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As with last year’s conference, I/O 2022 will be free to ‘attend’ (virtually, that is), and everyone can stream the entirety of the event from the comfort of their pajamas. That said, the opening keynote usually has the most relevant announcements for everyday consumers, so that’s the bit you’ll want to be sure to watch. We’re anticipating plenty of exciting news — including a good deal of hardware. What follows are our best guesses on the news to come, grouped by likeliness....

According to TechCrunch, the company is working on a debit card powered by Google Pay, which sounds a whole lot like the old concept. Still, now that Apple has had some success with its credit card and people are generally more acclimated to software companies offering payment services, the big G might have better chances at success. Google Pay currently allows you to make NFC payments or transfer money to others using an existing card or PayPal....

On Tuesday, the tech giant unveiled two new AI-powered attempts to support sustainable travel. The first is eco-friendly routing for Google Maps. The service has been updated with a new model that’s designed to reduce a driver’s carbon footprint. The model analyzes factors such as road incline and traffic congestion to display the most fuel-efficient route. As well as cutting carbon emissions, the feature could help users save money on gas....

— shoshana wodinsky (@swodinsky) May 20, 2019 In a statement on Google’s support page, it outlined that starting in June 2019, people looking to run ads using keywords in relation to “getting an abortion” will need to be certified as an organization that either “provides abortions or does not provide abortions.” Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that the Southern California-based Obria Group, which runs a network of clinics funded by Catholic organizations, successfully posted ads on Google suggesting that it provides abortion services at its medical clinics — when in fact, it tries to prevent “abortion-minded women” from ending their pregnancies....

The company has started showing notifications for searches on emerging topics, which suggest that users return later when more information is available. The notice is Google’s latest efforts to mitigate misinformation in search results for breaking news. In a blog post, Danny Sullivan, public liaison for search at Google, said that sometimes reliable information isn’t online at the time that users search: The feature was first spotted by Stanford Internet Observatory researcher Renee DiResta, who described it as a “positive step....

The spoofing attack, disclosed by cybersecurity firm Check Point Research today, has been found to be successful on most modern Android phones, including the Huawei P10, LG G6, Sony Xperia XZ Premium, and Samsung Galaxy S9. But any phone running Android can be targeted this way. Given that Samsung, Huawei, LG, and Sony account for more than 50 percent of all Android phones, the scope of the attack is understandably far broader in scope....

The Reno 2 is primarily a marriage of style and substance. Under the hood, you’ll find everything you’d expect from an upper-midrange flagship phone, which is augmented by design elements that elevate this handset spectacularly. These include a selfie-camera that’s hidden within the body of the phone, plus a polished Android experience courtesy of Color OS 6.1. Under the hood Before we delve into the phone itself, let’s chat about the hardware that powers this handset....

Among the key problems neural networks can solve is detecting and localizing objects in images. Object detection is used in many different domains, including autonomous driving, video surveillance, and healthcare. In this post, I will briefly review the deep learning architectures that help computers detect objects. Convolutional neural networks One of the key components of most deep learning–based computer vision applications is the convolutional neural network (CNN). Invented in the 1980s by deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun, CNNs are a type of neural network that is efficient at capturing patterns in multidimensional spaces....

How localization tools are driving innovation in AI-driven APIs Developers can hop on this trend, increase the value of their software, and expand online on capabilities to their apps. Google has emerged as a leader in translation algorithms in the past decade, leveraging advances in AI-driven neural network tech. This powers Google Translate, well-known to businesses for their companies or clients. They can do so readily by adding auto-translators Google Translate, well-known to businesses and consumers, an app that has made an impact on the translation profession as we know it....

You have come here today because you want to know how to update your AirPods firmware? Maybe you have the AirPods Pro? The AirPods Max? Or, indeed, maybe the new AirPods 3? The older models, perhaps? Well, come closer, let me tell you a secret about manually updating your AirPods firmware… you can’t. Apple doesn’t allow it. But there’s hope! While it’s not possible to update your AirPods firmware in the same way it is to, say, do the same with your iPhone, there are some things you can do to speed up the process....

