Source: IGN
Is 3-D-Printed Food Really the Way of the Future?
Casting Jason Momoa as Aquaman Renewed Excitement for DC Franchise
All respect to the Pacific’s favorite son, Aquaman, and I don’t mean that to be facetious. Yes, Aquaman was the butt of a lot of water-based jokes for a long time, but the character has had a recent resurgence of respectability and, frankly, awesomeness. The I-Guess-We’re-Not-Calling-It-The-DC-New-52 has produced a lot of groan-worthy, controversial and just flat-out not-great books, but one really good thing that came out of it was Geoff Johns writing Arthur Curry back to relevance. Johns has since left the book with a few writers following him, but the Aquaman comic has continued to be of good quality since.
Even while Arthur Curry continued to be a straight white male (OK, fine male Aquarian) superhero in the newest iteration, like the vast majority of comic book heroes from the major publishers, it never raised any alarm bells for me. I mean, this was Aquaman, fam. Dude just got back into the big leagues, I had other diversity battles to fight. Then came the news that Aquaman was not going to be the movie star version of a lean and incredibly handsome white heartthrob who loves the ocean (Lord knows we’ve got enough of those running around Hollywood). Instead we got Jason Momoa, who 14 people might know from playing Conan, but you probably know him from ripping a dude’s throat out as Khal Drogo on Game of Thrones. Or as Daenery’s husband. Surely one of those. At any rate, my first reaction that he was being cast as Aquaman was in the neighborhood of … “Oh.”
Fast forward to the first poster dropping and the Internet losing its collective mind over it. All respect to Kim Kar … I’m lying, I don’t really care, but Jason Momoa’s first poster as Aquaman kind of broke the (nerd) Internet that day. And you know what? It should have. It’s amazing. It also made me realize something — he kind of looks exactly like Aquaman SHOULD look. I mean, we’re talking about DC’s King of the Seven Seas, what is the likelihood that THAT DUDE would be a white guy from Maine? Nah, give me the Polynesian God who fell straight from Olympus and landed in an audition for some role across the Narrow Sea. All of a sudden, because Jason Momoa is in these panel streets lookin’ like Poseidon, let alone King of the Seven, he has instantly become DC’s most intriguing movie character and development (though Michelle McLaren directing Wonder Woman is still a hell of a draw for me).
Read more from William Evans at Black Nerd Problems
10 Extraordinary Black Pioneers Who Have Received a Nobel Prize
Sir William Arthur Lewis (Jan. 23, 1915 – June 15, 1991)
Lewis is the only Black person to have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is known for his Lewis model and the theory of economic growth. Lewis was awarded the prize in 1979.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Jan. 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)
King became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership during the Civil Rights Movement. King is remembered for many things, including the March on Washington, Selma marches and Montgomery bus boycott. He was an advocate of nonviolence and civil disobedience. In October 1964, he was awarded the prize.
This Innovative Technology Will Make Sure You’ll Never Kill Another Plant in Your Home Again
Parrot’s Pot and H2O are two new wireless sensors that track your plants’ health and let you water them remotely.
Source: The Verge
Kanye West Announces Video Game Idea That Will Have Gamers Leading His Late Mother Through Heaven’s Gates
Hip-hop star Kanye West has been known to incorporate his love for his mother, the late Donda West, in many of his musical projects, but the rapper is now translating that same love into a new video game.
Kanye West’s famous wife, Kim Kardashian, has already used aspects of her life to launch a successful video game, and it seems like West will be embarking on the same mission.
During an interview with Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club, West revealed that he has been working for months on a video game based on his single “Only One.”
In the song, which features former Beatles star Paul McCartney, West pays tribute to his mother, who died in 2007, in what he says is a conversation between his mother and his daughter North West.
While he didn’t say much about what the game will entail, he did explain what the game’s premise would ultimately be.
“The idea is that it’s my mother going through the gates of heaven,” he said during the hourlong interview. “And you’ve got to bring her to the highest gate of heaven by holding her to the light.”
