At first glance, arecently granted South African patentrelating to a “food container based on fractal geometry” seems fairly mundane. The innovation in question involves interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and stack. On closer inspection, the patent is anything but mundane. That’s because the inventor is not a human being – it is an artificial intelligence (AI) system called DABUS. DABUS (which stands for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”) is an AI system created byStephen Thaler, a pioneer in the field of AI and programming....

Full disclosure:Seth Porgesis one of my closest friends. That being the case, I know he shares my dislike of bacon products and eating land animals in general. And as we’re both journalists, I’ve seen his persuasive ways with public relations teams. He yells, they listen. Seth loves his Mexican food, so while at Chipotle one day, a woman told him there was a little bit of bacon used in their signature pinto beans and then said it was their policy to tell people....

Are we alone in the universe? The famous Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme has been trying to answer this question since 1959. American astronomer Carl Sagan, and many others, believed that other human-like civilisations must exist, and that we could communicate with them. But sceptics are not convinced, arguing the lack of evidence for such civilisations suggests they areexceedingly rare. But if other human-like civilisations are unlikely to exist, could there exist other forms of life – perhaps better suited than us to spread in the cosmos?...

There are more than 1.4 billion cars in the world today, and that number coulddouble by 2036. If all those cars burn petrol or diesel, the climate consequences will be dire. Electric cars emitfewer air pollutantsand if they’re powered by renewable energy, driving one wouldn’t add to the greenhouse gases warming Earth’s atmosphere. But producing so many electric vehicles (often abbreviated to EVs) in a decade would cause a surge in demand for metals like lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese....

This is adapted from Plugged In, TNW’s bi-weekly newsletter on gear and gadgets.Subscribe to it here. Uh oh,watch out:PluggedInhas just slid into the lobby all naked and greased up. Let’s move on from that childish image and kick off today’s lecture with a boring, grown-up statement: technology is only as good as its implementation. Take phones, for example. You can have the most delicious and crisp display on a device, but if it cracks easily, then it’s bad implementation....