Science and Tech

The Taiwanese government has said none of the components in thousands of pagers used by the armed group Hezbollah that exploded in Lebanon earlier this week were made on the island. Fragments of the pagers that blew up had labels which pointed to Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo. But the firm denied making the devices used in the attack. The Lebanese …

Jason Brown Jason Brown was happy with the AI input into his holiday to Ireland When Jason Brown organised his summer holiday to Amsterdam and Ireland this year, he didn’t turn to a travel book or check out Instagram. Instead the founder of recruitment company People Movers consulted ChatGPT, Open AI’s generative artificial intelligence tool. He asked the AI a …

Reuters More than a thousand workers are participating in the strike For the past 11 days, about 1,500 workers of South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics have been striking work in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, leading to major disruptions in production. The plant in Chennai city, one of Samsung’s two factories in India, employs nearly 2,000 workers …

A school in Sheffield has banned the use of smart devices including phones and watches. Forge Valley School no longer allows the use of smartphones, watches or headphones on its premises. Any student found to be using them has to hand them in, with the gadgets not returned for 24 hours. Head teacher Dale Barrowclough said children were previously left …

How live updating of online maps is helping humanitarian work around the world.

Zoe Corbyn How does beanless coffee taste? Zoe Corbyn has been finding out I am in a high-end coffee shop in a tech-heavy area of San Francisco, staring suspiciously into a cup of espresso. This is no conventional coffee: it is made without using a single coffee bean. It comes from Atomo, one of a band of alt-coffee start-ups hoping …

What do social media users do when their preferred platform is banned ?

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, carrying four private citizens, has launched into space, where the crew will spend five days – and attempt the world’s first private spacewalk. The mission is funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman and is the second privately-crewed mission from SpaceX – the spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk.

Chris Baraniuk It’s estimated that one third of the world’s airline seats are made in Northern Ireland In a warehouse building in a quiet town in Northern Ireland, a robot arm is opening and closing an airplane meal table over and over again. It has been programmed to carry out this mundane task no fewer than 28,000 times, day and …

Devlyn van der Walt Devlyn van der Walt always wanted to work in video games As a child Devlyn van der Walt dreamed of one day being a video game developer. “During primary school, I would make games from paper and put them into a ring bind file, cut out paper characters and move them through the pages,” he says. …