Outside of that short description and the fact that West said he will be designing the game himself, there aren’t many more details about the rapper’s gaming project.
While he did say he has been working on the project for about six months, he didn’t reveal how much work he had left on the game or hint at any set release date.
The announcement of the new video game comes as a surprise for some hip-hop fans, but West says he has always been an avid gamer and started designing games when he was still in grade school.
Back in 2009, he told Details magazine that the first beat he ever made was actually for one of the video games he was trying to design.
While this latest game has a holy theme with his mother in mind, his first video game idea had a completely different topic in mind — the kind of topic that one might expect from a young boy in middle school.
“The main character was, like, a giant penis,” he said. “It was like Mario Brothers, but the ghosts were, like, vaginas. Mind you, I’m 12 years old, and this is stuff 30-year-olds are programming.”
So while the concept was pretty juvenile, it actually took quite a bit of talent for a young Kanye to make any progress on the game.
“You’d have to draw in and program every little step — it literally look me all night to do a step, ‘cause the penis, y’know, had little feet and eyes,” he continued.
No word out yet on if West ever plans to go back and revisit the penis-themed video game idea.
10 Exceptional Black Women Who Are Changing the Face of Tech
Window Snyder
She is the security and privacy product manager of Apple. Snyder’s parents worked as programmers and taught her the program BASIC at 5 years old. Snyder is an expert on cryptography and has worked at Mozilla, where the Web browser Firefox was developed, and Microsoft.
Ory Okolloh
The Kenyan native was originally a Harvard-educated lawyer before turning to tech. Her company Ushahidi is a revolutionary crowd-sourcing platform that allows citizen journalists and eyewitnesses all over the world to report incidences of violence through the Web, mobile E-mail, SMS and Twitter. She currently serves as Google’s policy manager for Africa.
Watch How M-Pesa Is Using Tech to Completely Change the Way People Are Doing Business in Africa
How is a Third World tech country paving the way when it comes to the future of mobile banking? Ninety percent of Kenyans use their phones to access the Internet, and M-Pesa is bringing mobile banking to the nation. Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman explains.
Source: Bloomberg Business
The ‘Father of Modern Gaming’ Insists That the Virtual Reality Takeover Is Finally Here
After years of anticipation and vivid imagination, industry experts are confident that the tech world is finally on the brink of introducing consumers to the kind of virtual reality technology they only dreamed about.
The past few years in tech have seen incredible advancements and exponential growth.
Cars are able to park themselves. Phones know more about us than our friends and family do. Google claims to have the technology to build an elevator to space. Printers have gone from printing out family photos and research papers to spitting out figurines and prosthetic arms.
Needless to say, tech has come a long way.
But even in the age of real-life jetpacks and speakers you can text, tech-savvy consumers are still not completely satisfied.
The good news is that the moment they have been truly waiting for, perhaps even more than the flying car, could finally be peeking over the horizon.
The age of virtual-reality sets could finally be here.
Virtual reality got off to a bit of a false start when Oculus Rift was first announced back in 2012, but since then the growth of this technology has seemed slow. Rumors of any breakthrough have yet to spark a massive whirlwind of media attention online.
According to Tim Sweeney, however, things are about to change.
Sweeney, the man who started Epic Games and is hailed as the “father of the modern gaming industry,” believes virtual reality is about to change the world.
“There are some amazing things happening in VR right now, and a lot of them haven’t seen the light of day publicly at all,” Sweeney said during a phone interview with Engadget. “But next year is going to just be a watershed time for VR.”
There have been a few industry moves that suggested big things were happening with virtual reality, but nothing that seemed too exciting without someone like Sweeney backing it up.
Facebook paid $2 billion to purchase Oculus VR in 2014, and other tech giants, including Samsung, Valve, Google, Microsoft and Sony, have also started delving into the world of virtual reality.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, virtual reality stole the show with demonstrations of 360-degree monster films and stunning flight simulators.
But that isn’t the full extent of the possibilities of virtual reality, according to Sweeney.
