Naples, Italy — Beneath the honking horns and operatic yelling of Naples, the most blissfully chaotic city in Italy, archaeologist Raffaella Bosso descends into the deafening silence of an underground maze, zigzagging back in time roughly 2,300 years.

Before the Ancient Romans, it was the Ancient Greeks who colonized Naples, leaving behind traces of life, and death, inside ancient burial chambers, she says.

She points a flashlight at a stone-relief tombstone that depicts the legs and feet of those buried inside.

“There are two people, a man and a woman” in this one tomb, she explains. “Normally you can find eight or even more.”

This tomb was discovered in 1981, the old-fashioned way, by digging.

Now, archeologists are joining forces with physicists, trading their pickaxes for subatomic particle detectors about the size of a household microwave.

Thanks to breakthrough technology, particle physicists like Valeri Tioukov can use them to see through hundreds of feet of rock, no matter the apartment building located 60 feet above us.

“It’s very similar to radiography,” he says, as he places his particle detector beside the damp wall, still adorned by colorful floral frescoes.

Archeologists long suspected there were additional chambers on the other side of the wall. But just to peek, they would have had to break them down.

Thanks to this detector, they now know for sure, and they didn’t even have to use a shovel.

To understand the technology at work, Tioukov takes us to his laboratory at the University of Naples, where researchers scour the images from that detector.

Specifically, they’re looking for muons, cosmic rays left over from the Big Bang.

The muon detector tracks and counts the muons passing through the structure, then determines the density of the structure’s internal space by tracking the number of muons that pass through it.

At the burial chamber, it captured about 10 million muons in the span of 28 days.

“There’s a muon right there,” says Tioukov, pointing to a squiggle line he’s blown up using a microscope.

After months of painstaking analysis, Tioukov and his team were able to put together a three-dimensional model of that hidden burial chamber, closed to human eyes for centuries, now opened thanks to particle physics.

What seems like science fiction is also being used to peer inside the pyramids in Egyptchambers beneath volcanoes, and even treat cancer, says Professor Giovanni De Lellis.

“Especially cancers which are deep inside the body,” he says. “This technology is being used to measure possible damage to healthy tissue surrounding the cancer. It’s very hard to predict the breakthrough that this technology could actually bring into any of these fields, because we have never observed objects with this accuracy.”

“This is a new era,” he marvels.

Communicating when a traumatic brain injury, stroke, or disease has made speech impossible can be intimidating. Specialized eye-tracking technology uses eye movement to enable people living with disabilities to connect one-on-one over the phone or via the internet.

Eye-tracking systems for computers pinpoint a person’s gaze – where the eye is looking at a screen – by reflecting infrared light off the cornea and capturing it with a camera, using image-processing software to determine the eye’s orientation. The technology isn’t new, but it has become much more widely accessible, thanks in part to a collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and a Fairfax, Virginia-based company called Eyegaze Inc.

When the company built the first model in 1988, its computers were bulky, requiring three shipping boxes for equipment and a company staff member to set up the system. That cost limited access, and the learning process could be intimidating.

In 1998, NASA and Eyegaze entered a public-private partnership via Congressional funding to make the hardware smaller, more portable, and affordable without compromising efficiency. It also reduced the weight of the original system by six times and its volume by almost the same factor. Other advancements served as a springboard for two more decades of development. By collaborating with JPL, the two entities were able to miniaturize and improve the company’s Eyegaze Edge system and lower costs, eliminating barriers to ownership of this communications technology.

“Working with NASA, we were able to make the device less bulky,” said Preethi Vaidyanathan, an engineer with Eyegaze. “Since then, we integrated the external components into a small camera.” It mounts above or below a standard computer screen and requires less than 15 seconds to calibrate to an individual’s gaze.

Visual Surfing

Snapchat, with its latest update, has added a bunch of new features such as the ability to edit chats and set reminders. It has also gained a few more generative AI-powered features.

The update is currently rolling out to both Android and iOS users. Some of these features are limited to the paid Snapchat+ users, and are currently rolling out in phases. Snapchat+ users get the chat-editing capability. These users will now have up to five minutes to fix a typo in a text message after sending it.

Engineering and construction major Larsen & Toubro (L&T) Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T) board of directors on Wednesday, May 8, recommended a final dividend of Rs 28 per equity share for FY24, according to a stock market disclosure.

