Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, Elon Musk is reportedly forming a company with the goal of making implantable brain-computer interfaces, Facebook Messenger is getting a location sharing feature, Waymo has begun testing its self-driving cars in snowy conditions and more.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk is involved in a venture to create a brain-computer interface, named Neuralink (The Verge). The company aims to integrate the human brain with AI via a brain implant that, it's said, could eventually allow humans to merge with software. Musk's involvement in the as yet unannounced neurotechnology firm was reportedly confirmed by Bryan Johnson of human cognition enhancement startup Kernel, which has looked into implant-based treatments for Parkinson's. Musk has on several occasions discussed his desire to make real the "neural lace" of Iain M. Banks' Culture series of sci-fi novels: biomechanical computer implants that provide enhanced abilities, extra memory storage and the ability to receive information and silently communicate with both AIs and humans. With little concrete information - or even a company registration - available, it remains to be seen what benefits and risks Neuralink's technology will bring.
Facebook has launched a new, short term location sharing feature for its Android and iOS Messenger apps, dubbed Live Location (TechCrunch). The tool, which is rolling out worldwide over the coming days, will, at the press of a button, allow users to share their current location for sixty minutes with one or more people in a Messenger chat, making it easy for them to meet up. Some users are also now seeing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's promised Town Hall feature, designed to help them get in touch with their location political representatives.
The CEO of Waymo - Alphabet's self-driving car firm that emerged from Google's car project - has tweeted an image of one of the company's self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans taking on the snow at California's Lake Tahoe (TechCrunch). Snow is widely regarded to be among the most challenging conditions for self-driving vehicles, and most tests from companies across the board have taken place in urban conditions, which limits the likelihood of encountering heavy, uncleared snowfall. Waymo's latest fleet of self-driving vehicles first went on the road in January.
Ahead of Samsung's unveiling of the Galaxy S8 on Wednesday, the South Korean firm has confirmed it is going to start selling the Note 7 again (WIRED). In a blog post, the company announced it has "established three principles" to make sure the Note 7 is "recycled and processed in an environmentally-friendly manner". In the first instance, the phones will be used as refurbished devices or for rental. For this to happen, the firm says it needs to agree with regulators and mobile phone companies before it announces the locations and potential release dates for the device.
Microsoft has updated the Android version of its personal digital assistant, Cortana, to allow it to be run directly from your phone's lock screen (The Verge). The update also adds useful information such as calendar events, the weather and travel times to the main screen of the Cortana app, better equipping it to take on Android's native digital assistant features.
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Uber has told Engadget that all three of its self-driving car fleets are going back on the road following the involvement of one of the company's autonomous SUVs in a crash in Arizona on Friday. Reports indicate that the car was knocked over when another road user failed to obey a yield sign, in which case it's unlikely that there are any questions to be answered about the cars' self-driving capabilities in the situation, even assuming that a human driver wasn't in control at the time. Uber says that it is confident in its vehicles' performance.
Norway is planning to build the world’s first ship tunnel, and to do so, will blast through 7.5 million tonnes of rock (WIRED). Work on the Stad Ship Tunnel is expected to start in late 2018 and the Norwegian government has set aside NOK 1 billion (£94 million) for its creation. Once complete, the ship tunnel will be 1.7 kilometres long, 37 metres high and 26.5 metres wide and would allow large ships to navigate around the Stadhavet Sea. For the past few years, The Norwegian Coastal Administration has been conducting feasibility tests for the creation of the tunnel and these tests are due to be completed this year.
Astronomers from the Australian National University (ANU) have turned to crowd science platform Zooniverse to help them find a possible ninth plant in our solar system (BBC). Planet Nine is thought to exist beyond Neptune and Pluto, somewhere in the Kuiper Belt - a ring of rocky asteroids and dwarf planets. ANU's Zooniverse project, named Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, asks users to identify moving objects from short, noise-filled sequences of images, captured by the university's Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. Dr Brad Tucker told BBC News: "If this planet exists, it's already in one of our thousands and thousands of images. We said, 'hey, let's have the public help us and search these images to see if we can find it together.'"
Mojang has announced Glide, a new flying minigame for console versions of Minecraft, allowing players to participate in aerial races through the game's blocky canyons (Eurogamer). The trailer shows players gaining a pair of wings to tackle thermals and air currents in a variety of race and challenge modes. Glide is out today on console editions of the game, including the PS4 and Xbox One versions.
[i]GQ Magazine[/i] has revealed the first images from the new Tomb Raider film, along with an interview with director Roar Uthaug. The images show Alicia Vikander as a Lara Croft very much in the mould of 2013's video game reboot, written by Rhianna Pratchett. However, Uthaug said: "We drew a lot of inspiration and reference from the game and the entire Tomb Raider canon to develop our world, and I believe fans will recognize that. At the same time, this is a completely different theatrical approach to Lara Croft that will offer something new in the origin and development of the character." The film, which is being produced by Eidos Interactive, MGM and Warner Bros, is due out in 2018.
Dear Amber Rudd, Break encryption for one person and you break it for us all. You argue that security services once steamed open envelopes to intercept messages – to achieve this, all they had to do was break the security of glue. To break encryption, companies would be required to make every single message sent on their platforms insecure and open to interception by anyone.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
