bigwophh writes that IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform "is now more capable and human-like, especially when encapsulated in a robot body." An article from Hot Hardware reports that this week at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, "We saw Watson in robot form respond to queries just like a human would, using not only speech but movement. When its dancing skills were called into question, the robot responded by showing off its Gangnam Style moves." After winning Jeopardy's million-dollar championship in 2011, Watson moved on to "more practical applications" like providing data-analyzing services for doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, and "the capabilities of what IBM has created are nothing short of amazing... Just like a real person, the underlying AI can get a read on people through movement and cognitive analysis of their speech. It can determine mood, tone, inflection, and so forth."

An anonymous reader writes: 20 high school students gather every Friday night in a basement of a modest home in Federal Way, Washington to work on science experiments using a home-made nuclear fusion reactor. [They've also reportedly won top honors in science fairs as well as college scholarships.] This extreme science club is the brainchild of Carl Greninger, a Program Manager at Microsoft by day, scientist by night. He was concerned about the current state of high school science education, [and] lamented that the public school system does not truly expose students to the excitement of experimental discovery.
So using his own money (and one-ton of radiation shielding), Greninger "gathered some students and built a working nuclear fusion reactor in his garage."

An anonymous reader writes: Oculus says in its privacy policy it will track information about your location, physical movements, and how you're using the Oculus Rift headset. Senator Al Franken, a consumer advocate who has made a point of pushing back against invasive privacy policies like Uber's, wrote a letter to Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, pushing for more information about how, exactly, Oculus is using all of the data it collects. "I believe Americans have a fundamental right to privacy," Franken wrote. "And that right includes an individual's access to information about what data are being collected about them, how the data are being treated, and with whom the data are being shared." Oculus has not yet commented on the letter. As a result from Franken's letter, Oculus may offer a more detailed privacy policy, like what HTC has done for its Vive headset. Though, it's worth mentioning Oculus isn't collecting much more information than most technology companies. The biggest concern stems around what kind of information Facebook is collecting when the headset is not being used -- there's no off button, so it's always sitting in a semi-ready state.

An anonymous reader shares a report on Bloomberg: Apple Inc.'s fight over privacy with the U.S. isn't over yet, even after the government dropped a demand for the company's help in accessing a California shooter's iPhone because someone else found a way to crack it. The U.S. said it'll keep fighting to get the company's help in getting data off a phone in Brooklyn, New York, that belonged to a drug dealer because Apple provided assistance in accessing such devices earlier. In a court filing Friday, the government said it's going ahead with an appeal of a judge's order denying its request for Apple's help. The battle between the world's most valuable tech company and the U.S. over encryption and data privacy has sparked a national debate, with dozens of companies and organizations siding with Apple, while law enforcement has generally taken the government's side.

coondoggie quotes a report from Networkworld: Siemens and Airbus teamed up today to develop electric and hybrid electric/combustion engines for commercial and private aircraft. The companies said they would amass a joint development team of about 200 employees that would jointly develop prototypes for various propulsion systems with power classes ranging from a few 100 kilowatts up to 10 and more megawatts, for short, local trips with aircraft below 100 seats, helicopters or unmanned aircraft up to classic short and medium-range flights. Hybrid-electric propulsion systems can significantly reduce fuel consumption of aircraft and reduce noise. European emissions targets aim for a 75% reduction of CO2 emissions by 2050. These ambitious goals cannot be achieved by conventional technologies, the companies stated. Airbus has developed a 2-seat electrically powered aircraft, known as the E-Fan. Siemens too has been developing an electric aircraft engine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Tesla announced Thursday that it has received 325,000 preorders for its recently unveiled Model 3. If it sells every car that's been reserved, the company says it will earn enough revenue to make this the "biggest one-week launch of any product ever." A few days ago, the electric car company was saying it had received twice the number of preorders it originally expected to get. Now it's quickly approaching three times that number, which raises questions about the company's ability to meet its increasingly complex production goals. If it can, it stands to make a boatload of money. Tesla says the number of preorders it has received so far corresponds to $14 billion in implied future sales.

