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Modern timber buildings can be cheap, green and fireproof | Science & technology.

If you want to become a leader, start yammering. It doesn’t even necessarily matter what you say. New research shows that groups without a leader can find one if somebody starts talking a lot.

This phenomenon, described by the “babble hypothesis” of leadership, depends neither on group member intelligence nor personality. Leaders emerge based on the quantity of speaking, not quality.

Continue reading “Babble hypothesis shows key factor to becoming a leader” »

Tesla is preparing to open to its previously exclusive Supercharger network via partnerships with Ford, GM, and Rivian. That could help EV adoption.

Launching today, AItopia will explore AI’s impact on design, architecture and humanity both today and in the future. Dezeen features editor Nat Barker introduces the series.

The future has arrived. Having been depicted countless times in sci-fi literature and cinema over the decades, machines that can think for themselves are becoming a reality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) – that is, computers or contraptions performing tasks that would usually require a human brain – is a concept that has captured the shared imagination in some form since ancient times. But it was the British polymath Alan Turing who first seriously addressed the matter in his seminal 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” Turing wrote.

Director and oceanographer James Cameron said Friday that the design of the imploded Titan submersible was “critically flawed,” calling the construction of the vessel an “insidious” mistake.

At 12,500 feet, every square inch of an object’s surface experiences the equivalent of 5,500 pounds of force.

One expert said implosion would have happened in a “thousandth of a second” — so fast that passengers didn’t have “time to realize what happened.”

For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.

The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.

The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste.

Analysts are trying to estimate the value of Tesla’s Supercharger network as the NACS connector becomes the North American standard and could widen Tesla’s charging lead.

One of the top Tesla analysts believes it could be worth more than $100 billion.

The Supercharger network is the only global EV fast-charging network, and in North America, it is by far the most extensive and reliable.

“If someone is a good bulls—er, they are likely quite smart,” says Martin Turpin, a graduate student at the Reasoning and Decision Making Lab at the Unversity of Waterloo and co-lead on the study recently published in the scientific journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Turpin and his colleagues found that people who are better at producing believable explanations for concepts, even when those explanations aren’t based on fact, typically score better on intelligence tests than those who struggle to “bulls—,” as the study puts it.” However, it is not the case that those who are not good bulls—ers are less intelligent,” Turpin says.