“It’s going to change the world,” he said. “The hardware is going to double in quality every few years for another decade, to the point where, 10 years from now, it’s going to be hard to tell the difference between virtual reality and the real world.”
6 Ways You May Be Destroying Your Smartphone And Not Even Know It
Leaving It On for Long Periods
Believe it or not, our machines need to rest from time to time like we do. To ensure that your smartphone works well and operates to its fullest, always power it down for 30 minutes to an hour. This action can allow diagnostics to run, caches to clear and RAM to last longer.
Malware
Smartphone malware is far worse than malware on computers because it can track your location no matter where you are. This harmful software can steal vital data and personal information about you. There are many apps that remove malware, like the app Malwarebytes. Keep your phones and your data safe.
Artificial Intelligence Won’t Lead to Robot Overlords, But Does It Still Pose a Threat to Humanity?
When most people think of artificial intelligence (AI), they tend to think of Hollywood’s depiction of this scientific advancement — rebellious robots bent on world domination.
A few others may think of friendly human-like robot maids, and then even fewer think of their digital opponents in video games or thermostats that automatically adjust the temperature of their home.
The latter is the most accurate depiction.
Of course, you might not think that after hearing world-renowned physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking and SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk explain their fears of artificial intelligence.
Musk has even donated roughly $10 million to causes aimed at keeping artificial intelligence safe and “beneficial.”
According to experts who actually spend much of their time working with AI, however, there is actually nothing to be afraid of.
When it comes down to it, they say, AI isn’t as smart as Hollywood may lead you to believe.
“The AI community as a whole is a long way from building anything that could be a concern to the general public,” said Dileep George, the co-founder of a prominent AI firm, Vicarious, according to Popular Science.
The director of AI research at Facebook, Yann LeCun, added that even with the many advancements that have been made with AI in recent years, giving human-like intelligence to machines has not even been remotely possible.
For that reason, many scientists who are familiar with current AI research are not fearful that their work will one day wipe humans off the face of the earth.
“What people in my field do worry about is the fear-mongering that is happening,” Yoshua Bengio, head of the Machine Learning Laboratory at the University of Montreal, told Popular Science. “There are crazy people out there who believe these claims of extreme danger to humanity. They might take people like us as targets.”
Bengio is just hoping that those fears won’t start driving away investors and ultimately start slashing away at how much funding researchers are able to obtain in order to continue making developments to AI.
Of course, not every AI fear seems to be quite as irrational as evil robots.
There are also concerns about what the future of AI means for blue-collar jobs.
Many large retailers, like Lowes, have recently started rolling out robotic sales associates.
While these robots are nowhere near close to eliminating the need for human assistance in the hardware store, it was certainly an eye-opener for just how far AI has come.
China-based company Hon Hai, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, recently announced that over the next three years it will plan to fire roughly 500,000 workers and replace them with robots who will be able to complete similar tasks and work for free.
This could cause a major spike in unemployment rates, especially for Americans who rely on blue-collar jobs.
“AIs will cause significant unemployment, but that doesn’t equate with poverty,” Neil Jacobstein, the head of AI at Singularity University, told the BBC.
As AI grows, other related tech jobs will grow as well. So what this means is that there actually could be more jobs becoming available, but they would require highly intelligent people with extensive backgrounds in tech and engineering, which could ultimately mean the average “working man” could be out of a job.
Another fear that has been expressed is about AI getting in the wrong hands.
James Barrat, an author and documentarian, explained that AI could be extremely dangerous if the person on the back end has ill intentions.
“Advanced AI is a dual-use technology, like nuclear fission,” Barrat told the BBC. “Fission can illuminate cities or incinerate them. At advanced levels, AI will be even more volatile and dangerous than fission, and it’s already being weaponized in autonomous drones and battlefield robots.”
So according to Barrat, the fear is not about the technology itself, but the person behind it.
Either way, AI is quickly growing and contributing to many new beneficial technologies. Moving forward, however, it will be key that the ethics and regulations regarding AI continue to expand just as quickly as the technology itself.