Such an upbeat assessment seems at odds with the Scientific Consensus Statement, released by the Queensland government in 2017, which said “key Great Barrier Reef ecosystems continue to be in poor condition.” Of course, no one doubts what Ley saw – but the contrast between what we can directly experience and what scientists tell us is the bigger picture is brought into sharp relief when these perspectives are put side by side....

If you think this means kids can play games for three hours any time of the week, you’re wrong. The administration has allowed online gaming from 8PM to 9PM on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and public holidays. This feels like my parents setting dedicated time for TV around school exams. These rules build on restrictions issued in 2019, where children aged under 18 were allowed 90 minutes of game time per day, no gaming after 10PM, and a cap on in-app purchases....

As the U.S. cautiously starts to reopen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the consumer casualties of the economic plunge caused by the virus have only just begun. In recent days, major retail names like Pier 1, Victoria’s Secret and J.C. Penney’s have all announced plans to close entirely or shutter hundreds of locations following the downturn in business. Just like the retailers themselves, so are the resources of consumer marketing turning more and more exclusively to digital outlets....

On the morning of May 18, Judge Keith Dean of the Collin County District Court in Texas thanked the potential jurors in front of him for coming and performing their civic duty, as always. Then he and Judge Emily Miskel gave some new, unusual instructions: Tell your roommates to leave the room when we tell you to. Stay plugged into an outlet. And no Googling about the case in another tab!...

It would be great if we lived in a world where all businesses practiced what they preached, and took on sustainable and fair business practices. But these moral high grounds have become a new playground for marketing teams, with little to no oversight into if they are following through on their promises. It’s for this reason that Lush, the UK-based handmade cosmetics company, rejects these labels altogether. TNW recently spoke with Hilary Jones, Lush’s Ethical Director, about why Lush doesn’t call itself an “ethical” business, why word-of-mouth is better than advertising, and why being bold pays off....

If I asked you to name the objects in the picture below, you would probably come up with a list of words such as “tablecloth, basket, grass, boy, girl, man, woman, orange juice bottle, tomatoes, lettuce, disposable plates…” without thinking twice. Now, if I told you to describe the picture below, you would probably say, “It’s the picture of a family picnic” again without giving it a second thought. Those are two very easy tasks that any person with below-average intelligence and above the age of six or seven could accomplish....

Imagine, though, charging your car by simply changing lanes and driving over to special charging strips embedded in the road. That’s exactly the vision of Khurram Afridi, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University. Along with his team, they’re developing a groundbreaking approach to charge EVs without the need for cables. Drivers could save time, and cars would need smaller batteries, which means that their cost would be reduced, as much as their environmental impact....

This kind of catastrophic pan-internet meltdown is more likely than most people realize. I direct the Internet Atlas Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Our goal is to shine a light on long-term risks to the internet. We produce indicators of weak points and bottlenecks that threaten the internet’s stability. For example, where are points of fragility in the global connectivity of cables? Physical cables under the sea deliver 95% of the internet’s voice and data traffic....

About 99 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct. There’s almost no scientific reason to believe humans won’t join them in a relatively insignificant amount of time. I say almost because, if we try really hard, we can conceive of a theoretical, science-based intervention for death. Let’s call it a “quantum respawn.” We’re not the first generation to imagine immortality. But we are the first one to have access to this really cool research paper from physicists working at the University of Rochester in New York, and Purdue University in Indiana....

As we sleep, we go through cycles of “deep,” “light,” and “rapid eye movement” (REM) sleep. The “deep” portion of our sleep is mainly what leaves us feeling refreshed the next day. Most sleep trackers are a watch worn on the wrist, and work by monitoring your body movements as you sleep to determine how much time you probably spent awake versus asleep. Some devices also look at heart rate changes during sleeping to estimate how much time you spent in each sleep cycle....