Over the past several decades, Asia has enjoyed robust economic growth. Historically speaking, most of this growth was concentrated in China, and was due to a rapid expansion of manufacturing capability. Today, economic growth is being increasingly driven by the digital economy, and it’s spreading to many more countries in the region. In this infographic from the Hinrich Foundation, we take a...

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have developed a robotic four-legged dog that uses an algorithm to learn to walk from scratch "like a baby giraffe".Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have developed a robotic four-legged dog that uses an algorithm to learn to walk from scratch "like a baby giraffe".The four-kilogram robot is being used to help researchers at the German institution M...

In a 2021 survey conducted by Morgan Stanley, corporate travel managers in the US, Europe, and Asia suggested their companies would replace about a quarter of typical business travel with virtual meetings in 2022.Their predictions were pretty spot on.Air travel has nearly bounced back to pre-pandemic levels in the US and Europe, led by a strong recovery in tourist demand. But business travel is...

The milk alternative is molecularly identical to the kind that comes from cows.The world is a problematic place for ice cream-loving environmentalists.As of 2015, the dairy industry produced emissions equivalent to 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually — that’s almost as much as the shipping and aviation industries combined.So, the environmentally responsible thing would be to cut down...

Steve Jobs openly despised and ridiculed the styluses that were the mainstays of pocket PCs and Palm devices that predated smartphones, but more than a decade later, Apple would embrace the stylus and make it its own. Granted, the styluses of Jobs’ era were nothing more than glorified sticks to poke at tiny screens, providing no additional benefit to the user experience. The Apple Pencil was,...

Almost half of US frontline retail employees and two-thirds of frontline managers say they are thinking about leaving their jobs in the next few months. What’s a retailer to do ?High attrition in retail is nothing new: annual employee turnover among frontline retail workers has been at least 60 percent for a long time. Retailers regularly face the challenge of replacing more than half of their...

Eye-tracking technology alerts distracted drivers if they smoke, use a cell phone or doze off at the wheel. AI-powered camera monitors blink rate and gaze direction for signs of distraction. A new generation of cars keeps an eye on you… to make sure you keep an eye on the road.A tiny camera on the dashboard monitors every blink of the driver’s eyes to make sure they’re not drowsy or distract...

"It's like high school drama but from people who are very much out of high school."Wear a mushroom suit, meet a rabbit, hang out and talk amid a post-apocalyptic wasteland or sub-ocean lair. Or maybe just sit at a regular ol' bar.Virtual reality-powered metaverse dating is here and it's growing, as Madeleine Aggeler writes for The New York Times — and frankly, it sounds, uh, super weird."We in...

As the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war on Ukraine and the growing tensions between China and the United States have brutally exposed the vulnerabilities of highly globalized supply chains.More and more companies are reconsidering their position, trying to shorten supply chains and to bring production back home or at least closer, wherever possible (and financially feasible).While buzzwords s...