TUCSON, Ariz. — Welcome to Tech Tuesday, where each week I break down the hottest news in the world of science and technology -- and first, if you’re in the market for a new TV, you better saving up if you want this one.
A company called C SEED has unveiled a gigantic TV that disappears into the floor when you’re not using it. The screen uses a technology called MicroLED, which many consider to be the future of displays. Now, you would think that with a folding screen like this you’d see lines… but the TV has a feature called "Adaptive Gap Calibration" that senses when panels have slight offsets and automatically adjusts the brightness of pixels on the edge to hide the shadows.
So what’s the price you ask? Well, it can be yours for $400,000. Plus renovations to your room so that, you know, it can disappear into the ground.
Watching the new "Tom Cruise" videos on TikTok, you’d be forgiven for thinking… oh here we go, just another celebrity jumping on the TikTok bandwagon. Well as convincing as it looks, it’s fake. At almost a million likes, this video appears to show the Top Gun star talking, laughing and golfing. But it’s really an impersonator, using a technology called deepfake.
Basically, thousands of face shots of both the impostor and the actor are put through an artificial intelligence algorithm called an encoder. It finds and learns similarities between the two faces, and then swaps them. As you might imagine, there are a lot of risks with this invention, with the potential that it could be used to harm someone’s reputation. The “deeptomcruise” account seems to be all in good fun so far, but it’s unclear if TikTok will allow it to stay on the platform.
There’s been a lot of attention on space the past couple weeks, but a fossil that was re-discovered in Hungary reminds us that there are still untold mysteries to solve here on Earth. The vampire squid is one of the ocean’s oldest and most bizarre creatures, almost unchanged from its ancestors, who lived during the age of dinosaurs. It lives half a mile deep in the ocean, so its eyes are large and translucent blue in order to absorb more light. To capture food, the animal surrounds prey with its webbed arms and finger-like projections called cirri to move them towards the mouth
The fossil itself turned out to be a 30-million year old ancestor to the vampire squid, helping to fill-in the evolutional story of one of earth’s creatures.
