“Have it your way” isn’t just the motto for a certain fast-food burger chain, it’s a mantra for society.
Cars come with dual-zone climate controls so you can stay as cool or warm as you want, iPods let you mix up your own playlist instead of having a DJ choose your tunes, and restaurants serve personal pan pizzas with exactly what you want on them.
And so it goes with home theater. The high-end outfit i-Fi has taken the concept of individual choice to a new (and slightly absurd) extreme with the i-Fi Sound Chair, a recliner with built in speakers that literally allows you to tailor your sound experience to you alone. Rather than making the entire living room quake, and the downstairs neighbors get out a broomstick, you can keep it all within chair range and listen the way you prefer.
The recliner rolls a wireless receiver, iPod dock, angled satellite speakers, source and volume controls, a couple holder, and vibration unit all into one Italian-leather-swaddled package. And since the whole point is choice, you can order one up in burgundy, black, or chocolate.
Unfortunately, having it your way is a little pricier than a Whopper, since the I-Fi chair will run you up a $2,500 bill. But if you really have to have your bass just so, maybe it’s worth it. More details are available at I-Fi.
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.