“The Board of Directors has recommended a final dividend of Rs. 28/- per share of the face value Rs. 2/- each (in addition to the special dividend of Rs. 6 per share paid in August 2023) for the financial year ended March 31, 2024 (previous year final dividend Rs. 24/- per share. The Company will arrange to pay the proposed Final Dividend after approval of the shareholders in the ensuing annual general meeting,” L&T said in a BSE filing.

The tech company has also announced a record date ie June 20, 2024, according to the regulatory filing.

L&T has also announced its financial results for the fourth quarter ended on March 31, 2024, along with a dividend announcement. The company reported a 10.2 per cent increase in consolidated net profit at Rs 4,396.12 crore in the March quarter on the back of higher income. It had posted a consolidated net profit of Rs 3,986.78 crore in the year-ago period. L&T’s consolidated income of the company rose to Rs 68,120.42 crore in the latest fourth quarter from Rs 59,076.06 crore recorded a year ago, L&T said in a stock exchange filing.

Meanwhile, shares of L&T closed trading at Rs 3,485.2 each, up 1.53 per cent on BSE today, May 8.

Also read: Canara Bank posts 18.4% jump in Q4 net profit, declares dividend of 16 per share

550% dividend: Balaji Amines announces Rs 11 dividend along with Q4 earnings

CNN
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A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked about the need for a secret transaction to be carried out.

However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.

Believing everyone else on the call was real, the worker agreed to remit a total of $200 million Hong Kong dollars – about $25.6 million, the police officer added.

The case is one of several recent episodes in which fraudsters are believed to have used deepfake technology to modify publicly available video and other footage to cheat people out of money.

At the press briefing Friday, Hong Kong police said they had made six arrests in connection with such scams.

Chan said that eight stolen Hong Kong identity cards – all of which had been reported as lost by their owners – were used to make 90 loan applications and 54 bank account registrations between July and September last year.

On at least 20 occasions, AI deepfakes have been used to trick facial recognition programs by imitating the people pictured on the identity cards, according to police.

The scam involving the fake CFO was only discovered when the employee later checked with the corporation’s head office.

Hong Kong police did not reveal the name or details of the company or the worker.

Authorities across the world are growing increasingly concerned at the sophistication of deepfake technology and the nefarious uses it can be put to.

At the end of January, pornographic, AI-generated images of the American pop star Taylor Swift spread across social media, underscoring the potentially damaging posed by artificial intelligence technology.

The photos – which show the singer in sexually suggestive and explicit positions – were viewed tens of millions of times before being removed from social platforms.

Read on for the tech that expires in 2023.

Google Glass Enterprise Edition

(Image: Google)

Among the tech products laid to rest in 2023 was Google’s augmented reality headset Google Glass Enterprise Edition, marking the final nail in the coffin for Google’s visionary but ill-fated foray into AR glasses. First publicly announced in 2012, Google Glass was intended to usher in a new era of wearable computing, giving people working in agricultural, medical, and factory settings a heads-up display that would provide them with information while keeping their hands free. But the $1,500 price tag, lack of clear functionality, and privacy concerns doomed the Explorer Edition among consumers.

Google tried to revive Glass for businesses in 2017 with the Enterprise Edition, sold for $999. The headset found niche adoption in fields such as manufacturing and medicine, where hands-free computing was useful. But ultimately, Google Glass failed to achieve mainstream success or change how we interact with technology day-to-day.

Lenovo’s Legion Gaming Phone Business

(Image: Lenovo)

Rumors about Lenovo shutting down its phone business started flying in at the start of the year. Then in March, a Lenovo spokesperson confirmed to Android Authority that it had indeed been shut down. The spokesperson stated that the decision stemmed from “a wider business transformation and gaming portfolio consolidation.”

It seems gaming phones have struggled to carve out a distinct niche as regular flagship phones have gotten better and better at providing great gaming experiences even during long play sessions. Companies tried to attract buyers through gimmicks like cooling fans, RGB lighting and massive amounts of RAM, but to no avail. Lenovo’s Legion gaming phones were well-reviewed devices with top-tier specs, but ultimately couldn’t compete with more mainstream options. The company seems to be shifting focus to handheld gaming devices instead and unveiled the Lenovo Legion Go in September.

The gaming phone market in general seems to be on shaky ground – Xiaomi’s Black Shark division has gone quiet after layoffs in January this year, although brands like ASUS continue to see some success with their ROG Phone series. While they arguably pushed the boundaries of mobile gaming, Lenovo’s Legion gaming phones are yet another piece of tech that won’t pan out in 2023.

