This Week in Tech

Finally, US Hospitals Will Have to Post Their Prices Online – This Week in Tech – 12/30/2018

Finally, US Hospitals Will Have to Post Their Prices Online

Astronomical hospital bills are a trope of American health care. Hospitals in the US are known for charging exorbitant fees for simple procedures, and for adding baffling entries to discharge bills. Notorious examples include the woman who was charged $40 to hold her newborn, and the $18,000 emergency-room bill that a family received after their baby was “treated” with some milk and a nap…


Did Apple Retail Prices Get Too High in 2018? Consumers Say Yes

Apple has for years been a premium brand that rarely, if ever discounted products. Period…


Playing Video Games May Increase Your Brain’s Gray Matter and Improve How It Communicates

Researchers from the Chinese University of Electronic Science and Technology and the Australian Macquarie University in Sydney joined forces, and recently found a correlation between playing action video games and increased gray matter volume in the brain…


Fake Amazon Alexa Setup App Climbs Its Way To Apple’s App Store Charts

Some iPhone users who received a new Alexa device as gift on Christmas may have downloaded an app masquerading as the official setup companion for Amazon’s Alexa…


Estonia Goes Digital to End Bureaucracy: Everything From Birth Certificates to Drug Prescriptions Can Be Obtained Online

In the Estonian capital of Tallinn, three-day-old Oskar Lunde sleeps soundly in his hospital cot, snuggled into a lime green blanket decorated with red butterflies. Across the room, his father turns on a laptop…


Artificial Intelligence Creates Realistic Photos of People, None of Whom Actually Exist

Each day in the 2010s, it seems, brings another startling development in the field of artificial intelligence — a field widely written off not all that long ago as a dead end. But now AI looks just as alive as the people you see in these photographs, despite the fact that none of them have ever lived, and it’s questionable whether we can even call the images that depict them “photographs” at all. All of them come, in fact, as products of a state-of-the-art generative adversarial network, a type of artificial intelligence algorithm that pits multiple neural networks against each other in a kind of machine-learning match…


Study Confirms: Global Quantum Internet Really Is Possible

Quantum internet promises ultra-secure, next-generation communications, but is it actually feasible on a global scale?…