Category: i Robot

As the 20-year anniversary of the Beltway Sniper shooting rampage nears, the man who headed the investigation at the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says new technology would have likely stopped the shooting sooner.

During a three-week period in October 2002, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo shot and killed 10 people, and wounded three others in Maryland, Virginia and DC

At the time, Michael Bouchard was ATF’s special agent in charge during the sniper investigation, as the head of the agency’s Baltimore field office. Bouchard appeared often during news conferences with then-Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose and Gary Bald, the agent who headed the FBI’s task force efforts.

Hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, has long been touted as a clean and plentiful alternative energy source. But the easiest way to produce hydrogen fuel requires pure water, which can be hard to get ahold of — and will only become more difficult to source amid worsening droughts around the globe.

Now, in a study published this week in the journal Nature Communicationsscientists have revealed a new way to churn out hydrogen fuel.

What’s new — It turns out that all you need is the humidity that’s naturally hanging in the air, they found, along with their new device that swallows moisture and spits out hydrogen and oxygen. Their method could spur hydrogen fuel production anywhere on the planet.

This story is part of Plugged In, CNET’s hub for all things EV and the future of electrified mobility. From vehicle reviews to helpful hints and the latest industry news, we’ve got you covered.

Longer range, faster charging, less range degradation and a lower sticker price: That’s all that new battery technologies are to bring to electric cars. And while, on a practical basis, I remain more enthused about charging developments like GM’s recent expansion with Pilot and EVgo or Tesla Superchargers embracing the worldhere are some new battery technologies that are strong rivals for my enthusiasm.

Lithium ion is far from done

Please Nanotechnologies is replacing the graphite anode that forms a lot of the bulk and about 15% of the weight of today’s lithium-ion batteries with a form of silicon that it claims will give battery cells a 20 to 40% increase in energy density while

The New Jersey Department of Transportation has launched a new project along a section of Route 129 in Trenton that will include the use of a first-in-the-nation system to regulate traffic lights to improve pedestrian safety.

Plans call for a number of improvements to be made at three signalized intersections on Route 129 at Lalor Street, Cass Street and Hamilton Avenue, an area where a dozen pedestrians have been killed and many more injured since 2000.

According to DOT Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti, a Red Clearance Traffic Signal Extension system is being implemented that will detect vehicles approaching a pedestrian crossing.

“Basically, we let the red light stay a little longer, hopefully to allow pedestrians additional time to get across the street,” she said.

Smart predictive technology

Gutierrez-Scaccetti explained this smart, predictive technology detects the speed of a vehicle approaching an intersection and automatically adjusts traffic signal changes.

“That means instead

This week in football fans in this country will experience the future of VAR for the first time.

No more waiting around while the officials spend minutes drawing lines on the bottom of Harry Kane’s shirt sleeve — is that about right? No, no, down a bit, that’ll do — to find out if he is a few inches beyond the last defender.

After four years of development, nearly 300 matches of testing, the new semi-automated offside technology will launch officially in the Champions League group stages before being used at the World Cup this winter.

The semi-automated offside technology has been tested in 300 matches in the last four years

Chelsea, Man City and Liverpool kick off their campaigns in Europe’s elite competition away from home but Tottenham welcome Marseille where limb-tracking cameras inside the stadium will make tight offside calls quicker and clearer.

But as football welcomes a

Airbnb is testing new “anti-party technology” in the US and Canada as it attempts to enforce a global ban on house parties it made permanent earlier this year, the company has announced. The technology is designed to automatically catch the kinds of bookings that are likely to result in unauthorized parties, by looking at factors like a guests’ review history, the age of their account, the length of the stay they’re requesting, and whether they ‘re booking for a weekday or weekend.

The company says it’s been trialing similar technology in select areas of Australia since October 2021, where it saw a 35 percent drop in unauthorized parties. It’s also previously used a similar system in the US since July 2020 that has a more limited focus on guests under the age of 25. With this previous technology, younger guests were prevented from booking large houses nearby to where

In June, we announced that our previously temporary ban on parties will become a codified policy. We are continuing our work to enforce that policy by taking measures trying to the best of our ability to take on unauthorized parties — meaning parties thrown without the knowledge or consent of Hosts. It’s integral to our commitment to our Host community — who respect their neighbors and want no part of the property damage and other issues that may come with unauthorized or disruptive parties.

To that end, today we’re announcing the introduction of new anti-party tools in the US and Canada to help identify potentially high-risk reservations and prevent those users from taking advantage of our platform. For example, this system looks at factors like history of positive reviews (or lack of positive reviews), length of time the guest has been on Airbnb, length of the trip, distance to the

Why it matters: Researchers continue to find new ways to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities as the technologies evolve. Earlier this week, Google Scientists announced the creation of Transframer, a new framework with the ability to generate short videos based on singular image inputs. The new technology could someday augment traditional rendering solutions, allowing developers to create virtual environments based on machine learning capabilities.

The new framework’s name (and, in some ways, concept) are a node to another AI-based model known as Transformers. Originally introduced in 2017, Transformer is a novel neural network architecture with the ability to generate text by modeling and comparing other words in a sentence. The model has since been included in standard deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Just as Transformer uses language to predict potential outputs, Transframer uses context images with similar attributes in conjunction with a query