Disney is making humanoid robots that can perform mind-boggling stunts in midair, according to TechCrunch. Disneyland parks have incorporated animatronics into their displays for decades, but with its new project, “Stuntronics,” Disney hopes to take performing robotics to the next level. The project was born of a research experiment named “Stickman.” Stickman was a robot

When silkworms spin their cocoons so they can transition from caterpillar to moth, they produce one of the most valuable fibres in the world. Now a team of researchers has edited silkworm genes so that, in addition to producing their own silk, they spin that of another creature – the golden orb weaver spider. Spider

China has successfully tested a new hypersonic aircraft, a potential “hypersonic strike weapon” that could one day be capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads and evading all existing defence networks like the US missile shields, according to Chinese state-run and state-affiliated media, citing experts and the domestic designers. The Xingkong-2 (Starry Sky-2) hypersonic experimental waverider

In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three British scientists for their work on superconductors and superfluids, which included the explanation of a rather odd phase of matter. Now their discovery has a practical application – shrinking an electrical component to a size that will help quantum computers reach a scale that just

Facebook isn’t content to know just who you are, what you do, where you go, and who you talk to. It also wants to know how you spend your money. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is asking banks – including JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup – to turn over

Academics at Imperial Tech Foresight (ITF), an offshoot of Imperial College London, have been working to bring to life nebulous and intangible technological advances in a way you’ve never seen before. They have created a table of disruptive tech, taking inspiration from the periodic table of chemical elements. It contains 100 innovations, ranging from the

A failed assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Saturday was mounted with explosive-armed drones, according to news reports. Nine days earlier, and on the other side of the world, terrorists claimed to have sent an armed drone to attack the international airport in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. No

If you’re bluffing your way through a game of high-stakes poker, it’s a good idea to avoid shifty, nervous eye movements, which just might give your hand away. But it’s not just during poker that our eyes can betray us. A recent study suggests the way our eyes move actually reveals a scary amount about

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished from air traffic control radar screens, never to be seen again – and in the process spawned the most incredible aviation mystery of the 21st century. The 239 people on board were never found, and are presumed dead. Investigations dedicated to finding the plane, the victims,

The Chinese shipbuilder that’s constructing Beijing’s third aircraft carrier, Type 002, leaked an artist’s impression of that carrier on social media in late June that heightened intrigue about China’s naval ambitions before quickly taking it down. The China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation photo showed the future Type 002 with a large flight deck that featured an

Sometimes, while waiting for quantum computers to become a thing, or complaining that your stupid laptop keeps dying on 5 percent battery, it’s easy to forget just how far technology has come over the past 50 years. Sure, we can all list off a whole bunch of innovations that have changed the way the world

Today’s students have access to all kinds of gadgets and apps to aid their learning, but could these electronic devices be doing more harm than good? A new study suggests the very presence of phones in a lecture hall can knock down grades overall. The research found that when phone or laptops were allowed in

His formal title is His Imperial Majesty the Emperor, Akihito, who succeeded to Japan’s Chrysanthemum Throne upon the death of his father in 1989. Now, the 84-year-old Akihito is giving up that noble seat, officially abdicating in 2019. When he goes, it won’t just signal the end of a decades-long reign, and the first time

Why do batteries die? And, why can they only be recharged so many times before they won’t hold a useful amount of charge? My young son asked me about that years ago when his battery-powered toy car stopped moving, wondering about what he called an “everlasting battery”. And this same question has probably crossed the

Russian hackers infiltrated US electric utilities last year and had the ability to cause widespread blackouts, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a briefing on Monday. Symantec first reported on a hacking campaign by the state-sponsored group Dragonfly targeting dozens of victims in the US energy sector in 2017. But this is the

A group of German engineering students won the third SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition on Sunday, as their prototype pod shattered speed records and raced through a nearly mile-long tunnel at 290 miles per hour (466 kilometre per hour). WARR Hyperloop, from the Technical University of Munich, won first place for the third time in a

