A suicide prevention net at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco has finally been completed, officials say.
Around 2,000 people are known to have jumped to their deaths from the bridge since it opened in 1937 in the US city.
For decades, families who lost loved ones to suicide at the bridge have called for a solution.
The suicide deterrent system, also known as the net, has been installed around approximately 95% of the 1.7-mile (2.7 km) bridge.
In 2015, Canan Dağdeviren was working as a postdoc at MIT when she learned that her aunt, Fatma, had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Dağdeviren, whose work focused on building flexible devices that could capture biometric data, flew to the Netherlands to be with her relative in those last moments.
At her aunt’s bedside, Dağdeviren sketched an idea for an electronic bra with an embedded ultrasound that would be able to scan breasts much more frequently and catch cancers before they got the chance to spread.
It was just a way of offering her aunt a slice of solace at an unimaginably difficult time. But when Dağdeviren became a faculty member at MIT the following year, the bra stayed on her mind. Today, she’s an assistant professor of media and arts at the MIT Media Lab, where she leads the Conformable Decoders research group. Her lab’s mission is to harness and decode the world’s physical patterns—one thing that means is creating electronic devices that conform to the body and capture data.
The Las Vegas Strip is changing as we know it.
A new ordinance was approved this week that will make stopping on the pedestrian bridges on the Strip a misdemeanor crime.
“The Pedestrian Flow Zone ordinance will help to ensure our world-class tourism destination remains a safe place for people to visit and transverse,” Clark County officials said in a statement. “Through this ordinance, to maintain the safe and continuous movement of pedestrian traffic, it is unlawful for any person to stop, stand, or engage in an activity that causes another person to stop or stand within any Pedestrian Flow Zone.”
After three years of negotiating, Southwest Airlines and the union representing the airline’s pilots reached a tentative agreement on a new contract on Wednesday.
“We know that the last few years have been difficult for our pilots as well as our customers, but we believe that this TA rewards our pilots as well as improving reliability for our passengers,” said Southwest Airlines Pilots Association President Casey Murray in a statement.
The SWAPA union’s 25-member board approved the deal Wednesday after union leadership reached an initial agreement in principle with Southwest earlier this week.
But the deal isn’t guaranteed to go to contract: the union’s nearly 11,000 members can vote on whether or not to approve the contract until January 22.
Toyota is recalling about 1 million cars and SUVs in the United States due to a possible defect that could cause the passenger airbag to fail to deploy in a crash.
The recall involves 15 different 2020 and 2021 model year Toyota and Lexus models including the Toyota Camry, Rav4, Sienna and the Lexus RX350 and ES350. Lexus is Toyota’s luxury vehicle brand.
Specifically, the Occupant Classification System sensor that detects when someone is sitting in the front passenger seat could short circuit. In some of these vehicles the sensor was improperly manufactured.
A volcano in Iceland is now erupting after weeks of earthquakes rocking the region, according to a statement released by the Iceland Met Office on Monday (Dec. 18).
The country has been bracing itself for an imminent volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula for weeks. Grindavík, a small fishing town in the southwest corner of the island with a population of around 2,800 people, had previously been evacuated in November after a sinkhole measuring 3.2 feet (1 meter) deep appeared in the town.
Seismic activity began increasing in the area around the Fagradalsfjall volcano on Oct. 25, when more than 1,000 earthquakes north of Grindavík occurred in the space of just hours. Two strong earthquakes, measuring magnitudes 3.9 and 4.5, hit at a depth of around 3 miles (5 kilometers). Over the following two weeks, seismic activity continued, with hundreds of earthquakes and uplifts recorded each day, indicating that magma was accumulating beneath the ground.
Elon Musk has said Disney boss Bob Iger should be “fired immediately” after the company stopped advertising on X.
“Walt Disney is turning in his grave over what Bob has done to his company,” Mr Musk said in a series of posts against the media giant.
It comes just a week after he told companies that joined an ad boycott of his platform, formerly known as Twitter, to “Go [expletive] yourself”.
Some firms have paused advertising on X amid concerns over antisemitism.
Smile Direct Club has shut down months after filing for bankruptcy in the US, leaving some customers confused and stranded as their treatment is ongoing.
Best known for selling clear aligners remotely, the firm said it had made the “incredibly difficult decision” to wind down operations late on Friday.
The US-based dentistry company was offering aligners for about £1,800 without the need to visit a dentist.
A last-ditch rescue attempt failed though as it was weighed down by debt.
Founded in 2014, the orthodontics company styled itself as a disruptor to the “bricks-and-mortar” dental industry.
Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.
A video called “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI” hit a million views over the last day, and it’s not hard to see why. The impressive demo “highlights some of our favorite interactions with Gemini,” showing how the multimodal model (i.e., it understands and mixes language and visual understanding) can be flexible and responsive to a variety of inputs.
To begin with, it narrates an evolving sketch of a duck from a squiggle to a completed drawing, which it says is an unrealistic color, then evinces surprise (“What the quack!”) when seeing a toy blue duck. It then responds to various voice queries about that toy, then the demo moves on to other show-off moves, like tracking a ball in a cup-switching game, recognizing shadow puppet gestures, reordering sketches of planets, and so on.
Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage, the company reported via a post on X on Friday. And Apple is to blame, it seems. Users, including those of us at TechCrunch with access to the app, began seeing error messages when trying to send texts via the newly released Beeper Mini and messages are not going through.
The error message reads: “failed to lookup on server: lookup request timed out” spelled out in red letters.
Dispatches From The Front 