McDonald’s said Wednesday it has entered a strategic partnership with IBM to develop artificial intelligence technology that will help the fast-food chain automate its drive-thru lanes. CNBC reports: As part of the deal, IBM will acquire McD Tech Labs,…
Payments Company Stripe Is Kick Starting Market For Carbon Removal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Stripe is signing up to pay for carbon-removal technologies that haven’t been invented yet. The payments company has formed a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a London investment …
France Moves To Shield Its Book Industry From Amazon
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Sophie Fornairon’s independent bookshop has survived the rise of Amazon thanks to a French law that prohibits price discounting on new books, but she says the e-commerce giant’s ability to undercut on s…
UK Reaches Highest COVID-19 Deaths Since March As New AY.4.2 Delta Sub-Variant Spreads
AleRunner writes: The United Kingdom’s COVID-19 death rate has reached its highest rate since just after the peak of the last lockdown in March. This has been happening as the new AY.4.2 variant of the Delta strain of the SARS-COV-2 virus has begun to …
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Wants To Build a Tourism Space Station Nearly As Big As the ISS
Blue Origin, the rocket and space tourism company founded by Jeff Bezos, is proposing a massive new commercial space station called “Orbital Reef” that could be used to host science experiments, vacation getaways, and potentially even in-space manufact…
Apple’s iPod Came Out Two Decades Ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: On October 23, 2001, Apple released the iPod — a portable media player that promised to overshadow the clunky design and low storage capacity of MP3 players introduced in the mid-1990s. The iP…
US Regulators Exploring How Banks Could Hold Crypto Assets
A top U.S. bank regulator said U.S. officials are looking to provide a clearer path for banks and their clients that are looking to hold cryptocurrencies, in order to keep control over the fast-developing asset. Reuters reports: Jelena McWilliams, who …
Adobe Brings New Creative Cloud Apps To M1 Macs and The Web
During Adobe Max 2021 today, the company announced new features for Creative Cloud’s various iPad apps, two more applications running natively on Apple Silicon Macs, and new web versions of some apps, among other things. Ars Technica reports: Adobe sai…
Apple’s Privacy Rules to Blame For Facebook’s Lower Than Expected Quarterly Growth, Says Zuckerberg
Apple’s privacy rules are “negatively affecting” Facebook, and its business, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed during its most recent earnings call. MacRumors reports: As a quick refresher, starting with iOS 14.5 and all newer versions of iOS and iP…
Your Brain Uses ‘Autocorrect’ To Decipher Language and AI Just Helped Us Prove It, New Study Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Debrief: How do we how know to speak and to read? These essential questions led to new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses AI models to examine how and why our brains understand…