New graphene filter turns filthy water into drinking water
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Millions of people around the world don’t have regular access to clean drinking water, and this breakthrough could help them. Every year millions of people around the world die from diseases they’ve contracted from drinking unclean water but now researchers in Australia have developed...
AI helps emergency dispatchers diagnose heart attacks by listening in on phone calls
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Humans can only detect a narrow range of sound, but the sounds that AI can detect and analyse are only limited by the sensors they use, now sound is being used to diagnose health conditions in new ways. Emergency dispatchers have a tough job,...
New Graphene sieve turns seawater into drinking water
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Water scarcity is one of the greatest worries facing the modern age, and as the world watches one of its great cities face the real prospect of running out of water in months, not years, the search for new water filtration systems has never been...
Hitachi’s newest surveillance AI can follow you through a crowd
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF You might not care too much about your privacy today, but what about your children’s privacy tomorrow? The technologies to track and analyse our every thought and move have already been assembled, the next step is deployment. Not only can a new Artificial Intelligence...
Harvard revolutionises camera technology, invents Metalense
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Centuries after they were first invented most lenses are still made of plastic or glass and Harvard’s new metalense will revolutionise the industry and let us make cameras and lenses that, eventually, will be just atoms thick. Metalenses, flat surfaces that use nanostructures to...
Ingenious new bot discovers hacks companies haven’t told their users about
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many of your online accounts have already likely been compromised but very few companies own up to the fact, putting you and your data at risk,but now a bot can tell you which companies have been hacked – even if they don’t want you to...
DeepMind unveils the world’s first test to assess dangerous AI’s and algorithms
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI is being strapped into everything from self-driving cars and autonomous weapons systems and until now we had no way to assess how dangerous, or how much of a threat, those AI’s could become. Earlier this year a group of world experts convened to...
China’s surveillance network found a BBC reporter in under 7 minutes
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As nation states roll out increasingly advanced and sophisticated surveillance networks, how we use them and the agenda of those who control them become increasingly important to understand. It took Chinese authorities just seven minutes to locate and apprehend BBC reporter John Sudworth using its...
Dubai rolls out autonomous police cars to go alongside its robot police officers
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Technology is changing the world of law enforcement and it’s important to experiment with new ideas that provide low visibility but highly effective policing. A couple of weeks ago, and following on from the deployment of the regions first robot police officer at the Dubai...
First of a kind AI malware learns and mimics its target systems behaviours to prevent detection
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Powered and fuelled by AI cyber attacks are about to go full auto and noone is prepared for what’s coming. Every second of every day cyber security experts around the world are engaged in a virtual war with criminals, hackers and wayward foreign governments, and...
AI can now listen to individuals in a crowd
WHY THIS MATTERS This new breakthrough will let our Connected Home devices hear us better, but on the other it also gives organisations the ability to eavesdrop on everyone. Devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home can normally deal with requests from a single person, but like us they often still...
ARM CEO challenges the tech industry to build an immune system to prevent a cyber pandemic
WHY IT MATTERS Over the coming decades trillions of devices will become smart and connected and, unless companies and individuals come together to tackle the issue, we could be heading for a cyber security armageddon Cyber security today is bad, very bad, and as we all buy more devices,...
Nvidia’s newest AI is creating scarily realistic photos of fake celebrities
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Artificial Intelligence is getting more creative and better at creating realistic images and photos that fool even the most cynical experts, and it will bring about a new era in content creation. One of the more unexpected outcomes of today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution...
Researchers are trying to create a rating system for cybersecurity software
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF With cybersecurity at the top of most people’s minds how do you know just how good the cybersecurity product you just bought to protect your company or home devices really is? Cybersecurity is obviously front of mind for a lot of people, which is...
Revolutionary new IoT chip communicates miles without using any energy
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF IoT devices only “work” if they have connectivity, but up until now trying to get data from a sensor in a field, or a toaster at home, has meant fitting them all with battery powered communications gear, new backscatter devices solve that issue. A...
Lockheed’s new camera puts a space telescope in your pocket
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Increasingly we’re using new, and advanced, optical systems to monitor everything that goes on around us, both on Earth and in space, and the more the sensors improve the more we can watch. Today’s space telescopes, like the Hubble or the newest kid on the...
World first as researchers hack a computer using modified DNA
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As we increasingly become masters of manipulating the makeup of life criminals will find new, innovative ways, to breach computer systems and cause havoc. We are increasingly becoming masters of manipulating the building blocks of life, whether it’s creating new “alien” life forms that...
New all seeing cameras will revolutionise computer vision as we know it
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Imagine a camera that can see and analyse every part of the visible and non-visible spectrum at the same time, now imagine it’s in a search and rescue drone, or a hunter killer robot… Hey, I know you like hearing about the grand things that...
World first as Chinese scientists communicate without sending any data, revolution in computing beckons
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to communicate without sending any data, and without using any particles as intermediaries, sounds impossible but scientists have just demonstrated it working and it could change everything about technology and communications as we know it. Firstly I’m going to get this one...
Is this the first recorded incident of Robo-Suicide?
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF One day AI and robots might actually have feelings, and then this won’t be as funny… Most science fiction films are famous for portraying Androids as wannabe humans, whether it’s Data from Star Trek, the freaky one from Aliens, or the nerdy looking one...
