Trying to find the different mobile chargers for the handsets in your house could be a thing of the past after the IEC, the international standards body for electrotechnology,announced the publicationof the first globally relevant universal charger standard for data-enabled mobile phones. The standard takes into consideration the charger itself, the connector and plug, its interoperability and how it impacts the environment. The charger will be based on existing MicroUSB specifications, a standard that is accepted worldwide and already in use by the world’s top mobile phone manufacturers....

On May 8, a piece of space junk from a Chinese rocket fell uncontrolled back to Earth andlanded in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. A year ago, in May 2020, another Chinese rocket met the same fate when it plummeted out of control into the watersoff the West African coast. No one knew when or where either of these pieces of space junk were going to hit, so it was a relief when neither crashed on land or injured anyone....

The Holy Grail of AI research is called “general artificial intelligence,” or GAI. A machine imbued with general intelligence would be capable of performing just about any task a typical adult human could. The opposite of general AI isnarrowAI – the kind we have today. For example, you can ask Alexa to do all sorts of stuff but when you try to get it to do something it’s not specifically designed for it fails....

We all have extra things to either throw out, donate to Goodwill, or give away to a friend. An extra tennis racket, that scuba gear you thought you’d use. Some of it is junk, but some of it might be worth selling. Right now, you can place these items on Craigslist to make a few bucks for yourself. KarmaGoatwould rather you sell things on its site, and have the money go to a charitable cause....

If one car out of every 1,000 was networked, we’d be able to put an end to traffic, arecent research report claims. While many people are still afraid of automated vehicles like Google’s experimental, self-driving car — despite the fact that a city of automated, networked cars would pretty much eliminate the majority of accidents — the cars in question in this report only need to be Wi-Fi enabled. They can still be driven by humans....