This $250 Drone Cam flies around your home to monitor threats. There’s also the Rover Cam for businesses, featuring the guts of Amazon’s former Astro robot.
Author: Michael
Amazon-owned Ring is pushing into robotics with the launch of a home security drone and a rolling robot designed to patrol and protect businesses.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Nancy Pelosi’s replacement is ready to regulate AI —Grace Huckins As a California state senator, Scott Wiener authored legislation aimed at curbing the risks of advanced AI. Now, after winning a tight congressional race for Nancy Pelosi’s open San Francisco seat, he could play a key role in setting federal AI policy. I spoke with Wiener only a few hours after he had been declared the victor. But he was already thinking about AI risk: during…
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured a giant planet two years ago without anyone being able to spot it in the images. Now, researchers at Northwestern University have found a way to pull the planet out of the glare of its star. Their new technique makes the telescope up to 15 times more sensitive to faint planets, without changing a single piece of hardware. Even a telescope as powerful as James Webb has trouble photographing planets around other stars. The problem is simple: stars are incredibly bright, while the planets orbiting them are much fainter. Their light often gets…
The midterms were in no small part a searing repudiation of the AI industry, and in particular data centers. In fact, of 41 ballot proposed measures that would crack down on data center development, Americans voted for all but one. The lone exception: the town of Harwood, North Dakota, population 845. According to reporting by The Washington Post, a lot of residents were hesitant to approve the $3 billion, 1.8 million square foot facility for the same reasons as their peers across the country: noise, environmental impact, and the shady backroom dealmaking that facilitated it. But all the same, they…
The metals industry has experienced transformational moments before: the Bessemer process, flash smelting, electric arc furnaces, and modern continuous casting all changed what was possible. Yet, for more than a century, most extraction processes rely on techniques and pathways that would be familiar to metallurgists from generations ago. Processes have become larger and control systems smarter, but the fundamental science behind separating metals from ores has changed less than many realize. Today’s materials challenges are different from those of the 20th century, but why are critical metals still produced using largely the same scientific foundations? EvoMaterials, a technology platform developed…
Hugging Face executive Irene Solaiman warns that growing cyberattacks on open AI platforms could force tighter security restrictions, threatening the accessibility that makes open-source communities valuable to developers worldwide.
More than 2,000 years ago, Egyptians offered cats to the gods. Now, a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science suggests that even cats destined for the gods did not necessarily live pampered lives.
An interdisciplinary team of students from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) is taking part in iGEM, the international synthetic biology competition in Paris (Nov. 13–16), this fall. Using a clever combination of artificial intelligence, a mechanical trap and protein nanofibers, they are presenting a targeted method to efficiently control populations of the Asian hornet.
Drone-mounted lasers helped locate three unregistered Aboriginal rock art shelters in Australia, offering communities another way to document and protect their cultural heritage for future generations. In Australia’s Blue Mountains, rugged terrain and dense bushland make searching for Aboriginal cultural sites slow, difficult, and expensive. More than 200 rock shelters containing cultural and archaeological evidence […]