GPJ:Digital blog

Did you know that the gaming industry is larger than both films and music combined; yet few of us are likely to put our Fortnite playing achievements on our CVs. But why not? 

Businesses around the world are now waking up to the skills that gamers can bring to the workplace. 

One start-up is convinced that the skills learned playing games - hard-won through years of training and battle - can be applied to real-life work situations. 

Game Academy’s idea is to analyse gamers’ habits and offer courses that revolve around their aptitudes - skills they can practice and refine in-game. There’s already a growing acceptance that gaming skills are transferable. 

Elon Musk is one of the biggest names in technology, but his views on AI could be worrying to some!

"AI will make jobs kind of pointless," the Tesla CEO said Thursday at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. "Probably the last job that will remain will be writing AI software and then eventually the AI will just write its own software."

Musk suggested people study things like engineering, physics, art or careers that involve people interacting with each other.

Mossy cars? What? 

Usually when you find out there’s moss inside your car, it’s a bad thing. That's not necessarily the case for this small, solar-powered electric vehicle from German startup Sono.

Once upon a time a report claimed Tom Cruise wanted to play Iron Man.

What a very different Marvel Cinematic Universe that would have been. Now, thanks to Collider and the frightening deepfake video manipulation software, we can see what a Tom Cruise "I am Iron Man" line delivery would have been like. 

A toolkit has been produced by the NHS and seveb charities to help local services improve care for people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and Parkinson's.

It is hoped it will avoid up to 2,500 emergency admissions to hospital each year, saving as much as £10m that can be reinvested into the NHS.

For this weeks #TechTuesday, i thought i’d try something different: a tech review!

The Mi 9T is Xiaomi’s latest (and arguably greatest) smartphone to enter the fray. The device offers a 6.39 inch display, a massive 4,000 mAh battery, a pop-up front facing camera and even a triple camera setup at the back! 

With extremely impressive specs, what’s the catch i hear you ask?

Aside from non-upgradable storage and somewhat tinny speakers; there aren’t any others i can think of. The camera quality is stunning, the battery will last you more than a day’s use and the bezel-less, full screen display looks gorgeous. 

Nowadays, it seems like the technology industry is focused on making things smaller, so what happens when the Californian startup Cerebras announces the “world’s largest computer chip?”. 

The chip (which slightly larger than an iPad), can drive complex artificial intelligence (AI) systems in everything from driver-less cars to surveillance software.

Minecraft was released back in 2009 - ten years later, it’s popular as ever. 

Minecraft is a creation/survival indie game initially developed by a single man (Markus “Notch” Persson) and proved to be an immediate success. So much so that Microsoft purchased the game in 2014 for $2.5 billion. 

The game has now sold over 154 million copies and has a monthly userbase of over 91 million players. 

Minecraft requires you to fit pieces together to create something - sometimes something amazing, from nothing.The game provides endless building blocks and a blank canvas for the user. It’s up to you whether you create something breathtaking or ridiculous (or both). 

Apparently throwing green and red shells at your significant other during a race could keep your relationship going strong. 

According to a new survey conducted by internet service CenturyLink, gaming -- and especially playing Nintendo's Mario Kart -- has a positive impact on love lives.

They surveyed over 1,000 people, with one in three people aged between 18 and 24 saying games helped their relationship. This trend went downhill with older survey respondents. 

The latest development in robotic prosthetic technology has allowed users to feel human touch.  

The motorized “Luke Arm” - named after Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker who had a robotic limb - delivers a sense of touch via electrodes in the users forearm. It then relays movement signals to the prosthetic hand, allowing the person to feel. 

If you thought you the last article was the only bizarre one for this week, you’d be wrong. 

Finding new ways to train a neural network (a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system) is increasingly important, as the race to develop autonomous cars heats up. This has led to developers to come up with creative ways to get their networks up to speed, one being the decade-old game “StarCraft II”.

In Starcraft, you’re tasked with controlling dozens of individual units, all while managing resources and fighting opponents. It’s a complicated task humans are good at, but machines suck at. 

My favourite part about writing #TechTuesday is finding all the weird technology articles out there. This is no exception. 

What seems like something out of science fiction; this contact lens can zoom on your command. Scientists measured the signals generated when your eyes make specific movements and created a lens that responds directly to those electric impulses. 

The lens could then change its focal length depending on the signal generated - hence allowing it to zoom. 

A US teenager has won a record-breaking £2.4m to become the world champion of the hit game Fortnite. 

Fortnite is the most popular of the craze that is battle royale games, which sees 100 players fighting against eachother to be the last one standing - much like The Hunger Games. The game has a total playerbase of 125 million people. 

The tournament had the largest prize pool in the history of e-sports, with £25m shared among the winners - (i personally think it has nothing on our Mario Kart tournaments in The Lab...) 

Speaking of which, this week’s tournament will be instead be replaced by a demo from Lizzie Mildinhall’s son Quincy, who has kindly put himself forward to teach us all about Fortnite and how to play the hit game!

Computer vision has improved massively in recent years, but it’s still capable of making serious errors. So much so that there’s a whole research field dedicated to studying images routinely misidentified by AI - known as “adversarial images”. 

To demonstrate this, researchers used a dataset of 7,500 natural adversarial examples and found the machine vision accuracy drop by as much as 90 percent, with the software only identifying 2-3% of images in some cases. 

Machine vision systems are extremely important, being at the heart of new technology such as AI security cameras and self driving cars. We trust that computers see the world the same way we do.  

It finally happened. Avengers: Endgame has dethroned Avatar as the highest grossing movie of ALL time.   

Avatar was released back in December 2009 and has held the international box office record for almost a decade, with $2,787,965,087 since 2010 (quite a big number). 

It took Avengers: Endgame only three months to beat this record, and it could be the first ever movie to reach that $3 billion landmark. 

The European Space Agency (Esa) is researching technologies based on 3D printing to build a sustainable moon base. 

The dusty powdered rock found on the Moon’s surface serves as the perfect construction material to help with habitation on the Moon. 

Whilst not only providing protection from the heat and cold, it also could protect a base from the radiation found in deep-space - which are all danger factors to astronauts. 

Have scientists just found a solution to make our cities greener and save the planet? 

An alternative to urban trees called “bio-curtains” are being developed by a team of architects and scientists. The curtains use the power of algae to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, and can be fitted onto any building.