The IBM-backed developers behind Project Owl, winner of 2018’s Call For Code challenge, have successfully tested their rubber duck-based emergency WiFi network in Puerto Rico. And, with hurricane season quickly approaching, not a moment too soon. Owl, which stands for organization, whereabouts, and logistics, was designed to be deployed in the event of a loss…

As a community health worker tasked with tracking infant vaccinations in Kenya, Collince Oluoch was overwhelmed by the burdens of the job. He encountered mothers with no record of their children’s vaccinations, caregivers who could not remember clinic visits and colleagues who fudged figures. “Is there not a better way to track this vital health…

Electric vehicles have a small but fast-growing share of the car market. This switch from the gas-powered internal combustion engine to battery-powered electric propulsion is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But how will it affect other emissions related to air quality? A new analysis published in Atmospheric Environment delves into that question. Researchers behind the study consider the effects of the…

Microsoft's annual developer conference kicks off on Monday, and the company will no doubt have all manner of things to announce for Azure and, if we're lucky, Windows. To whet our appetites, the company has unveiled a crop of new Azure and Internet-of-Things services with, as we should no doubt expect these days, a focus…

Enlarge / Shoreline Amphitheatre, as seen at Google I/O 2017. Ron Amadeo Google I/O kicks off May 7 in Mountain View, California, where Google will be hosting a keynote and a million other sessions at the Shoreline Amphitheater. The keynote starts at 10am PT, and we'll be there to cover everything announced at the show.…

Valentina Palladino AMD wants in on the Chromebook craze. A few OEMs, including HP, Acer, and Lenovo, announced AMD-powered Chromebooks at CES this year, and those devices are just starting to become available. Intel processors power most Chromebooks available today, but now individual customers and businesses will be able to choose from a small, but growing,…

Microsoft The classic Windows game Solitaire has joined such landmarks as Doom, Tetris, and World of Warcraft in being inducted into the Strong Museum of Play's World Video Game Hall of Fame. The award recognizes Solitaire's role as a significant part of gaming's history. Solitaire was first bundled with Windows 3.0. Much like the other notable bundled game,…

While driverless cars and flying taxis hold the far-future promise of alleviating traffic congestion, today’s problems require immediate solutions based on today’s technology. Luckily, the field of machine learning already has a lot to offer. There are large scale solutions, such as Delhi’s Intelligence Traffic Management System. Data generated by this massive system aids the…

Throughout history, women in STEM have contributed massively to build the world as we know it today — from Rosalind Franklin, a chemist whose research helped reveal the components of DNA, to Marie Curie, a physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. But with a quick search of “greatest scientists of all time,”…

Facebook might be taking its bullying problem a lot more seriously than you think. Rather than hire more humans to flag troubling content, it plans on developing AI with human level intelligence to do the job. An official company blog post today, on the subject of content moderation, laid out a road map for machine…