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Two robots developed by Fieldwork Robotics, a spinout company from the University of Plymouth, have been harvesting the berries round the clock in polytunnels in a field near Odemira in south-west Portugal. ... The robots, which cost £2m to develop, stand 1.8 metres (5ft 11in) tall and each is fitted with four 3D-printed plastic arms that simultaneously pick raspberries – among the hardest fruit to pick, as they are softer than other berries and grow on tall bushes at varying heights. When the first iteration of the robot went on trial in the UK three years ago, it had one...

The cheapest member of the Raspberry Pi computer family now has a successor: the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W , A 64-bit, quad-core follow-up to Zero W costing just $15. Launched today by British computer-maker Raspberry Pi, the Pi Zero 2 W features a 1GHZ CPU that the manufacturer claims packs 5x the performance for multithread workloads than 2015's Raspberry Pi Zero. The 65mm x 30mm board features a quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 CPU, clocked at 1GHz. At its heart is a Raspberry Pi RP3A0 system-in-package (SiP), integrating a Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC (the same used in the Raspberry Pi 3,...

We're sorry in advance if we've just ruined your appetite. But, the rumors are true: There might be small amounts of beaver butt goo in some of our favorite gummy candies, ice creams, sodas and baked goods. Don't worry though, it's safe. For the past 80 years, we've been using the "brown slime" emitted from beavers as a way to add vanilla, strawberry and raspberry flavors to some of our favorite foods. How exactly does this work? Beavers emit the chemical compound castoreum from their castor sacs. The sacs are located under the animal's tail and are secreted when they...

... After publishing details about the availability of new kernel packages for the Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS computer operating systems, Canonical now reports that the Linux kernel for Raspberry Pi 2 was updated for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf). According to the Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2843-3, four kernel vulnerabilities discovered by various developers in the upstream Linux kernel 4.2 branch, which is now officially maintained by Canonical's Ubuntu Kernel Team, as we reported a couple of days ago, were patched for the Raspberry Pi 2 port of Ubuntu 15.10. The first security flaw was...

Today, I’m pleased to be able to announce the immediate availability of Raspberry Pi Zero, made in Wales and priced at just $5. Zero is a full-fledged member of the Raspberry Pi family

--SNIP-- This week I’ve been using the $35 Raspberry Pi 2, a bare-bones Linux computer no bigger than a juice box. And I’ve rediscovered something I had forgotten: the thrill of tinkering with a machine and its software. Of course, that thrill is accompanied, from time to time, with the urge to take a baseball bat to an inanimate object.

Raspberry Pi is quite a popular little fellow and has finally got its own app store, the Pi Store. The new store can be reached via the web or via the standalone app and gives developers and programers a unique place to offer their apps out to the world. The new Pi Store offers developers a choice to either charge for their apps, or give them for free with a tip jar option in case you want to push some funding into dev that you like. Currently, or to be precise at launch, there are only 23 free titles...

Gooseberry is another alternative to Raspberry Pi, and according to the manufacturers it is three times faster than its rival. This new berry comes with a new ARM A10 processor running at 1GHz stock frequency, while there is enough headroom for overclocking up to 1.5 GHz. Also, it has twice the RAM of Raspberry Pi, meaning 512MB for this board. As for its power consumption, Gooseberry  board consumes on average 4 watts of power when in use. When idle consumes 3.5 watts of power and when on standby consumes 2.3 watts of power.Currently, it comes with Android 4.0 ICS operating...

>BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, a friend of this program passed away, William Raspberry. He was a longtime columnist for the Washington Post. He passed away at age 76, and he's survived by his mother, who is 104. He also has a couple kids and his wife of 45 years. But he's survived by his mother, 104 years old. William Raspberry in 1993, very famous columnist for the Washington Post and very famous, highly respected liberal, he was one of the last of the breed of liberals that could still be reasoned with. You can't reason with liberals....

Former Washington Post columnist William Raspberry has passed away. The obituaries in both the Post and the New York Times noted that while Raspberry was generally considered a liberal, he often expressed opinions that defied easy labels. Perhaps the most famous such case of an unconventional Raspberry column, which neither newspaper mentioned, was when he publicly changed his opinion of Rush Limbaugh after listening to his program. This was described through the years by Limbaugh as the Raspberry Effect: The Raspberry Effect, William Raspberry, a former columnist of the Washington Post, he wrote a piece highly critical of me based...