An anonymous reader shares an article from Geek.com: The one thing that makes LG's G5, the flagship smartphone it launched in February, stand out from the crowd is its modularity. As iFixit learned, that means more than just being able to quickly swap the battery for a camera grip or DAC. In its teardown, iFixit found that LG has made it easy to replace lots of the G5's parts. The process might not be as simple as giving the phone a squeeze and sliding a module out, but it's a heck of a lot easier than it is with many phones and tablets. [...] All in all, it makes for a pretty tidy teardown and it earned the G5 an impressive 8/10.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quanta Magazine: An ambitious new program, funded by the federal government's intelligence arm, aims to bring artificial intelligence more in line with our own mental powers. Three teams composed of neuroscientists and computer scientists will attempt to figure out how the brain performs these feats of visual identification, then make machines that do the same. "Today's machine learning fails where humans excel," said Jacob Vogelstein, who heads the program at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). "We want to revolutionize machine learning by reverse engineering the algorithms and computations of the brain." By the end of the five-year IARPA project, dubbed Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (Microns), researchers aim to map a cubic millimeter of cortex. That tiny portion houses about 100,000 neurons, 3 to 15 million neuronal connections, or synapses, and enough neural wiring to span the width of Manhattan, were it all untangled and laid end-to-end.

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook Live was launched last year, allowing public figures and celebrities to live stream to their timeline. Today, Facebook has released a host of new features to its live broadcasting tool, which lets anyone post live streams of themselves to their timeline. Not only can users add filters to their videos, but they can also draw and add doodles as well. "Live Reactions" lets people react in a similar way to live videos as they do to posts, and it will also allow people to replay the comments they receive during their stream. The site has also added new ways of finding videos, either by location or by inviting friends. It also features a new button for people to ask their friends to watch a live video alongside them, for example. The live streaming features are limited to people in the U.S. right now, with new features rolling out to iOS and Android devices "in the coming weeks," the company said.

TechnoidNash quotes a report from Techie News: Rembrandt van Rijn was one of the most influential classical painters, and the world lost his amazing talent when he died nearly four centuries ago. And yet his newest masterpiece was unveiled only yesterday. How? By scanning and analyzing Rembrandt's works, a computer was able to create a new painting in near-perfect mimicry of Rembrandt's style. It has been named, appropriately, "The Next Rembrandt." The computer used machine-learning algorithms to create the portrait, which was then 3D-printed to give it the same texture as an oil painting. "The Next Rembrant," was a collaboration between Microsoft, ING, Delft University of Technology and two Dutch art museums -- Mauritshuis and Rembrandthuis.

An anonymous reader cites an article on CNET: Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa has already grown into a viable platform for voice-activated smart home control. Now, Amazon is introducing new, open software that will make it easier for smart home gadgets to hop aboard that platform. The software is a new addition to the Alexa Skills Kit called the Smart Home Skill API. The API makes it faster and easier for device makers to build the Skills that sync their products up with Alexa, and it standardizes the vocabulary that they'll use, too. If I make a smart thermostat and sync it up with Alexa using the Smart Home Skill API, I'll be using common terminology that Alexa already knows. That means that Alexa will be able to control my thermostat with basic commands like, "Turn the heat up" or, "Set the thermostat to 70" without me needing to program any of it.

Alphabet-owned Nest recently announced that it will be turning off Revolv Hub next month. An anonymous reader shares an article on EFF, a privacy rights group: Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices -- customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of updates would enable the hardware they paid for to actually work, only to discover the manufacturer can turn their device into a useless brick when it so chooses. This is far from the first time that customers' software and electronics have been downgraded by manufacturers. Updates can disable features the customer paid for that have fallen out of favor with the vendor, as when Google disabled privacy settings on Android or Sony took away the ability to run GNU/Linux on a Playstation 3. Manufacturers can even render a device unusable until the customer "agrees" to new terms of use, as Nintendo did with the Wii U. Other software and devices, including some video games, are designed so they simply stop working when they can no longer dial home to a server run by the vendor.

