Michael Belfiore

Meetings can sometimes be frustrating for remote participants, who often have to contend with extraneous noise, unclear speech, and bad acoustics, especially with multiple participants in large conference rooms.

High-end conference room setups can alleviate these issues with individual mics for participants and professional audio equipment such as high-end digital signal processing hardware and software. But these can be expensive and cumbersome for most businesses to deploy and maintain.

Google’s new Series One meeting room kits let businesses create spaces that filter out noise...

The manufacturing, logistics, and retail sectors are undergoing profound transformation. Follow along to see what the future holds.

Interactive feature in The Washington Post for AT&T.

Imagine this scenario: In the San Francisco Bay area one weekday morning in the near future, a long-haul trucker wakes up and gets ready for the day's shift. She's made incredible time recently, covering two or three times the distance she used to be able to cover in the same time span. As she pours her coffee and settles in the control center, she reminisces about when she had to physically be in the truck to drive it.

Now, it's cruising down the highway a thousand miles away, along with three others on different routes that she's responsible for. She watches her monitors...

A diabetic man collapses in a New York City hotel room. But the guide dog he’s fostering licks and nudges him repeatedly, keeping him from passing out. Finally, the dog rouses him enough so he can inject himself with glucose and recover.

It was that experience, in 2000, that led the man, forensic scientist Mark Ruefenacht, to found Dogs for Diabetics (D4D) in the San Francisco Bay area four years later.
These days, D4D-trained dogs help diabetics get assistance or emergency supplies when they...

THE DATA GENERATED in the health care industry increases by 48 percent every year. The amount produced in 2020 alone could exceed 2.3 zettabytes, or 2.3 trillion gigabytes. That’s the amount of data it would take to watch 262 million years straight of HD movies.

This tsunami of data, along with industry inefficiencies, make health care ripe for digital innovation. A.I. and machine learning in particular hold the potential to reduce costs while improving the health of millions of people.

The Indianapolis 500 brings together 235,000 fans for a once-a-year event pitting 33 drivers against each other in a 200-lap, 500-mile test of skill and endurance. But in the fall of 2021, the teams racing on the oval will pit software against software whose engineers will sweat out the race, not in the cockpits of their cars but in their on-site garages and pit stops.

The first-of-its-kind Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) will use the same Dallara IL-15 race cars as the famed Indy 500 race an...

Chakri Toleti was at his office in Florida in January 2018 when he got the call from India alerting him that his mother had fallen.

Only hours after the fact did he learn that his mother had lain on her bathroom floor for a good 20 to 30 minutes before a live-in caregiver discovered her. He felt helpless that he didn’t know she was in trouble until much later and therefore couldn’t get her help. He knew that many other people must face similar struggles. So he did what any good serial entrepreneur does. He started a company to solve what he perceived as a major challenge...

On a bright summer afternoon off New Zealand's eastern coast in January 2020, a five-story, three-foot-diameter rocket made of carbon fiber puffed steam from its liquid oxygen tank.

In a control room in Auckland, a flight controller counted down. At T-0, flame bloomed from the rocket's nine 3D-printed engines, and the machine hurled into the sky with a roar.

And with that, small satellite company Rocket Lab launched its first mission of the year. The mission, dubbed Birds of a Feather, and the aerospace manufacturer's tenth launch in total, put them on track to launch a rocket a month...

Even before forced lockdowns, observers warned of the adverse effects of going without human contact. In his 2018 book, Lost Connections, for example, Johann Hari posited that an increasingly fragmented urban society causes mental illness due to isolation.

As Dr. Andrea Graham, assistant professor of medical social sciences at Feinberg School of Medicine, has said, “We're social beings. It's important to interact with other people and feel connected to others for laughter, lightheartedness and support."

More than 40,000 people die every year in car crashes in the United States alone, according to the National Safety Council. To put that figure in perspective, that’s about as many American casualties as in the entire Vietnam war.

Fortunately, help is on the way in the form of autonomous vehicles. “When you think about it, the main reason for car accidents are humans,” says Yosi Taguri, CEO of MissingLink.ai. “Take the humans out of the equation, you get more safety.”

In the near future, a humanoid robot wakes up each day, greets a fellow robot, and steps off her porch into an idyllic landscape of sweeping prairie vistas, mountains, and clear blue skies. She has no memory of yesterday and so starts each morning cheerfully, no matter what horrors had befallen her the day before. That is, until flashbacks begin to intrude.
That’s the setup for the HBO series Westworld, where humanoid robots built as playthings of the rich experience an awakening....

Despite our always-on technology connecting us with each other in more ways than ever before, recent studies have shown that technology seems to contribute to feelings of isolation rather than social connectedness.

Scrolling through countless pictures of our friends' polished and perfect lives no doubt contributes to this increased sense of isolation. But what if technology could sense and accurately convey our emotions, beyond simple clicks to indicate likes or the use of emojis? What if technology allowed us to interact in ways that were much closer to the ways we do in real life?

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that warding off catastrophic global warming requires actively removing 100 billion to 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by midcentury. “We have to create an industry equivalent to the oil and gas industry whose job it is to undo emissions,” says Julio Friedmann, chief executive officer of Carbon Wrangler LLC and a senior research scholar at Columbia University. Here are some of the most promising demo-ready projects trying to do just that.

Even the best lithium-ion batteries stink at storing the large amounts of electricity a massive wind or solar installation is capable of generating. They’re expensive and hold, at most, about four hours’ worth of that grid-scale juice. Here are five potentially less costly—if somewhat Rube Goldberg-y—methods companies are trying to store power as potential energy in other forms, smoothing out renewable energy’s peaks and valleys.

More real estate agents are closing the door on open houses as Virtual Reality tours take off
The freshly remodelled four-bedroom, three-bath ranch is ready to be listed, open floor plan and all, when you get a call that the homeowner has decided to put the kibosh on the open house this weekend. How are you supposed to sell a home that people can’t visit? For more and more real estate professionals, the answer is: make the visits virtual.
If clients don’t want strangers wandering through thei...