15th of November, The 8 billionth person on the planet was born. Well, more or less. This date was chosen UN demographers at the moment when the world crossed its last demographic frontier. The exact date is probably wrong—perhaps by a few months or more—but there are about a billion more people alive today than...
It may finally take place. For many years, technologists have been promising that the age of electric vehicles will come. After false starts in the early 20th century (when electrics briefly made up a third of cars in the US), the 1970s (thanks to the gas crisis), and the early 2000s (when two American engineers...
On cool but on a humane November evening in Toronto, Allison Williams and I fall into a lengthy conversation about how politely one can manipulate an audience. Williams is an actress, one of the most conscientious of her generation; audience manipulation is her not-so-secret weapon. And I am well aware that as a writer covering...
Almost two years I reviewed the $200 Nokia 5.3 a while ago, which was promised two years of Android OS updates and three years of security updates. How is HMD Global, the company that licenses the Nokia brand, doing? It’s just only deployed on this device Android 12, which is a one-year version of Google’s...
It seemed if this year the world plunged from one crisis to another. Once most countries were freed from the shackles of the pandemic, the horrors of war returned to Europe, millions of people around the world were affected by extreme weather, and the twin pains of energy shortages and inflation came. But thanks to...
Luxury over-ear headphones plush and comfy, and they sound great. But for most everyday activities — working out, traveling, and wandering around the house pretending to put things away — I prefer a pair of comfortable, durable wireless workout headphones. Since I started testing them, their sound and comfort have improved a lot. I run...
mRNA is one the first molecules of life. Although it was identified six decades ago as the blueprint for proteins in living cells, its pharmaceutical potential has long been underestimated. mRNA turned out to be unpromising – too unstable, too weak and too inflammatory. The successful development of the first mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 in...
we are crashed futures all the time. Every ad, every political campaign, every quarterly budget is a promise or threat of what tomorrow might look like. And sometimes it can feel like this future is happening, whether we like it or not, that we’re just on our way. But the future has not yet arrived....
In the post-apocalyptic Blue Twelve Studios, the humans are gone and the cats are left roaming the neon-lit ruins. To roam, a puzzle platformer in which players control a ginger tabby cat traveling through a cyberpunk world, is simple in its approach: you are the lost cat. You can meow, scratch and be endlessly annoying,...
The idea is to encourage yourself to do something, but something that you don’t put emotional effort into. This builds willpower, which you can then apply to the things you are emotionally invested in. Out with the old This is the time of year when we focus on new beginnings (naturally), but it’s also worth...
