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Engineers have developed a machine with two highly dexterous arms that are capable of unscrewing even the trickiest of lids. The talents of the RE2 Robotics High Dexterous Manipulation System extend even to tying knots, opening zips, making balloon animals and cutting snowflakes out of folded paper. RE2, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said it has delivered one of its systems to the US Army's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Centre. The robot can be controlled either semi-autonomously, by following a series of set commands or with a remote controlled 'imitator' that causes it to mimic the actions of a human...

Phones that lock away everything they hold could inhibit law enforcement more than we really want. Are we certain we want to eliminate an important source of evidence that helps not only cops and prosecutors but also judges, juries, and defense attorneys arrive at the truth?

[Disclaimer: This article uses a lot of pejoratives about Win10. Don't bother taking that bait -- the important things are that a) the nagware is going away, and b) support for non-Win10 has horizons that bear paying attention to when planning for the future.] Microsoft's "Get Windows 10" nagware will be killed off in July, the tech giant has told us. The software has been worming its way into Windows PCs via Windows Update since last year using aggressive malware-like techniques and frequent pop-up reminders. It quietly downloads and installs Windows 10 automatically for you, and then cheerfully offers to...

The Chinese government has banned all depictions of gay people on television, as part of a cultural crackdown on “vulgar, immoral and unhealthy content”. “No television drama shall show abnormal sexual relationships and behaviours, such as incest, same-sex relationships, sexual perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual violence, and so on.” The ban also extends to smoking, drinking, adultery, sexually suggestive clothing, even reincarnation. China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television told television producers it would constantly monitor TV channels to ensure the new rules were strictly adhered to.

Nvidia's Ansel is designed to give you all the tools you need to create artistic in-game screenshots of your favorite scenes. Take control of the camera, change the lighting, add a vignette, or snap a 360-degree image. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed a surprising new addition to the company’s portfolio of graphics technologies. The company founder talked about a new form of artwork that has emerged from the gaming community. Several digital artists have made a name for themselves by capturing breathtaking images of video game scenes. Huang said that some of those artists are able to capture such imagery...

Good news for Windows 10 users: you can now block internet ads in the Edge browser just like those with Chrome and Firefox do! Extensions for both the AdBlock and AdBlock Plus services have come to Microsoft's new browser, and are now available on the Windows Store. There is one small requirement, however, and it's that users need to be Windows Insiders with build 14291 on the desktop. Non-Insider users will still need to wait until this summer to take advantage of extensions in Edge, when the Anniversary Update for Windows 10 is released to the public. Once that's out,...

vAmazon giveth, and Amazon taketh. The giant internet retailer said on April 27 that it will create 2,000 full-time jobs by opening two more fulfillment centers in New Jersey. One will be a 600,000-square-foot facility in Florence, Burlington County, generating 500 new jobs. The other will be an 800,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Carteret, Middlesex County, that will generate about 1,500 jobs. Together, the two facilities will bring Amazon's total physical footprint in the Garden State to 2.5 million square feet of space, if you count three existing centers. The irony is that Amazon made the announcement the day after a...

Apple has held a special meeting with leading podcasters in an attempt to address concerns that the company is failing to adequately support the iTunes broadcast community

How Apple's music services all work is a little confusing, but in no way is the company interested in getting rid of your music library. Credit: Thinkstock A blog post has been making the rounds since Thursday, saying that Apple Stole My Music. James Pinkstone, writing on his company’s blog, tells a tale of losing 122GB of music files because of Apple Music. Plenty of websites are trumpeting this story, saying that Apple Music is the big bad wolf. But I’m afraid that isn’t the case.The author of this blog post begins by citing a bit of a conversation he...

Microsoft has made a change to an update for Windows 7 that can prevent certain systems from booting. While you might expect me to say, "good news, the software giant has fixed the problem", in fact what Microsoft has done is switch the update from "optional", to "recommended". So, on some systems, it will now install, and break Windows 7 automatically. There is good news though, and that’s you can solve the problem and get your computer working again by (can you guess?) upgrading to Windows 10. Hooray! The update in question is KB3133977 and what this does is fix...

A 29-Year Study Has Found No Link Between Brain Cancer and Cellphones If, and by how much cellphones increase the risk of brain cancer is a long and disputed argument. No one study is going to settle anything, but one statistical analysis of data in Australia hints at cellphones being reasonably safe. The study examines the incidence of brain cancer in the Australian population between 1982 to 2013. The study pitted the prevalence of mobile phones among the population—starting at 0 percent—against brain cancer rates, using data from national cancer registration data. The results showed a very slight increase in...

