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Research Reveals that Cellphone Radiation Poses no Real Harm to Humans

February 5, 2018 Dianne Jacobs

Male rats showed a small increase in a kind of heart tumor after exposure to massive amounts of cellphone radiation, a new government study reports. But don’t read too much into that, experts say — because those rats bathed in more radiation than even the heaviest cellphone users would experience. There are ongoing worries about whether cellphones can give you cancer — especially brain cancer, since our phones spend so much time near our faces. It’s true that cell phones do emit radiation but it’s radiofrequency radiation, which is much…

Study Shows that Top Video Games Depict Unrealistic Drugs Use

January 25, 2018 Dianne Jacobs

Harmful narcotics often give unlikely strength and health boosts to characters, a study of real and made-up drugs in best-selling video games has highlighted. The report also details how players are often prompted to create drug cocktails to gain new or enhanced abilities. The work was done by Archstone, an addiction awareness organisation. It said parents needed to be cautious about what their children are playing and learning. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), which assigns age and content ratings to games in the US, says it is happy with…

Five African tech trends to watch in 2018

January 10, 2018 Editor

The BBC’s Clare Spencer picks five African tech trends to look out for in 2018. Land registry you can’t tamper with The idea: Documentation is often lacking in parts of Africa, leading to land disputes because it isn’t clear who owns the land. Even when there are records, sometimes they have been tampered with. A record that cannot be deleted, using something called blockchain, could be used to prevent these disputes. Blockchain is a method of recording data – a digital ledger of transactions, agreements, contracts – anything that needs…

Huawei Joins Hands with PCITC to Embrace Smart Factory 2.0

December 5, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

Our Earth faces increasingly grave environmental problems. Although more people have realized the significance of environmental protection and have chosen shared bicycles and electric cars as part of their low-carbon lifestyles, yet we still rely heavily on non-renewable energy such as petroleum. How much oil is left and how long will it last? According to estimates from conservative experts, the sustained oil reserves left may last only 30 to 40 years at present rates of consumption, and the next oil crisis may happen much sooner than expected. Governments and socially-responsible…

The Unfortunate Side Effect of LED Lighting

November 24, 2017

Light pollution has increased worldwide because of the prevalence of energy saving LED lights. However, the problem isn’t with the lights themselves — but the fact that the world is getting brighter because LEDs are illuminating places we didn’t bother to light before. And that has its own environmental cost. The findings were published in the journal Science Advances, and found that artificially lit outdoor surfaces grew at a pace of 2.2 percent each year between 2012 and 2016. “With few exceptions, growth in lighting occurred throughout South America, Africa,…

Eco-friendly bitcoin competitor Chia, Invented

November 13, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week, and legendary coder Bram Cohen wants to fix that. Considering he invented the ubiquitous peer-to-peer file transfer protocol BitTorrent, you should take him seriously. Cohen has just started a new company called Chia Network that will launch a cryptocurrency based on proofs of time and storage rather than bitcoin’s electricity-burning proofs of work. Essentially, Chia will harness cheap and abundant unused storage space on hard drives to verify its blockchain. “The idea…

IOT and cybersecurity: tomorrow’s threats today

April 18, 2017April 21, 2017

A growing number of devices and appliances are now getting connected to a network, and to each other, to provide additional, enhanced features. We are beginning to see some of this potential being realised and the number of connected devices is growing fast. Cisco predicts that 50 billion new devices will be connected to the internet by 2020. Additionally, IoT connected cars are able to monitor and adapt to both internal performance quality and external environment, allowing modern cars to provide a new level of safety that was before unattainable.…

U.S. tech look to Africa for developers

November 11, 2016

Tech companies founded in the United States are setting up software development centers in Nigeria and Kenya, where a number of young developers has led to growing tech communities. Microsoft has launched its Microsoft 4 Afrika initiative, aiming to help empower African youth, entrepreneurs, developers and others to make their ideas a reality. Steve Case, the AOL founder, and his wife Jean, Generation Investment Management and Sir Richard Branson have provided $19 million to Kenyan pay-as-you-go energy start-up M-KOPA Solar. Andela, which has attracted $24 million of funding from a scheme led by…