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Have you made the switch to electric yet? One of the challenges preventing more people from adopting electric vehicles is concern over battery life and charging capacity. Often referred to as "range anxiety," this is the fear of whether the car will reach the next charging station in time.   And even if you make it, will the charger actually work? The current charging infrastructure still leaves much to be desired, often forcing drivers to go miles out of their way to find a

Ken Kocienda, a veteran Apple software engineer and designer, played a crucial role in developing the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. In his 2018 book, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Job s, he offers an unparalleled insider’s perspective on Apple’s creative processes during this amazing era of breakthrough products. The phrase “creative selection” is Kocienda’s spin on “natural selection,” emphasising how Ap

How do you feel about machines tracking your emotions? Imagine if your phone could sense that you’re feeling stressed, and it responded by recommending a meditation app. The rapid rise of emotion recognition technology means this could soon be a reality. If AI-powered tech can learn to recognise and respond to our emotions, the potential will be huge. But so are the concerns. And that’s before we get to the really big question: can this technology actually work?  Watch my sho

The global population is expected to pass 10 billion within the next few decades. That means we’ll have doubled the number of people on the planet in less than 100 years. As a result, the world faces an existential dilemma: how do we boost production to feed billions more people while reducing agriculture’s negative impact on the environment?  For thousands of years, farming has been central to human civilisation. But the looming "population bomb" means we’re going to need so

ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini – formerly known as Bard – can plan parties, write stories, hold conversations and pass exams. These incredible Large Language Model (LLM) systems might look like the all-knowing AI promised by science fiction. But they are not.  As powerful, impressive and revolutionary as they are, LLMs are essentially elaborate bluffing systems which use statistics to piece sentences together. It is only by understanding how these systems work that we will get t

Everyone loves a good magic trick. Take mind-reading, for instance. We can enjoy the stagecraft and illusion safe in the knowledge that it isn’t actually possible for someone to pry into our innermost thoughts. But what if it was? We may be on the verge of a technological breakthrough that takes mind-reading from illusion to reality. Brain scanning is one of the wonders of medical science. Its history goes back to 1924 and, over the years, the abstract signals and images coll

Last month was the hottest ever recorded on Earth. It is a fact that the planet is heating up and, without drastic action, the changing climate threatens to unleash a wave of global disasters. Human activities are responsible for this and, while we are taking some gradual steps to become greener, we still generate most of our energy by burning heat-trapping carbon. But what if, in addition to reducing our carbon dependency, we could undo some of the damage we’ve already in

From eyes that see over a million different colours to ears that detect a staggering range of frequencies, the human senses are incredible. But none can hold a candle to the most powerful part of our sensory system: the brain. The human brain does the most impressive feat of data analysis imaginable – decoding electrical impulses from all over the body and combining them to create the rich, multi-modal experience we call reality. But what if a connection fails, and a sense is

Welcome to the second part of my article on microchips. Part one covered the invention of the transistor and a brief history of the microchip. Now, let’s bring things into the present with a look at how and where microchips are made today, their place in modern geopolitics and what might happen when we finally reach the limit of Moore’s Law. The most complex engineering process ever invented As microchips have got ever-smaller, the machines required to manufacture them have g

Advances in technology over the past century have been staggering. It took just 66 years to progress from launching the first airplane to landing on the moon. Life-changing new smart gadgets, revolutions in communication and miraculous medicines now come so thick and fast that we almost take them for granted. What has driven this incredible rate of innovation? It all comes down to a tiny piece of technology: the transistor.  Our ability to keep making these transistors smalle

As technologies go, printing can feel fairly mundane and uninspiring. Sure, some impressive things are being done with 3D printing but that can feel pretty remote when you’re trying to fix yet another paper jam. What if I told you that printing might be on the verge of a huge breakthrough which would herald a revolution in medical science and save tens of thousands of lives a year? What if instead of just churning out paper and plastic, our printers could print… us? That’s th

Compared to Hollywood’s portrayal, life in the 21st century can sometimes feel a bit of a let-down. Where are the cities full of driverless cars? The hand-held lasers? The robotic killing machines who’ll stop at nothing to topple their human overlords? Ok, maybe not that last one... But what if some of these things are much closer to being realised than we thought? Enter LiDAR – short for Light Detection And Ranging. LiDAR scanners bounce laser beams off objects to calculate

How objective are you? Most of us like to think that we always make rational and fact-based decisions, but studies show that we are often swayed by unconscious biases. Thankfully we can rely on science to give us an objective and unbiased take on the world, with its robust, impartial research and cold, hard data. Or can we? It turns out the truth is a bit more complicated… In a recent iluli video, I explored how science and technology have reinforced inequalities in our socie

In the late 19th century, America was gripped by an engineering battle that would forever change the world. In the "war of the currents," inventors Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse (with some help from Nikola Tesla) raced to find the best way to bring electricity to cities and industries. Edison favoured a system called direct current (DC) while Westinghouse championed alternating current (AC). After a brutal fight, the latter won out, the world adopted AC, and the rest

If you were listing the innovators who had the biggest influence on the world in the past 50 years, the name Steve Jobs would likely come close to the top. You might be tapping out this list on the Notes app of your iPhone, or dictating it to Siri through your Apple Watch. Even if you don’t have a house full of products with a shiny fruit-based logo, Jobs’ impact transforming how we use computers and consume music, news and film in the 21st century is undeniable. 11 years on

For many of us, the concept of nuclear power can sound a bit scary. We hear the word "nuclear" and images of mushroom clouds, Chernobyl or other more recent disasters spring to mind. And it’s not a completely irrational response – when thing go wrong with nuclear, they go very wrong. But it got me wondering – might we take a more rounded view of the pros, cons and untapped potential of nuclear power if we had a better understanding of how it works? We set ourselves the chall

In medical emergencies, every moment counts. That’s why innovations that can shave even fractions of a second off the time it takes someone to get life-saving treatment represents a massive leap forward. When it comes to organ transplantation, speed really is of the essence. According to the American Transplant Foundation , an average of 16 people die each day because they do not receive organs in time. What’s more, between 2014 and 2019 there were 370 “ near misses ” where

Spoiler alert: Yes, it’s already happening. Scorsese. Kubrick. Lynch. Anyone with the last name Coppola. Iconic directors invariably have a distinct style and vision that make their work easily recognisable. Chances are that even if you didn’t see the words "Directed by Quentin Tarantino" appear in the credits of a film, you’d still be able to identify the auteur through the kind of snappy dialogue, hammy violence and unique overall aesthetic seen on screen. Or would you? In

In years gone by, parents would worry about letting their children play out in the street. Nowadays, it’s the potential dangers lurking online that are just as likely to keep mums and dads awake at night. The explosion of games, apps, and video content has happened faster than regulators and the rest of us can possibly keep up with. In that respect, the internet is like the new Wild West. Some countries are now turning to facial recognition to identify the age of those consum

Thanks to social media, it has never been easier to connect with people from the past. Curious about what that old classmate is up to now? Their profile is only a couple of clicks away. What’s more, most of us now use our social media feeds as a kind of virtual photo album. If you’re of a certain age, then a scroll through the older photos will no doubt take you on a trip down memory lane which rekindles memories of long-forgotten nights out, old friends we lost touch with an