Most Quayside watchers have a hard time believing that covid was the real reason for ending the project. Sidewalk Labs never really painted a compelling picture of the place it hoped to build.  Quayside 2.0 The new Waterfront Toronto project has clearly learned from the past. Renderings of the new plans for Quayside—call it Quayside […]

Increasingly, communities are turning to technology to help solve problems that the police are unable—or unwilling—to attend to. So that’s what I did: I went online, joining an increasing number of people who are using local networks to solve crimes that have affected them, such as robberies, reckless driving, and even plant theft. One in […]

But the company’s mission is also about redressing the inequities of the cycling world, Stuart says. Bikes are often perceived as an amenity for gentrifiers, especially white upper-class professionals. But those with the lowest levels of income are the most likely to rely on bikes for commuting, and they are also much more likely to […]

As bus systems experiment with eliminating onboard fareboxes, for example, operators will need to expand their fare vending networks—which include street-level vending machines as well as national chains like CVS and local businesses like check cashing centers. This is already happening in New York City, which has the largest public transit system in the country. […]

Such “advance market commitments” have enabled cutting-edge technologies to swiftly reach commercial markets in other fields, from vaccine development to commercial spaceflight. The same approach could shrink the timeline to scaling up emerging clean technologies and driving down their cost premiums over more carbon-intensive technologies. On top of swelling demand for clean technologies, investments in […]

Optical computing, an early approach that was later abandoned in favor of binary electronic circuitry, is also moving forward. I am fascinated by the possibility of building computers that use light as the “working fluid,” passing photons around much the way our present chips do electrons.  This is already happening: silicon photonic chips are providing […]

It’s been exciting to see technology that rewrites and improves what we thought was an established health concept—how to evaluate the need for knee surgery, for instance. With the help of technology, we can focus resources on areas of human health that are complex and chronically understudied, or we can move on from simply naming […]

But GPT-3 suffers from several problems that researchers are working to address. It’s often inconsistent—you can get contradictory answers to the same question. Second, GPT-3 is prone to “hallucinations”: when asked who the president of the United States was in 1492, it will happily conjure up an answer. Third, GPT-3 is an expensive model to […]

Thanks to this built-in responsiveness, future materials could be made with some decision-making capabilities and adaptability. Intelligent materials may be able to automatically release precise amounts of medication, heal themselves when damaged, or perform logical operations when exposed to light. In fact, some architected materials have already incorporated new kinds of logic gates that respond […]