’s iconic

Social media sites like YouTube are stepping up their enforcement against anti-vax content. YouTube channels that promote anti-vaccination content are not allowed to run ads on the video sharing platform, according to a policy first reported by BuzzFeed News on Friday. YouTube said that it considers anti-vaccination content to be “dangerous or harmful,” which as

Last week, we reported on a mysterious new website, ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, that shows you a new human face, generated by an AI, every time you hit the refresh button. It’s a growing trend: more copycat websites like ThisAirbnbDoesNotExist.comand ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net have also cropped up in its wake. And now, ThisCatDoesNotExist.com takes the trend to its logical conclusion:

Researchers in China have developed a new way to remove bacteria from water that they say is both highly efficient and environmentally sound. By shining ultraviolet light onto a two-dimensional sheet of a compound called graphitic carbon nitride, the team’s prototype can purify 10 litres (2.6 liquid gallons) of water in just one hour, killing virtually

Earth might have a dizzying array of life forms, but our biology ultimately remains a solitary data point – we simply don’t have a reference for life based on DNA different from our own. Now, scientists have taken matters into their hands to push the boundaries on what life could be like. Research funded by

A group of computer scientists once backed by Elon Musk has caused some alarm by developing an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) they say is too dangerous to release to the public. OpenAI, a research non-profit based in San Francisco, says its “chameleon-like” language prediction system, called GPT–2, will only ever see a limited release in

At first glance, the two rows of portraits at the top of this article just look like a bunch of average-looking people. The catch is, none of them exist. All of these faces are fakes, put together by artificial intelligence. To be more precise, these faces are created by a generative adversarial network (GAN) developed

China’s Academy of Space Technology is working on an orbital power plant that would capture solar energy in space and beam it back to Earth.  The plant would be able to harness solar power even when it’s cloudy back on Earth, since its photovoltaic array would be floating high above any terrestrial weather. With plans to