Category: Technology

Agriculture is the lifeblood of Africa. More than 60% of African households depend directly or indirectly on the land for their livelihoods. And the continent has nearly 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. Farming is a fragile sector, however. It has to deal with climate change, market volatility, weak infrastructure and demographic pressure. Addressing […]

Hiring algorithms are one of the systems that could be affected by discrimination. PeopleImages If artificial intelligence (AI) systems shape decisions that affect people’s lives, they should do so fairly. This should be a given considering that potential applications for AI include automated hiring systems, as well as tools used in education, finance and criminal […]

Throughout history, most of the world’s genomic research has relied on DNA data from people of European ancestry. A genome is the full DNA code of about three billion (a thousand million) bases, including all the chromosomes. Each person has two genomes: one from their mother and the other from their father. Well resourced environments […]

serpeblu/Shutterstock A great Tyrannosaurus rex strides through the conifer trees of her territory, sniffing the air. She picks up the scent from the carcass of a dead horned dinosaur, Triceratops, that she was feeding on yesterday. She walks over and strips off some more shreds of meat, but the smell is foul even for her. […]

What if training a robot to handle dirty, dangerous work on the factory floor was as simple as showing it how? Czech startup RoboTwin is doing exactly that, helping factory workers teach robots new skills by demonstration. Instead of writing complex code, workers perform the job once and RoboTwin’s technology turns those movements into a […]

Last winter, as Christmas markets opened across Europe, social media was flooded with alarming videos. Posts claimed that radical Islamists were “invading” Christmas markets.  One clip appeared to show people “disrupting” the opening of the Brussels Christmas market, while a separate photo showed a market surrounded by heavy security. The message was clear: Christian traditions […]

PBXStudio/Shutterstock I recently lost one of my cocker spaniels, Bobbi. She was fit, healthy and active, but had a catastrophic diagnosis of oral melanoma two months before I had to make the decision that anyone with deeply loved pets dreads. It is easy to presume that only humans have a true concept of death and […]

What does war look like through the eyes of a child? For those far removed from conflict, it can be hard to imagine. A new narrative adventure game, We Grew Up in War, sets out to answer that question through the stories of Mak, Anna, Valerie and Melisa.  Co-developed by Prague-based studio Charles Games and […]

Humans are not the only species negatively affected by increasingly hot and humid conditions. Intense heatwaves sometimes kill large numbers of wild animals. Eastern Australia’s giant fruit bats, known as flying-foxes, provide possibly the most dramatic illustration. In late 2018, two days of extreme heat in the far north of Queensland wiped out one third […]

Belgian AI company Kantify was doing business as usual until a cancer diagnosis forced the team to rethink their direction. “We built algorithms for sectors like marketing or transport,” said Ségolène Martin, Kantify’s co-founder and CEO. “Those were complex projects that had nothing to do with health, but they enabled us to build a deep expertise in […]