So, right on cue, Microsoft has added a bunch of clever features to Teams to help increase productivity, including background noise suppression, and a ‘raise hand’ button to ask questions. As a Slack user at work, I’m so jealous right now. [Read — Bill Gates: Coronavirus testing in the US is unorganized] The AI-powered noise suppression feature works automatically canceling outworks by automatically canceling out noise from the background such as the rustle of a bag of chips, the drone of a vacuum cleaner, or your cat meowing....

In the past few days, a new app named “Remove China Apps” has risen to the top position on the Google Play Store in India. As per the Play Store numbers, it has been downloaded more than 5 million times. While the app has been cashing on anti-China sentiment, there’s a problem — it does not work as intended. I Installed it on my Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro Max, and it only detected six “China Apps” — leaving out plenty of pre-installed Xiaomi apps, ByteDance’s music app Resso, and Tencent’s popular PUBG Mobile battle royale game....

The surface, named RFocus, is quite cost-effective and contains 3,000 antennas that can boose channel strength within office walls by a factor of two. This is helpful when multiple devices are trying to access the same network on the premises. Lead author of the research paper, Venkat Arun, said this the largest number of antennas ever used for a single communication link. RFocus can be easily installed on a wall and set up between cubicles....

The app is currently in the beta phase, and you need an invite to sign up. Once you get an invite, you need to pay $4.99 a month, because privacy is not a free lunch. In return, Mozilla vows not to log your network traffic or your browsing history. The VPN uses a new Wireguard protocol, which is supposed to be faster and more secure than other standards such as OpenVPN....

“Water” has since been detected inside the minerals in lunar rocks. Water ice has also been discovered to be mixed in with lunar dust grains in cold, permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles. But scientists haven’t been sure how much of this water is present as “molecular water” – made up of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (H2O). Now two new studies published in Nature Astronomy provide an answer, while also giving an idea of how and where to extract it....

A team of researchers led by NASA astrobiologist Edward Schwieterman recently published a study indicating that the habitable zone (HZ) for life includes far fewer planetary systems than scientists thought. According to the paper: Basically the scientists used the only model for life we have – Earth life – and came up with a solution for determining whether anything intelligent could evolve in the expected conditions of systems in the HZ....

Without further ado, let’s dive in and see what the pros think will happen in the wake of 2020. Dr. Arash Rahnama, Head of Applied AI Research at Modzy: Dr. Kim Duffy, Life Science Product Manager at Vicon. 2021 will be the year of explainability. As organization integrate AI, explainability will become a major part of ML pipelines to establish trust for the users. Understanding how machine learning reasons against real-world data helps build trust between people and models....

We often express our existential concerns through metaphors, as they help us relate our own experiences to abstract concepts. Research suggests that people who apply their own metaphors to life report greater meaning — especially those with a strong need for structure. As Henrikensen puts it in his research paper on the project: [Read: Can AI convincingly answer existential questions?] Unfortunately, our individual experiences limit our ability to create meaningful metaphors for such complex concepts....

Marketing materials shared with Hard Fork claim the Perth Mint Gold Token (PMGT) is the first gold token on a public blockchain backed and guaranteed by government reserves. “It offers institutional investors a competitive alternative to traditional gold products such as gold ETFs, with the additional benefits of real-time trading and settlement enabled by blockchain technology,” reads a press release. Ethereum blockchain used to digitize government gold The token is part of a wider campaign to digitize the Perth Mint’s inventory....

According to BitMEX Research (the analytic arm of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX), BSV miners and nodes are likely confused over when the upgrade will initiate, as two different start times have been mistakenly provided. This is a problem. BSV nodes enforce the rules of the protocol, and must reject any BSV blocks that don’t match. If the miners don’t know the rules, they could start submitting invalid blocks, which drains network efficiency and security....

But Samsung has recently decided not to manufacture a dedicated electric brand, as two senior executives told The Korea Times. Two reasons why The first reason behind this decision is that the company doesn’t believe its entrance into the EV segment will bring sustainable profit. As one of the sources explained: The second reason is that the Korean tech giant is trying to avoid any conflict of interest with its current and potential clients....

The hackers allegedly sent a phishing email to UpBit users earlier this week. The email falsely claimed that the exchange needed additional customer information to process a nonexistent sweepstakes’ payout, according to information obtained by security firm East Security, CoinDesk Korea reports. It’s reported that a file was attached to the email which claimed to contain more information about the payout but would in fact run malicious code when opened....

I’m being deliberately hyperbolic, but this argument actually holds water: there’s a marketing “penalty” to the price of almost every popular gaming headset, with some rare exceptions of course (HyperX, if you ask denizens of r/headphones). That means you often end up paying for the brand, not for the audio quality. There are also certain limitations to gaming headsets. Some of them are locked to specific platforms or consoles, they won’t work with your phone, and they generally make for a poor music listening experience....

Clubhouse is an invitation-only audio-chat social networking app… so yet another place where ‘innovative minds’ can speak their minds unhindered. Only this time around it’s all live audio so you can hear their unfiltered and unstructured thoughts in real-time… yay, sign me up… But now the app has gone far beyond being just hype. It isn’t just the lone ‘office Chad’ who’s raving on about the amazing talk he hosted on the exclusive invite-only platform with his fellow hustlers....

— Panos Panay (@panos_panay) August 5, 2021 For those not familiar, the Pomodoro method is a simple productivity strategy in which you focus on a task for, say, 20-30 minutes, and then take short (often 5-10 minute) breaks in between. The exact timing is flexible, but the idea is to break down a task into manageable chunks while still allowing some room for small distractions. The keyword is small; taking a timed short break helps ensure you don’t go on a complete tangent of procrastination....

However, OnePlus also released a McLaren edition of the phone, just like it did with last year’s OnePlus 6T. This year, the special edition sports 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The back of the phone has a glimmering pattern that reflects under light. The phone comes with a special case made of carbon fiber and Italian-made Alcantara. — OnePlus India (@OnePlus_IN) October 10, 2019 OnePlus packs a 30W charger with cable matching the papaya orange theme....

Planetary protection from microbes from Earth has been a goal of NASA and other space agencies since the earliest days of space exploration. “Such regions would be of concern for planetary protection policies owing to the potential for forward contamination (biological contamination from Earth),” researchers described in an article detailing their study, published in Nature Astronomy. It’s about brine! Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) investigators found the low temperatures and extremely dry conditions on Mars would cause water to instantly freeze, boil or evaporate....

The company revealed the new batch of hardware and software at a press conference in Tokyo, including a port of Detective Pikachu for the Switch. The apps are Pokémon Home, Pokémon Masters, and Pokémon Sleep. Home is the most immediately useful, as it’s a cloud storage service that allows you to store Pokémon you’ve captured on all current-generation games, including GO, Let’s Go Eevee and Pikachu, and the upcoming Sword & Shield....

Notably, Polk is using the very same woofers and tweeters it developed for the flagship Legend series — speakers I enjoyed in my own listening tests and which offered solid measured performance. Not only that, but Polk has also added a few more tricks, since the Legend line including a new ‘X-port’ filter in the rear, as well as new cabinet construction with internal bracing techniques in order to minimize resonances — artifacts that can color a speaker’s sound....

Up front: Pyrrha is an open-source solution developed by a team comprised of a firefighter, a nurse, and a group of developers. It gives commanders in the field the ability to monitor personnel safety at a glance. This starts by equipping firefighters with a wearable device that detects toxins. Credit: Prometeo / IBM Per a post on the IBM developer blog: Background: Prometeo’s been developing its solution since the 2019 Call for Code challenge....