Amazon Hello Brand

(Image: Amazon)

Did you know that Amazon has a line of fitness trackers? Probably not. So it didn’t come as a surprise when Amazon decided to pull the plug on its Halo line of health and fitness trackers in July 2023, marking the end of the company’s attempt to break into the wearables market. Launched in 2020, Halo was Amazon’s play into the competitive fitness tracking space dominated by Apple, Fitbit and others. However, it failed to gain significant traction against entrenched rivals.

Halo has three products: the Band, the View, and the Rise. The Band was a basic fitness tracker that was launched in 2020. It has some controversial features, such as measuring body fat with a 3D scan and analyzing voice tone. The View was a smartwatch that came out in 2021. And the Rise was a sleep tracker and alarm clock that was launched recently. The company announced that it would refund customers who bought a Halo device or accessory in the last year, stop charging for the Halo subscription, and delete all the data it had gathered.

Cortana on Windows

(Image: Microsoft)

After years of gradually scaling back support, Microsoft discontinued the standalone Cortana app in August 2023, redirecting users to its new Bing Chatbot and AI Copilot features instead. Cortana’s shutdown marks the end of Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Siri and Google Assistant in the voice assistant space.

Originally launched in 2014, Cortana was designed to provide hands-free voice control and predictive information on Windows devices, similar to the capabilities of Apple and Google’s assistants. It expanded to Android, iOS, and Xbox over the next few years. However, Microsoft struggled to get consumers excited about Cortana. Usage remains niche compared to the competition. By 2021, Microsoft had already ended support for the iOS and Android apps, removed Cortana from the Windows taskbar and stripped out most third-party integrations. Its focus shifted to productivity features rather than general assistance.

With new AI chatbots like Bing Chatbot and Copilot taking center stage, Microsoft no longer sees a need for the standalone Cortana app. Its removal streamlines the Windows experience while freeing up resources for Microsoft’s new AI priorities. For now, the original Cortana lives on solely as an AI companion in Microsoft’s Halo videogame franchise.

Microsoft WordPad

(Express image)

The humble text editor WordPad is finally meeting its demise with Microsoft announcing it will no longer update the app and deprecate it with a future version of Windows. It was included for free on Windows PCs for over 25 years. While never as feature-rich as Word, the no-frills WordPad allowed users to compose documents, edit fonts and formats, and save files as .doc, .rtf or .txt. For students, office workers, and home users alike, WordPad strikes a nice balance between capable and uncomplicated.

But with Word and Notepad improving over the years, Microsoft has decided WordPad’s time has passed. The app was already optional starting in 2020 before its looming removal from Windows was confirmed this September. Though it never had a large user base compared to Word, the soon-to-happen discontinuation of WordPad closes the book on an unassuming yet capable writing tool many grew up using. For those wanting more formatting options, Microsoft suggests its Office suite, while Notepad remains for basic text needs.

Omegle

(Image: Omegle)

The once-popular online chat platform Omegle announced in November that it would be shutting down operations after over a decade of connecting strangers for random conversations. Omegle founder Leif K-Brooks cited financial and psychological unsustainability as reasons for closing the anonymous chat site. Since its launch in 2009, Omegle has become a go-to destination for those seeking random connections online. However, the platform has increasingly become a target for grooming and online abuse despite its original innocent intentions. Short-form video app TikTok even banned sharing Omegle links due to concerns over child safety on the platform.

While Omegle’s anonymous nature allowed for positive cultural exchanges and advice-seeking for some users, the lack of oversight made it difficult to control misuse. After years of fighting uphill battles, Omegle founder K-Brooks decided the platform could no longer bear the attacks and shut it down.

Hyperloop One

(Image: Virgin)

Hyperloop One, the ambitious transportation startup aiming to develop a network of tunnels for levitating pods traveling at speeds up to 760 mph, has ceased operations after nearly a decade of work. Despite raising over $400 million in funding and demonstrating a working prototype, the company was ultimately unable to secure any customers for its futuristic vision of transportation. After layoffs in 2022 and the withdrawal of investment from Sir Richard Branson, Hyperloop One was simply unable to sustain itself financially. The company’s assets, including its test track in Las Vegas, will be liquidated as its story comes to an end on December 31, 2023.