An anonymous reader writes: LTE routers made by Quanta Computer Incorporated, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer, are plagued by over twenty major security flaws ranging from backdoor accounts to remote code execution bugs, from hardcoded SSH keys to undocumented diagnostics pages, and from weak WPS PINs to network eavesdropping functions. As the researcher explains: "A personal point of view: at best, the vulnerabilities are due to incompetence; at worst, it is a deliberate act of security sabotage from the vendor." The vendor has not fixed any of these issues even after almost four months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: "Messengers are the new browsers and bots are the new websites," Kik's Mike Roberts told The Next Web. The messaging app that's big with America's youth has launched a bot store and developer platform to support it. The Kik Bot Shop offers mini-apps that you can add to your account and either chat to directly or use in your chats with others. For example, at launch, there's a bot that inserts relevant Vine videos into your chats at your request, similar to Giphy's insanely popular Slack integration, and if you do prefer GIFs, Riffsy (which also powers Twitter's GIFs) has a bot for Kik. A Weather Channel bot can tell you the forecast on demand or send you a regular update, and if you're looking for beauty tips, Sephora's bot has you covered. There are 18 bots in the store at launch, but Kik is keen for developers to build more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: How would you feel if a robot asked you to touch its butt? Maybe it sounds like a silly question, but as robots proliferate and anthropomorphize, it's actually something that needs to be considered. So scientists at Stanford considered it. The study, to be presented soon but previewed by IEEE Spectrum, is entitled "Touching a Mechanical Body: Tactile Contact With Intimate Parts of a Human-Shaped Robot is Physiologically Arousing" -- and really, the title says it all. The researchers sat volunteers at a table with a Nao humanoid robot reclining casually on it. They were told (by the robot, in fact) that it was a vocabulary exercise focusing on terms for body parts. Volunteers were told by the bot to, for instance, "touch my ear" using their dominant hand, while the non-dominant hand remained on a skin conductance sensor that loosely monitored their physical state. When asked to touch "high accessibility" areas -- places we normally touch on other people, like shoulders and elbows -- volunteers did so without hesitation or agitation. But "low accessibility" areas -- this would be the robot's butt and where its junk would be -- produced delay and that arousal we talked about.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Computerworld: The U.S. Department of Energy has demonstrated a 20,000 watt (20KW) wireless car-charging system that offers three times the efficiency of today's plug-in systems for electric vehicles (EVs). The research is the first step in creating a 50KW wireless charging system that may someday allow roadways to charge vehicles while they are being driven. The DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee demonstrated the new system in partnership with Toyota, Cisco Systems, Evatran and the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research. ORNL said the 20KW charging system for passenger cars is the world's highest power wireless system. It was developed in less than three years using a "unique architecture that included an ORNL-built inverter, isolation transformer, vehicle-side electronics and coupling technologies."

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, HP announced the Spectre 13, the world's thinnest laptop. One of the subtle changes HP is making with its recent global brand offensive is to its logo. HP has decided to go with a minimalist design consisting of four slashes making up the "HP" brand name. Previously, "Hewlett-Packard" was written out in full on last year's Spectre x360. HP says it will be using the minimalist logo solely on its premium laptops. Even though the logo has received a makeover, it's not exactly new. This very same mark first surfaced online in a 2011 brand redesign study released by Moving Brands, who HP had hired to develop a new logo and brand identity.

An anonymous reader writes: HP claims that its Spectre laptop, unveiled April 5, is the world's thinnest laptop. It measures 10.4mm thick or 0.41 inches. That would mean that it's slimmer than the 12-inch MacBook (0.52), MacBook Air (0.68 inches) and Dell XPS 13 (0.59 inches) at their thickest points. It's also thinner than the 0.52-inch Razer Blade Stealth. The new notebook is equipped with an advertised nine-hour battery life, 13-inch HD 1920 x 1080 resolution display, and sixth generation Intel Core i5 or i7 processor. The Spectre will be available for pre-order on April 25 for $1,169.99 before it hits Best Buy stores on May 22 for $1,249.99.

An anonymous reader writes: Samsung is now mass producing the industry's first 10-nanometer class, 8Gb DDR4 DRAM chips, ahead of competitors SK Hynix and Micron. It will produce 10nm-class DDR4 DRAM modules this year varying from 4GB for laptops and up to 128GB for enterprise servers. Samsung also promised to reveal 10-nanometer-class mobile DRAM "in the near future." The announcement marks a big milestone for the company after it first mass produced 20-nanometer-class 4GB DDR3 DRAM chips in 2014. "Samsung's 10nm-class DRAM will enable the highest level of investment efficiency in IT systems, thereby becoming a new growth engine for the global memory industry," said Young-Hyun Jun, President of Memory Business, Samsung Electronics. "In the near future, we will also launch next-generation, 10nm-class mobile DRAM products with high densities to help mobile manufacturers develop even more innovative products that add to the convenience of mobile device users."

An anonymous reader writes: Intel has acquired the Italian company Yogitech to improve upon Internet of Things (IoT) security and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Yogitech's flagship technology known as faultRobust is designed to keep circuits functional and prevent device failure. Since Intel provides chips for IoT devices, it makes sense for the company to be interested expanding that effort with Yogitech's technology. Intel's Atom and Quark chips are used in IoT devices, and it bundles hardware- and software- based security and networking layers in with those chips. The most obvious use for Yogitech's technology is with autonomous vehicles, where the circuitry can be used to reduce errors related to braking and identification of objects. It may also be used in industrial machines, where the chances of equipment hurting the process or a worker could be reduced. According to Intel, 30 percent of the IoT market will require functional safety systems. Intel didn't comment how much they paid to buy the company.