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A hot potato: For almost as long as we’ve had smartphones, there has been the belief that they surreptitiously listen to our spoken conversations to serve us targeted ads; most people have experienced seeing an ad on Facebook for something they were recently talking about. It’s always been claimed that this type of privacy invasion doesn’t happen. However, a marketing agency, whose clients included Facebook and Google, has admitted to using an “Active Listening” feature that eavesdrops on conversations via phone mics to gather data.

A pitch deck from Cox Media Group (CMG), seen by 404 Media, states that the marketing firm uses its AI-powered Active Listening software to capture real-time data by listening to phone users’ conversations. The slide adds that advertising clients can pair the gathered voice data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers.

A newly developed transistor device has shown exceptional levels of resilience in tests, performing so well, in fact, that it promises to transform the electronics and gadgets we make use of each day.

These tiny toggles are essential in just about every modern day electronic device, involved in storing data and processing information in a binary ‘on’ or ‘off’ state, switching back and forth multiple times a second.

Thanks to its remarkable combination of speed, size, and resilience to wear, this latest design potentially represents a huge upgrade for consumer devices like phones and laptops, as well as the data centers that store all of our information in the cloud.

Why do we take so many selfies? Because we are afraid of dying, say psychologists.


Many of us have phones filled with selfies documenting everything from holidays to duvet days.

But what’s behind the modern fascination with taking photos of ourselves?

Psychologists have come up with a rather morbid answer: fear of dying.

Researchers at Tohoku University have successfully increased the capacity, lifetime durability, and cost-effectiveness of a capacitor in their pursuit of a more power-efficient future. The research is published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

A capacitor is a device used as part of a circuit that can store and release energy, just like a battery. What makes a capacitor different from a battery is that it takes much less time to charge. For example, your cellphone battery will power your phone instantly, but charging that back up to 100% when it dies is far from instantaneous.

While this makes capacitors sound like the superior choice, they have some big drawbacks that need to be overcome. First, their is much smaller than batteries, so they cannot store large amounts of energy at once. Second, they can be quite expensive.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS subscribers in the U.S. will get direct to mobile phone internet with the help of Starlink satellites first and other telecom service providers later.

What Happened: “Starlink direct to mobile phone Internet is exclusively with Tmobile in the US for the first year, then other carriers thereafter,” Musk wrote on X. “We are starting off working with one carrier in each country, but ultimately hope to serve all carriers.”

Musk’s comment comes on the heels of SpaceX launching 26 Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capabilities to low-Earth orbit on Saturday.