March was another busy month in tech and PR. The spring season has sprung, and along with it, so have the amazing and, at times shocking, stories of 2017. The Nereus team took on Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the beginning of the month, the US senate voted to allow ISPs to sell your browser history, Elon Musk wants to connect the human brain to computers, scientists are using rocket ship software to save bats, and if you have ever been to the DMW, your face is probably in a FBI database.
Dig into the top stories of March below:
- Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017 featured a vast variety of new technologies ranging from 5G concepts to different IoT-connected devices. The show floor included VR headsets from Samsung, a Porsche laptop, 4G-enabled Ford cars and the return of the Nokia 3310. Snake anyone?
- As if luxury electric cars and space exploration were not enough, Elon Musk has launched a new firm named Neuralink that will focus on connecting human brains to computers. The medical research firm will develop “neural lace” technology with the hopes that it improves memory or gives humans a shot at artificial intelligence. Do you have goosebumps?
- The United States Congress voted last week to rollback FCC rules on consumer online privacy. Internet service providers (ISPs) can now take all of the information they collect on consumer’s online activity and sell it to the highest bidder. What does this all mean and how much can service providers actually do with all of this consumer information? The Verge lays it all out here.
- Scientists in Kentucky have leveraged the same software used to help SpaceX land on a floating platform in the ocean to run climate scenarios that would bring back the dwindling Indiana bat population back to the Vespertilla Hall cave in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park. Batman would be proud.
- The faces of over 125 million Americans are being stored in a vast network of databases used by law enforcement to scan photos and videos of individuals. Ethical and legal limits are being discussed as to avoid possible pitfalls of scanning photos of both criminals and non-criminals when local and federal law enforcement identify people in public.
The beginning of spring shows the inevitable blooming of both flowers and different technologies that are changing the landscape of human engagement by redefining our everyday lives around the world. What stories and technologies impact you the most?