Samsung teased its “AI Vision Inside” refrigerators at January’s CES tradeshow. (Its internal sensors can now detect 37 different fresh ingredients and 50 processed foods, generating lists for your cellphone or a screen on your refrigerator’s door.) But the refrigerators are part of a larger “AI Home” lineup of screen-enabled appliances with advanced AI features, and Engadget got to see them...

“I’ve been dreaming of this moment for 20 years,” says Aptera co-CEO Steve Fambro. Aptera’s solar-powered electric car just drove 300 miles on a single charge. “We’re one step closer to a future where every journey is powered by the sun,” Aptera says in their announcement. “This go around, Aptera took to the highway for the first time ever…” writes the EV blog Electrek. “At one point, Aptera’s...

Some scientists believe life on earth originated in organic matter in earth’s bodies of water more than 3.5 billion years ago,” reports CNN. “But where did that organic material come from…?” Maybe electrical energy sparked the beginnings of life on earth — just like in Frankenstein: Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in ancient Earth’s oceans and...

Though it’s stock price is still up 200% from its IPO in March of 2024— last week Reddit’s stock had dropped nearly 50% since February 7th. And then this week, it dropped another 10%, reports Bloomberg, citing both the phenomenon of “volatile technology stocks under pressure” — but also specifically “the gloomy sentiment around Reddit…”The social media platform has struggled to recover...

Automotive historian Dan Albert loves the “adorable tiny truck” he’s driving. It’s one of the small Japan-made “kei” pickups and minivans that “make up about a third of car sales in Japan.” Americans can legally import older models for less than $10,000, and getting 40 miles per gallon they’re “Cheap to buy and run… rugged, practical, no-frills machines — exactly what the American-built...

“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” a 53-year-old film and TV director told the New York Times:If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those...

Last week an Air France flight to the Caribbean had to turn around and return to Paris, reports the Washington Post, “after a passenger could not locate their cellphone.” Because of fears that an unattended cellphone could overheat — and because the passenger and crew couldn’t find the phone — the Boeing 777 turned around off the coast of France “and returned to the airport, according to...

In 1999 Slashdot reader Jeremie announced “a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other IM systems (ICQ, AIM, etc).” It was the first release of the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, and by 2008 Slashdot was asking if XMPP was “the next big thing.” Facebook even supported it for third-party...

Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam writes:No more burning fossil fuels, playing with fissile material, damming rivers, erecting wind mills, or making solar panels. All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century. [Which is similar to speed...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Mercury News:After a year of fastidious planning, a microscopic sample of the ultra-rare radioactive element berkelium arrived at a Berkeley Lab. With just 48 hours to experiment before it would become unusable, a group of nearly 20 researchers focused intently on creating a brand-new molecule. Using a chemical glove box, a polycarbonate glass box...