Microsoft is sending out email alerts to OneDrive customers, warning people with free 15-gigabyte accounts that their storage will shrink to 5 gigabytes on August 10, assuming they didn't previously opt into keeping the higher amount. Although the change has already been in effect for new OneDrive subscribers for some time — also eliminating an extra 15-gigabyte camera roll bonus — a number of people were grandfathered into the 15-gigabyte tier. Earlier notifications gave this group a chance to say they wanted to keep their storage, following a backlash against original plans to implement the change universally. Users with uploads...

On Thursday, The Guardian published a report by Nellie Bowles in which Cupertino mayor Barry Chang went on a little bit of a rant against Apple, Cupertino's largest employer. Chang had some harsh words about the company spending $5 billion to build an office in his city, including, for example, that "Apple is not willing to pay a dime" and that "they abuse" the city of Cupertino.Apple says that it pays tens of millions of dollars annually in property tax to Cupertino, and that it is the biggest taxpayer in Cupertino. Apple also says it funds millions in public improvements, such as adding sidewalks, bike...

Image Source: Human Media Lab We’ve seen plenty of wild experimental smartphone concepts over the years but the new HoloFlex phone designed by Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab is something else. The phone combines 3D holographic images with a flexible display to create what might be a prototype for smartphones of the future.The Human Media Lab explains that the HoloFlex is “is capable of rendering 3D images with motion parallax and stereoscopy to multiple simultaneous users without head tracking or glasses.” All images on the device’s display are “rendered into 12-pixel wide circular blocks rendering the full view of the 3D...

Steven Sinofsky was President of Microsoft’s Windows’ division from 2009 to 2013. From his blog post about moving to an iPad as his full time machine: Unlike many “use a product for month” tests this is not an experiment. For me this is a deeply held belief that the rise of smartphones (specifically starting when the iPhone launched) would have a profound impact on the way we all use “computers”. The transformation spans hardware (thinner, lighter, smaller, cheaper, longer battery life, instant on/off, touch, sensors, connectivity, etc.), operating systems (more: secure, reliable, maintainable, robust, etc.), and app software (refactored, renewed,...

OOPS! Flaws in Samsung’s ‘Smart’ Home Let Hackers Unlock Doors and Set Off Fire Alarms

Hundreds of millions of hacked user names and passwords for email accounts and other websites are being traded in Russia's criminal underworld, a security expert told Reuters. Mail.ru logo is seen in front of a displayed binary code in this illustration taken, May 4, 2016. REUTERS/DADO RUVIC/ILLUSTRATION The discovery of 272.3 million stolen accounts included a majority of users of Mail.ru (MAILRq.L), Russia's most popular email service, and smaller fractions of Google (GOOGL.O), Yahoo (YHOO.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) email users, said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security. It is one of the biggest stashes of...

The hack affected providers such as Google, Yahoo, Hotmail and MicrosoftCybersecurity professionals are warning anyone with a personal email account to change their passwords after stolen user names and passwords were being offered up for sale on the Internet, NBC News reported. Some 272.3 million accounts were stolen - and involve some of the biggest email providers, including Google, Yahoo, Hotmail and Microsoft, according to Alex Holden of Hold Security. "We know he's a young man in central Russia who collected this information from multiple sources," Holden told NBC News. "We don't know the way he did it or the...

<p>At the end of April, Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware interrupted a live TV weather broadcast to urge meteorologist Metinka Slater to upgrade her computer.</p> <p>A week later, while playing Counter Strike: Global Offensive to 130,000 spectators on Twitch.tv, Erik Flom was blasted out of his match by the Windows 10 installer. This was even after he spent a few frantic minutes trying to delay the upgrade until after his game had ended. The fun starts about nine minutes into this recording of the live stream. "F*ck you, Windows 10!" was Flom's response.</p>

The technology is built into a Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode (FOLED) touchscreen that can be bent by the user. In addition to the oft stated upsides of a bendy smartphone, a built-in bend sensor (similar to what the lab deployed in its recent ReFlex prototype) leverages the motion as another means with which to interact with the handset. The pair of disembodied hands in the demo video use the motion to move objects along the phone’s Z-axis. In the case of Angry Birds, that means stretching back the bird-catapulting slingshot. The tension on the phone correlates with that of...