William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist for The Washington Post who for 39 years in more than 200 newspapers brought a moderate voice to social issues, including race relations — sometimes to the ire of civil rights leaders — died on Tuesday at his home in Washington. He was 76.

David Braben is a very well-known game developer who runs the UK development studio Frontier Developments, but is just as well known for being the co-developer of Elite. Over his career his studio has brought us the Rollercoaster Tycoon series, Thrillville, Lost Winds, and most recently Kinectimals. In the background, however, Braben has been trying to tackle another problem: getting programming and general learning of how computers work back into schools. Braben argues that education since we entered the 2000s has turned towards ICT which teaches useful skills such as writing documents in a word processor, how to create presentations,...

After Four Decades as a Columnist, It's Time for Baby Steps So, what's next? I've been wrestling with the question, in one form or another, ever since I decided that the end of this year would be the end of my 39 years as a newspaper columnist. For years I've had two nightmare scenarios. In the first, I'm sitting in a wheelchair on the deck of a luxury cruise ship, wearing a lap robe against the chill -- and wondering where the devil I am. That is to say, I've feared that after reaching the point where I have the...

I'll breeze right past the fact that the heaviest mail day of my career as a newspaper columnist came when I announced the end of that career. What I want to think about instead is something that is enormously flattering and still a little mysterious.

I first heard the numbers from sociologist Andrew Billingsley: In 1890, 80 percent of black American households were headed by husbands and wives. That's just 25 years after the end of the Civil War. In 1900, the percentage was mostly unchanged, and so it remained -- between the high 70s and the low 80s -- for 1910, 1920, 1930, for every decennial census report until 1970, when it was down to 64. For the 2000 Census, the percentage of black families headed by married couples was 38. The only good news is that it was also 38 percent in 1990,...

The trouble with the Kentucky display of the Ten Commandments, said the Supreme Court, while approving a similar display in Texas, is that the it was motivated by a "predominantly religious purpose." The trouble with the court's confusing -- some say absurd -- rulings, says Kevin "Seamus" Hasson of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, is that they proceed from an impossible premise. "The 'predominantly religious' test suggests that anything not predominantly secular must be religious. It in fact has strong anti -religious overtones." Hasson, whose organization is devoted to defending the free expression of all religious traditions, believes the...

THE REDNECK PROBLEM By WILLIAM RASPBERRY May 17, 2005 -- THE plight of have-not blacks in America's urban ghettos, says economist Thomas Sowell, can be laid at the feet of white people. And not just any white folks. The culprits are that particular breed of white people known as "rednecks." If you've followed the writings of Sowell for as long as I have, you'll know that he's not saying anything as simple as racism accounts for today's black poverty. He's saying something much more complex and, to my mind, far more intriguing. Immigration from the British Isles to the New...

The in-your-face right-wing partisanship that marks Fox News Channel's news broadcasts is having two dangerous effects. The first is that the popularity of the approach -- Fox is clobbering its direct competition (CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, etc.) -- leads other cable broadcasters to mimic it, which in turn debases the quality of the news available to that segment of the TV audience. The second, far more dangerous, effect is that it threatens to destroy public confidence in all news. The latter, I admit, is more fear than prediction, but let me tell you what produces that fear. Fox News Channel --...

Is 'Not George Bush' Enough? By William Raspberry Monday, August 30, 2004; Page A23 John Kerry is not George W. Bush -- and for a lot of us, that's reason enough to vote for Kerry come November. But reason enough for a majority of voters? I doubt it. The problems with Bush are (for those who would vote for virtually anyone else) obvious and important. He has tilted the economy toward the rich and away from the middle class. He is heavily influenced by "neocons" whose foreign-policy ideas are well outside the American mainstream -- and, because he came to...

.....But if Bush is frightening -- in part because he so dogmatically believes what he believes -- Kerry is frustrating and infuriating because he seems not to believe much of anything worth risking offense. .........No, what infuriates about Kerry is his wish to be all things to all people -- or, at any rate, not to give them any basis for attacking him. He has, as far as I can tell, staked out a single position that might be called controversial: He would repeal the tax cuts for the rich. But nearly everything else he says or does seems calculated...