Seen in → No.76
- 🎤👁 Smart talking: are our devices threatening our privacy? “With microphone arrays that hear voices from across the room, Amazon’s devices would have been coveted by the Stasi in East Germany. The same can be said of smarthome products from Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as the microphone-equipped AIs in all of our phones. As the writer Adam Clark Estes put it: ‘By buying a smart speaker, you’re effectively paying money to let a huge tech company surveil you.’”
- 💓🤯 Scientists print first 3D heart using patient’s biological materials: Engineered heart completely matches the immunological, cellular, biochemical and anatomical properties of the patient. “In a major medical breakthrough, Tel Aviv University researchers have "printed" the world's first 3D vascularised engineered heart using a patient's own cells and biological materials.”
- 🏴👑 Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population. ”The findings, described as ‘astonishingly unequal’, suggest that about 25,000 landowners – typically members of the aristocracy and corporations – have control of half of the country.” … “Land ownership has remained largely unchanged for centuries among the aristocracy and gentry”
- 🗺 Mapping the world in 3D will let us paint streets with augmented reality. “The firm’s visual positioning service uses GPS and multiple camera images to work out exactly where you are within two or three seconds, according to cofounder Edward Miller. It has collected over two billion street images to precisely 3D-map more than 100 cities around the world, including London, San Francisco, Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo.”
- 🙏🏼 The Last Jedi’s message of spirituality over religion is a much-needed shift in the Star Wars saga. “What Star Wars does so well, by representing so many different religions, is prove that no one culture, ethnicity, belief system, has a monopoly on universal truths like kindness, justice, compassion. What The Last Jedi does so well is to build upon that idea to argue that, not only can one religion not be placed above the rest, but that religion itself can and should be challenged if it proves unwilling to evolve with the society it belongs to.” I’m unconvinced, but interesting.
- 😍Lots and lots (and lots) of beautiful scifi landscapes in Kuldar Leement’s Art Gallery.