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My dream is a world where my car will drop me off, park itself, and then pick me up whenever I want. “Come down to Earth, Ioanna,” you might say, “it’ll never happen.” But you’d be wrong. Because my dream is coming true as we speak. The technology is known as automated valet parking (AVP) — and it doesn’t even need full self-driving functionality. A modern vehicle equipped with electric power steering, electronic shifting, and connectivity capabilities is good enough....

According to a new report discovered by Space.com, the space agency may soon need more astronauts — and you could be one of them. Possibly. The report reveals that NASA’s astronaut corps has shrunk from nearly 150 people to just 44. As the agency prepares to send humans to the Moon and Mars, officials are concerned that this cadre is too small. These concerns have been bubbling for some time....

The Top 3 Reasons Why Fleets are Switching to EVs 1. Cost Savings The number one reason fleets go electric is to save costs on multiple fronts. The most obvious of these is fuel, but electric cars can also escape the city center fees and steep parking prices imposed by over forty European cities in a bid to curb congestion and pollution. Going electric can save a fleet thousands each year....

Assuming we could build ships that can go that fast, we could cut aging in half. At 99.5% light speed, we would age at only ten percent relative to an observer at rest. The problem is physics. More acceleration means more energy. We could conceivably accelerate a ship in the vacuum of space given enough time, but slowing down the ship fast enough without killing us is another problem entirely....

There is no doubt that platforms like Zoom are very useful. But all this time spent on video calls has its problems. We rely on it connect with people, yet it can leave us feeling tired and empty. It has given us some semblance of normal life during lockdown, but it can make relationships seem unreal. This feeling has spurred talk of a new psychological affliction: “Zoom fatigue.” When we interact with another person through the screen, our brains have to work much harder....

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased screentime for smartphone users since March. Whatever the reasons, it’s going to be more common for users to reach for a charging cable to stay connected. Naturally, the increase in usage is going to drive down the cable’s lifespan or have it mysteriously disappear under a multi-person living situation. During this 24-hour Green Monday, save an additional 20% off these ten Android and iPhone compatible charging cable with code “GREEN20” at checkout....

Utrecht, the Netherlands’ fourth largest city, is on its way to becoming the first region in the world with a bidirectional ecosystem. How? By using vehicle-to-grid charging(V2G), combined with car sharing. Bidirectional V2G charging is an efficient and cheap way to store and use renewable energy. The idea is simple: electricity flows both ways, meaning from the grid to the electric vehicle and vice versa. Utrecht has already partnered up with We Drive Solar and Hyundai, and now will get a fleet of solar electric vehicles (SEVs) made by Sono Motors....

This is my last post in 2020, so it’s the perfect moment to declare how fucking shitty this clusterfuck of a year has been. There. I said it. And feel free to say the same. Nobody is listening, so shout it out, it really helps. I would love to predict that 2021 is going to be all peachy and easy — but I won’t. We’re not out of the woods yet....

When it comes to understanding your customers’ needs and communicating how you can address those needs, you’re going to have to rely on data. While data may not always seem like a natural match with a creative activity like advertising, there is no denying that when used right, it will make all the difference in helping you achieve your desired marketing results. 1) Personalize your marketing content One-size-fits-all messaging needs to become a thing of the past — at least, that’s what your customers think....

Herodotus claimed that Africa was surrounded almost entirely by sea. How did he know this? He recounts the story of Phoenician sailors who were dispatched by King Neco II of Egypt (about 600BC), to sail around continental Africa, in a clockwise fashion, starting in the Red Sea. This story, if true, recounts the earliest known circumnavigation of Africa, but also contains an interesting insight into the astronomical knowledge of the ancient world....

Upon graduating from college, I made a huge life decision to take on a new job in a new city at GE Healthcare. The role was a two-year rotational leadership program that allowed program members to change teams within the IT organization every six months. Our projects were technical and leadership based, which allowed us to gain experience both while learning from all of the great people on the various teams within the different segments of the IT organization....

To take on these challenges, astronomers are turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to build new tools to rapidly search for the next big breakthroughs. Here are four ways AI is helping astronomers. 1. Planet hunting There are a few ways to find a planet, but the most successful has been by studying transits. When an exoplanet passes in front of its parent star, it blocks some of the light we can see....

The world of work is fast changing. As life expectancy lengthens and labor markets shift, our working lives have become more complicated. The old expectations about how we work have become unsustainable – not least the expectation that we religiously travel to and from a fixed location ten times a week during rush hour, with all the knock-on effects that this has for carbon emissions. Flexible work has the potential to solve many issues that see people fall out of the workforce....

The scam, which operated from Australia‘s Gold Coast, was busted as part of ‘Operation Quebec Walnut.’ According to a statement issued by Queensland Police, detectives investigated an alleged criminal operation which ran a number of businesses selling cryptocurrency investments between 2017 and May 2019. The police, which charged three men and two women, say victims were offered the chance to invest in Exmount Holdings Group, a seemingly legitimate business with a website, call centre (with 1300 telephone numbers), and sales staff....

For Aaron Rasmussen, founder of the learning platforms Masterclass and Outlier.org, we are currently even entering the golden age of design. More than ever before, successful branding provides orientation and differentiation in the market, it allows customers and employees to identify themselves with organizations and eventually generates real, measurable value. Even though most founders are aware of the importance of brand building, many prefer to postpone it “until later.” Especially in their early stages, startups often experience major changes such as fundamental adjustments to their business model....

Even if you have a budget for perks, tangible and intangible methods of motivation should work together. People need to know that their work matters. Perks are great for attracting people, but they have a lesser effect on retaining them. It’s critical to understand one fundamental thing though: benefits will not replace salary. A person works for money, having all the rest is good but secondary. However, if pay cuts are needed due to the crisis, there are ways to retain and motivate your employees, as well as preserve high efficiency....

Don’t worry, you don’t need to know much about quantum physics to read this article. I will mostly be explaining what quantum physics isn’t, rather than what it is… 1. “Quantum physics is all about uncertainty” Wrong! Quantum physics is probably the most precise scientific discipline ever devised by humankind. It can predict certain properties with extreme accuracy, to 10 decimal places, which later experiments confirm exactly. This myth originated partly in Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle”....

MIT alum Calvin French-Owen illustrated this perfectly by comparing stock data from the beginning of the plunge in February and now, and grouping it by industry: — Calvin French-Owen (@calvinfo) April 27, 2020 Most notably, as he shows, the information technology industry is now up around 8.5% compared to the start of the plunge in February. So now that we know that the tech industry as a whole has been the most stable part of the economy, we can also look at which specific tech companies coped best....

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series (see above), but nothing comes close to our next topic. The “democratization of expertise” might sound like a good thing — democracy, expertise, what’s not to like? But it’s our intent to convince you that it’s the single greatest AI-related threat our species faces by the time you finish reading this article. In order to properly understand this, we’ll have to revisit a previous post about what we like to call “WALL-E Syndrome....

The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison accused Greta Thunberg – the Swedish teenager who started the global strikes – of creating “needless anxiety” in children. So it’s Thunberg’s activism that is responsible for the anxiety children feel about their future, not the climate crisis itself? Thunberg has also been called mentally ill, a hysterical teenager and “a weirdo”. French academics criticized her looks and rather than address the points in her UN speech, dismissed Thunberg as “a happy girl looking forwards to a bright future”....