Science & Technology

Facial recognition is a threat to privacy

Facial recognition is a threat to privacy

The privacy and freedom of ordinary citizens is under threat from facial recognition technology, according to the founders of the technology. Brian Brackeen, the chief executive officer of the facial recognition software developer Kairos, has spoken out about the dangers of the technology being used by governments. He believes that the technology may be used the wrong way. He said[Read More…]

Minority-report comes to China with powerful supercomputers used to ‘predict’ crime

Minority-report comes to China with powerful supercomputers used to ‘predict’ crime

China has been utilising powerful supercomputers that can scan the country’s entire population in 1 second. And the Chinese government has been putting it to good use too. Over the last two years, the system has been used to arrest 2,000 people. Local police have already been using the technology to track people’s movements, friends, and even try to predict[Read More…]

Virtual app image from Patient's Virtual Guide

The dad who created a virtual hospital for young cancer survivors

At the Akashic Times, we try to feature positive news to inspire people in a world where it seems that only negative news, terrorist attacks and murders seem to be featured prominently in the headlines. This is one of the reasons we have a whole section on the Akashic Times dedicated to positive news. The stories that we feature often[Read More…]

Facebook face recognition technology prompts privacy concerns

Facebook face recognition technology prompts privacy concerns

Facebook’s push for facial recognition technology has prompted privacy concerns, it has been reported. Facebook has been using face recognition for years to make suggestions of who should be tagged in photos you share. Indeed, it released a statement that said: “Our technology analyzes the pixels in photos you’re already tagged in and generates a string of numbers we call[Read More…]

Japanese scientists have created an enzyme that eats away at plastic bottle waste

Could this spell the end of plastic bottle waste?

Japanese scientists have accidentally created a mutant enzyme that eats away at plastic bottles, it has been revealed. The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.[Read More…]