When you add a smiley face to the end of a message, you may be saying more than you realise. Emoticons, faces formed from punctuation symbols such as :-), and emojis, picture symbols such as 😀, are now common features of the way we communicate using phone and internet messaging services and social media. They

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to save lives by predicting natural disasters, stopping human trafficking, and diagnosing deadly diseases. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to take lives. Efforts to design lethal autonomous weapons – weapons that use AI to decide on their own whether or not to attempt to kill a person –

Nuclear weapons are humankind’s most fearsome creations. In a matter of minutes, one nuclear-armed nation can level dozens of cities, spread radioactive fallout for hundreds or thousands of miles, and wreck Earth’s climate. Most people are familiar with the basics: Slap together enough uranium or plutonium and – kaboom! – you have a nuclear blast.

Star-shaped gold nanoparticles, coated with a semiconductor, can produce hydrogen from water over four times more efficiently than other methods – and could lead to better ways to store solar energy, a new study shows. The discovery could also lead to other advances that could boost renewable energy use and fight climate change, researchers say.

Tianqi Sun, CEO of robotics firm Vincross, has created a delightful mod of his robot Hexa which cares for a houseplant when the owner is too forgetful to water it. Hexa is a small crab-like looking robot, which is available to buy for $US949 and is designed to give people the chance to experiment with

Phil and Anthony Butler aren’t just father and son. The physics professor and bioengineering professor (respectively) are also business partners. And this week, their company, MARS Bioimaging, unveiled a first-of-its-kind X-ray scanner 10 years in the making. First, a quick recap of how X-ray imaging works. When X-rays travel through your body, they’re absorbed by

Elon Musk is testing equipment designed to help rescue the remaining members of a Thai youth soccer team who are trapped in a cave, the Tesla CEO tweeted on Sunday. Hours after four boys were confirmed to have been rescued from the cave, Musk tweeted a video of a small submarine-like vessel being tested in

The internet isn’t your phone. It’s not Instagram, YouTube, or Netflix. Behind those apparitions, the internet is actually a sprawling matrix of hundreds of undersea data cables, criss-crossing the ocean for some 885,000 km (550,000 miles). That’s where your Facebook and FOMO come from. But those hidden conduits aren’t just useful for relaying data –

It would be amazing and terrifying if true – a ‘laser AK-47’ that can set fire to targets and clothing from 800 metres (half a mile) away. According to South China Morning Post, that’s exactly what researchers at a Chinese company called ZKZM Laser have developed. The newspaper claims that the rifle beam cannot be

Researchers from Montreal’s National Institute of Scientific Research (INRS) just published a study in Optica detailing a new approach to invisibility cloaking. Their device, called a spectral invisibility cloak, is the first to manipulate the color (or frequency) of the light waves that interact with an object, rendering it invisible. “Our work represents a breakthrough in the quest

Yes, we know. Our smartphone batteries are bad because they barely last a day. But it’s partially our fault because we’ve been charging them wrong this whole time.  Many of us have an ingrained notion that charging our smartphones in small bursts will cause long-term damage to their batteries and that it’s better to charge them when

The Algerian government has taken a dramatic step to try and curb rampant exam cheating by repeatedly turning off the internet during the exam season. Yes, all of the internet. For everyone. For a period of six days. On Wednesday this week the plug was pulled for the first time as students started sitting down

By making a strange kind of particle that is its own antiparticle out of a time crystal, physicists aim to develop a quantum computer that’s not only more reliable, but far more lightweight than anything currently in the pipeline. Time crystals and quasiparticles called Majorana fermions have made headlines in recent years thanks to the

AI knows when you’re going to die. But unlike in sci-fi movies, that information could end up saving lives. A new paper published in Nature suggests that feeding electronic health record data to a deep learning model could substantially improve the accuracy of projected outcomes. In trials using data from two US hospitals, researchers were

