Josh Andah Editorial Board Writer

Articles

• Startup Zunum Aero wants to make hybrid planes the norm

  Americans currently prefer to drive, take the bus, or ride the train for regional journeys (i.e. journeys within state, or less than 1,000 miles). Planes aren’t that popular of an option, because getting on them is much more cumbersome than getting in a car. After all, why would anyone go through the hassle of airport security and ticket prices just to travel from Boston to New York?

  SciTech | April 17, 2017
• Classifying alien civilizations with the Kardashev scale

  There is a great deal of energy available to humans — I mean, unthinkable amounts of energy. But, we’ve barely tapped into it. Saying we have scratched the surface of energy harvesting is a gross overstatement. The sun, for example, produces well over a quadrillion (thousand trillion) joules of energy every second. To put that number into perspective, that’s more energy than our species has consum...

  SciTech | April 10, 2017
• Use of foveal descriptors help improve facial recognition

  Deva Ramanan, an associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon, and Peiyun Hu, a Ph.D. robotics student, recently developed an improved method for detecting multiple faces in a crowd. The feat of distinguishing small objects is one challenge in computer vision, which is why Ramanan and Hu’s achievement is so crucial.

  SciTech | April 10, 2017
• New research finds that people create their own realities

  A study by Carnegie Mellon researchers has shown what many presumed: we forge our own realities. George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology, Russel Golman, assistant professor of social and decision sciences, and David Hagmann, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, published their work in the Journal of Economic Literature. The study showed that peo...

  SciTech | April 3, 2017
• SciTech Briefs

  Samsung announces the new, sleek S8

  SciTech | April 3, 2017