The way Motobot straddles an unmodified Yamaha YZF-R1M bike and blasts down the straight makes for an impressive sight, and its humanoid form means that it can accelerate and adjust its position on the track in an uncannily human manner. Motobot has six actuators for steering, throttle, front brake, rear brake, clutch and gearshift pedal. Reacting to data from the bike’s internal sensors, including speed, engine RPM and attitude, it steers the motorcycle and reacts to conditions on the track.

Marley Gray, Microsoft’s director of tech strategy for financial services, told Reuters that “the major pain point” it was hearing from customers wanting to use blockchain technology was that it was too hard and too expensive. This, according to Gray, inspired the creation of Ethereum Blockchain as a Service, allowing companies to begin working with the technology without having to first make significant investments in hardware.

Machine learning is used to scan emails and understand if they need replying to or not, before creating three response options. An email asking about vacation plans, for example, could be replied to with “No plans yet”, “I just sent them to you” or “I’m working on them”.

“Back to Dinosaur Island shows how intense, involving and rich virtual reality can be. Players will see a powerful dinosaur breathing inches from their face, getting an unprecedented sense of its immense scale,” says David Bowman, Crytek’s director of production. “To watch this scene in 2D is impressive, but when you’re in virtual reality, it becomes more intimate, and more exciting — giving you a feeling of presence and a belief that you’re really right there in a way that no other medium can.”

 

According to the London Fire Brigade, earlier this month four fire engines and around 20 firefighters were called out to a fire that started in a flat in Southwark and involved an “electric uni-cycle” that was charging. Luckily the owner of the flat heard a loud bang and evacuated the property straight away, so no one was hurt. A similar incident happened a week before in Morden when a charging electric hoverboard caught fire while also charging. Scary stuff.

Humanoid robots, say Nasa, will be an integral part of future journeys beyond the Earth. Extreme space environments are often testing and dangerous for human astronauts. Humanoid robots may help make these situations easier to endure by performing mission tasks before humans arrive, or work as “human-assistive robots” alongside a human crew.

There are also no wires that tangle or yank your phone off your desk or out of your hand. There’s no cord that’s so long that you have to ball it up and stuff it in your pocket, or buy an entirely new accessory just to maintain. Instead, you’re left with two small bits of plastic and metal that slip into (and more importantly, stay in) your ears, objects that conjure music from your phone like some sort of magic trick.

Without encryption, all of the things we do online would be insecure, be it emailing, or shopping, or banking. They all rely on the principle that if you encrypt data using complex mathematics it is nigh-on impossible to crack. If you’re using communication apps such as WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage, WeChat and so on, your messages are encrypted by default.etgwe

The chosen few will have the chance to fly on one of four US space vessels, including the International Space Station (ISS), and will be selected from a pool of pilots, engineers, scientists and doctors who are willing and able to apply their “considerable knowledge and skills” and “bear tremendous responsibility in orbit”. They must also be “determined to succeed”, Nasa explained.

Lynx’s IP won’t increase the resolution of the Structure Sensor, but it cuts back on the sensor mapping errors by up to 90 percent. Occipital says that initial tests reduced the error of its 3D depth maps from 5 inches down to 1/4 inch. “It’s a big deal for the idea of mapping your entire home,” says Jeff Powers, Occipital’s CEO. “Usually we’re limited to an object, or an artifact, or a person. But this tech really lets us blow that out to something like a room.”