Illustration (& header image) by Miriam Sugranyes for BRIGHT Magazine.
Reliance Jio recently launched the Jio Phone at the company’s AGM in July 2017. The phone was an instant hit as the company recorded millions of pre booking orders within a fortnight of the launch.
The Jio phone is the cheapest 4G phones available in India but lacks some features like whatsapp. Someone spotted that they could use whatsapp on Jio phones by visiting Browserling: a live interactive cross-browser testing platform. Soon there were several tutorials on YouTube and other digital platforms that taught Jio users how to use Browserling in able to use whatsapp on their phones.
If you know where to look, there has been a noticeable reclamation for Indigenous storytellers. Notably, it’s visible through technology and modern forms of online gaming, comic books, animation and transmedia. And while content for “mature audiences” is definitely on the rise, I was still able to find plenty of action for kids!
Eric Leuthardt believes that in the near future we will allow doctors to insert electrodes into our brains so we can communicate directly with computers and each other.
Inspired by the folding technique of origami, US researchers said Monday they have crafted cheap, artificial muscles for robots that give them the power to lift up to 1,000 times their own weight.
Being stuck without access to the internet is often thought of as a problem only for rural America. But even in some of America’s biggest cities, a significant portion of the population can’t get online.
Link: https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/kz3xyz/detroit-mesh-network
In development since 2014, Youbionic started taking pre-orders for its 3D-printed robotic hand early last year. The company recently launched a new improved version, but hasn’t stopped there. Looking to a near future where robotic enhancements make for improved humans, a bizarre two-handed prosthetic has been developed and gone up for sale.
These days, it’s just as important to have communication up and running after a major disaster as it is to have power, food and drinkable water. The FCC approved $77 million to fix communications in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, while Project Loon (a collaboration with AT&T, Alphabet and T-Mobile) has found ways to get the internet up and running via LTE-providing balloons. Now, AT&T has deployed its helicopter Flying COW (Cell on Wings) to temporarily provide data, voice and text services to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
Link: https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/06/att-flying-cow-drone-cell-service-puerto-rico/
In 1900, Greek sponge divers discovered a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The artifacts they came back up with included money, statues, pottery, and various other works of art and craft, as well as a curious lump of bronze and wood that turned out to be by far the most important item onboard. When an archaeologist named Valerios Stais took a look at it two years later, he noticed that the lump had a gear in it.
The classic image of a robot is one clad in a rigid metal shell, but that might not be practical in situations where man and machine will need to work together. The emerging field of soft robotics is helping to make that collaboration safer, but recreating muscle is no easy task. Now, mechanical engineers from Columbia University have developed a synthetic soft muscle that’s said to be much more simple to make and run than others, and is three times stronger than the real thing.
Link: https://newatlas.com/3d-printable-soft-synthetic-muscle/51434/