If you spent time on social media today, you probably came across that script for an Olive Garden commercial allegedly written by an artificial intelligence algorithm. The commercial is a hilarious trip into the absurd in which patrons enjoy classic staples of the kind of Italian dining we’ve come to expect from America’s 15th favorite

With the biggest event in the soccer calendar now underway, fans are speculating on which team might emerge victorious from the 2018 World Cup in Russia – and an artificial intelligence model based on 100,000 simulations has made its prediction too. Using a database of statistics from previous tournaments, and three different AI methods to

Scientists have made a breakthrough that could open the doors to a whole new way of producing nuclear fuel, and they did it using nothing but the power of the ocean – or at least the chemicals floating inside it. Researchers in the US used a specially designed yarn to extract natural trace amounts of

Most of us are used to technology predicting the words we want to type. Soon this kind of software will be able to look even further into the future to predict actions we’ve barely considered ourselves. This isn’t some creepy Minority Report style of precognition. Not yet at least. But it could see us get

Remember Elon Musk’s Not-A-Flamethrower – a propane-fuelled, oversized barbecue starter that looks more like a modified Nerf gun? It might have been a joke when Musk first posted about it on Instagram in January, but it got deadly serious when 20,000 people pre-ordered it. On Saturday, the first wave of 1,000 people have received their

Every second, millions of emails, clicks, and searches happen via the world wide web with such fluidity that the internet seems almost omnipresent. As such, people often mistakenly assume that internet traffic happens by air – our mobile devices, after all, aren’t wired to anything. But satellites carry less than 1 percent of human interactions,

When it comes to future challenges, one of the biggest will be water scarcity – on a warming planet we’re going to have plenty of seawater, but not enough fresh, clean water in the right places for everybody to drink. And while a lot of research has focussed on desalination, a team of scientists have

One of the most important dating tools used in archaeology may sometimes give misleading data, new study shows – and it could change whole historical timelines as a result. The discrepancy is due to significant fluctuations in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and it could force scientists to rethink how they use ancient

The greatest mystery in aviation history will keep its secrets for now with the search for the wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 ending this week without success. Ocean Infinity, the US-based technology company which began a supplementary search for the Malaysian government at the start of 2018 on a no-find, no-fee basis, failed to

Batteries powered by radioactive materials have been around for more than a century, but what they promise in power they usually lose in bulk. Not so with a new kind of power source, which combines a novel structure with a nickel isotope to pack ten times more power than an electrochemical cell of the same

Powering cold, hard mechanics with muscle tissue is a promising idea that so far hasn’t delivered awe-inspiring results. But a new way to grow muscles and attach them to a frame could help overcome existing hurdles, resulting in a biological hybrid device that isn’t just stronger than previous attempts, but lasts longer as well. Engineers

We’re really bad at choosing passwords. According to a new study by a researcher at Virginia Tech and Dashlane, a popular password manager service, most users make the same mistakes when making passwords, such as making their password the name of a popular brand or sports team. And while these things make passwords easy to

Do you have a right to know if you’re talking to a bot? How about the bot? Does it have the right to keep that information from you? Those questions have been stirring in the minds of many since well before Google demoed Duplex, a human-like AI that makes phone calls on a user’s behalf,

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love being able to say “Alexa, play me some bangers”, and those who got one targeted advertisement too many and are paranoid that their smart devices are always listening. Recent news, unfortunately, gives some more credence to the latter. A few weeks ago, a

Microsoft is the latest tech company to try and tackle algorithmic bias — that is, artificial intelligence that was fed subpar data and came to mirror society’s own prejudices or unfair perspectives. The company wants to create a tool that will detect and alert people to AI algorithms that may be treating them based on

The hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. There seems to be no shortage of sensationalist news about how AI could cure diseases, accelerate human innovation and improve human creativity. Just looking at the media headlines, you might think that we are already living in a future where AI has infiltrated every