Payal Dhar

The country says that more open access to terrestrial data will help rural farmers. More likely, will make it easier for corporations to control their land.

When Kondo speaks of tidying, she isn’t just referring to possessions. The essentials of the KonMari philosophy are just as applicable to other aspects of our lives, from sorting out the clutter in our heads that hold us back, to removing people who suck out our joy.

They know all about saving fictional worlds, but gamers are now being called upon by researchers to lend a hand in one of humankind's biggest crises—the Covid-19 pandemic. So far, they have risen to the occasion and saved scientists almost 500 years of mind-numbing data crunching.

The plan so far: land the next humans on the Moon by 2024. And, if all goes well, use Earth’s satellite as a springboard to prepare to venture further — to Mars.

Before that happens, though, we will need some answers about the impact on human health of exploring deep space.

Designing electronic systems that mimic the human brain, both in terms of energy use and ability to carry information, is a holy grail of scientific research. Whereas artificial intelligence has come a long way, these systems are still far from matching the brain's energy efficiency. A team of scientists from the ENS Laboratoire de Physique, Paris, believe the answer might lie in microfluidics.

When the coronavirus pandemic shut down travel around the world, some natural, historical and cultural sites saw it as a call to redouble their efforts to embrace extended reality, both to let people tour these destinations from afar, and to develop meaningful new ways for travelers to experience them on-site, in hopes of luring them back after the health emergency eased.

In early June, border officials “quietly deployed” the mobile app CBP One at the U.S.-Mexico border to “streamline the processing” of asylum seekers. While the app will reduce manual data entry and speed up the process, it also relies on controversial facial recognition technologies and stores sensitive information on asylum seekers prior to their entry to the U.S. The issue here is not the use of artificial intelligence per se, but what it means in relation to the Biden administration’s pre-election promise of civil rights in technology, including AI bias and data privacy.

In the 1970s, when transgender residents in Great Britain tried to correct their gender in government IDs, they encountered a new computerized system programmed to trigger “compatibility check failures.” Mar Hicks, a historian who studies how gender and sexuality bring hidden technological dynamics to light, documents how this “failure” mode had been deliberately programmed so that trans people would not be allowed to exist, except on rare, case-by-case bases.

Like most parents, Sourav’s would like to see him “settled”. In India, however, this is a loaded concept. Being happy, healthy and financially secure are all important, but making a good marriage is the cornerstone of “settling down”. Indeed, 26-year-old Sourav, an IT professional in one of India’s metro cities, would make a wonderful husband to a man of his choice. That is the problem.

The part that artificial intelligence plays in climate change has come under scrutiny, including from tech workers themselves who joined the global climate strike last year. Much can be done by developing tools to quantify the carbon cost of machine learning models and by switching to a sustainable artificial intelligence infrastructure.

As government-run health care buckles under India’s second COVID wave, residents are turning to social media to try to locate life-saving care.

With the Perseverance safely on Mars, now collecting rock and soil samples from the surface, it’s now time to plan the next stage of the mission: the return of the samples to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission will be an unprecedented one in the history of space exploration, marrying decades of scientific knowledge and with cutting-edge technology. It will comprise separate, coordinated robotic missions requiring NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to combine their expertise.

Some have dubbed this the era of “smart agriculture”—with farms around the world scaling up their use of the Internet, IoT, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence to increase yields and sustainability. Yet with so much digital technology, naturally, also comes heightened potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities. There’s no scaling back smart agriculture either. By the end of this decade we will need the extra food it produces.

The pandemic may have put a temporary damper on our fuel needs, but forecasts from the International Energy Agency indicate that demand for transport fuel is expected to continue to rise through 2040, and maybe even beyond. Even though the share of renewables is likely to increase, the consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to rise as well.