When ‘good enough’ is not good enough

Apple’s product launches are covered with breathless enthusiasm usually reserved for royal weddings and vaccines for dreaded diseases. The recent launch of the iPhone6 featured an exciting new technology – ApplePay – which, if widely adopted, will allow Apple’s discerning customers to make electronic payments from their phones in situations where they would have used […]

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Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?

PAYING for a taxi ride using your mobile phone is easier in Nairobi than it is in New York, thanks to Kenya’s world-leading mobile-money system, M-PESA. Launched in 2007 by Safaricom, the country’s largest mobile-network operator, it is now used by over 17m Kenyans, equivalent to more than two-thirds of the adult population; around 25% of […]

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First Solar-Backed Off-Grid Innovator to Capitalize on Kenya Experience

Powerhive, Inc. today announced that its industry-leading portfolio of off-grid metering and control solutions has successfully completed over two years of field testing in Kenya, paving the way for its commercialization and scale-up. With financial and technical backing from First Solar, Inc. FSLR, -1.97% a leading global provider of photovoltaic (PV) solar energy solutions, Powerhive […]

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Bringing Women’s Perspectives to Africa’s Engineering Solutions

In September 2014, at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, I made a commitment on behalf of Ashesi to have gender balance in our new engineering program. Gender balance is rare in the world of engineering education, but we believe it’s necessary to aim for inclusion. More importantly, we believe in making sure that future […]

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Far Out, Man: 13.1bn-Year-Old Galaxy Is Most Distant Yet Seen By Humans

Galaxy EGS-zs8-1 has moved 30bn light-years away from Earth since it was born: ‘We’re actually looking back through 95% of all time to see this galaxy’ A team of astronomers has measured a galaxy farther than any other ever seen by human beings, reporting this week that the ancient star system offers a glimpse of […]

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Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Opportunity Logs Sol 4000, Digs Spirit of St. Louis Crater

After investigating some flat, light and dark toned rocks around Spirit of St. Louis Crater in April, Opportunity chalked up another milestone achievement for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) mission – the 4000th sol or Martian day of surface operations – then did what she does best. By month’s end, the robot field geologist was closing […]

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Citizen Scientists Discover Five New Supernovas

More than 40,000 citizen stargazers have helped to classify over 2 million celestial objects and identify five never-before-seen supernovas, in a massive example of citizen science at work. An amateur astronomy project of cosmic proportions, established by scientists at the Australian National University, asked volunteers to look through images taken by the SkyMapper telescope and […]

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How A Computer Can Help Your Doctor Better Diagnose Cancer

Correctly diagnosing a person with cancer — and identifying the specific type of cancer — makes all the difference in successfully treating a patient. Today your doctor might draw from a dozen or so similar cases and a big book of guidelines. But what if he or she could instead plug your test results and […]

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The Hubble Space Telescope: ‘It’s a terrific comeback story’

gathered crowd to watch. On it was to appear the first ever image from Hubble, Nasa’s powerful, sparkling space telescope. That, at least, was the plan. Plenty of the astronomers wanted this event – called, in the business, first light – to be held away from the media gaze. But the press had been invited […]

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Arx Pax Hoverboard, New Maglev System Paves Way For Flying Cars

Arx Pax is pioneering a new kind of magnetic levitation that is much less expensive than existing maglev systems, which could lead to widespread adoption of maglev technology. Last fall, small startup Arx Pax nearly broke the internet with a Kickstarter campaign that many thought was too good to be true—it was building a real-life […]

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