Love them or hate them, e-scooters transformed our world more than any other technology in 2018. From Portland to Paris, they descended on cities like two-wheeled locusts this year, inspiring envy, scorn, confusion, and outright destruction. Hipsters hate them. Bikers hate them. Transit wonks hate them. And everyone who’s ever ridden one loves them, making them this year’s most contentious topic to bring up over a beer, after “laurel versus yanny.”
When it comes to e-scooters, the Digital Trends staff is as deeply divided as a family Thanksgiving at Uncle Ralph’s. But we’re laying down the carving knife on this debate: You don’t need to adore e-scooters to acknowledge that they’re fundamentally changing the way people get around in cities. The rideable revolution is finally here.
We’ve covered electric skateboards, bikes, scooters and even unicycles for years, but they’ve always been more fun than practical. Taking the plunge on an electric rideable means spending thousands of dollars up front, a religious charging routine, lugging a suitcase-sized vehicle up apartment stairs, and in the case of devices like the OneWheel, learning not to break your face.
Dockless e-scooters solve all these problems. They’re cheap and easy to ride, precharged, available everywhere, and when you’re done, you just leave them at your destination. Which brings us to all that vitriol…
Yes, sometimes people leave them in stupid places. Yes, sometimes people ride them on sidewalks. And yes, sometimes people even ride them drunk, saddled with two passengers, swerving all over the bike lane. We’ve seen it all.
But these are the normal growing pains of an entirely new form of transportation. Horses once covered city streets in knee-deep crap, cars swallowed cities in smog, and even your precious trains enabled a genocide. If the worst that comes from electric scooters is mild annoyance as early riders learn their manners, consider us impressed.
So go ahead, take one for a spin. You’re tasting the future of transportation.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.