A person’s “right to repair” their own equipment may well become a US election issue, with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders making it a main talking point during his tour of Iowa. “Are you ready for something truly insane?” the veteran politician’s account tweeted on Sunday, “Farmers aren’t allowed to repair their own tractors without paying Read more about Tractors, not phones, will (maybe) get America a right-to-repair law at this rate: Bernie slams ‘truly insane’ situation[…]

Aweigh is an open navigation system that does not rely on satellites: it is inspired by the mapping of celestial bodies and the polarized vision of insects. Ancient seafarers and desert ants alike use universally accessible skylight to organize, orient, and place themselves in the world. Aweigh is a project that learns from the past Read more about Aweigh – open source navigation system without satellites[…]

In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company. And if you step back and just look at intracontinental cables, Google has fully financed Read more about Google and other tech giants are quietly buying up the most important part of the internet[…]

Researchers at the Black Hat Asia conference this week disclosed a previously unknown way to tap into the inner workings of Intel’s chip hardware. The duo of Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy from Positive Technologies explained how a secret Chipzilla system known as Visualization of Internal Signals Architecture (VISA) allows folks to peek inside the Read more about The hidden backdoor in Intel processors is a fascinating debug port (you have to pwner to use it anyway)[…]

Canadian startup D-Wave Systems has extended the availability of its Leap branded cloud-based quantum computing service to Europe and Japan. With Leap, researchers will be granted free access to a live D-Wave 2000Q machine with – it is claimed – 2,000 quantum bits, or qubits. Developers will also be free to use the company’s Quantum Read more about Europe, Japan: D-Wave would really like you to play with its ‘2,000-qubit’ quantum Leap cloud service[…]

Microsoft has helped build the first device that automatically encodes digital information into DNA and back to bits again. DNA storage: Microsoft has been working toward a photocopier-size device that would replace data centers by storing files, movies, and documents in DNA strands, which can pack in information at mind-boggling density. According to Microsoft, all Read more about Microsoft just booted up the first “DNA drive” for storing data[…]

Scientists from Heriot-Watt University have welded glass and metal together using an ultrafast laser system, in a breakthrough for the manufacturing industry. Various optical materials such as quartz, borosilicate glass and even sapphire were all successfully welded to metals like aluminium, titanium and stainless steel using the Heriot-Watt laser system, which provides very short, picosecond Read more about Welding glass to metal breakthrough could transform manufacturing[…]

A team of Cambridge researchers have found a way to control the sea of nuclei in semiconductor quantum dots so they can operate as a quantum memory device. Quantum dots are crystals made up of thousands of atoms, and each of these atoms interacts magnetically with the trapped electron. If left alone to its own Read more about Physicists get thousands of semiconductor nuclei to do ‘quantum dances’ in unison[…]

One day, hospital patients might be able to ingest tiny robots that deliver drugs directly to diseased tissue, thanks to research being carried out at EPFL and ETH Zurich. A group of scientists led by Selman Sakar at EPFL and Bradley Nelson at ETH Zurich drew inspiration from bacteria to design smart, highly flexible biocompatible Read more about Researchers develop smart micro-robots that can adapt to their surroundings[…]

A team of Japanese researchers from Keio University in Tokyo have demonstrated that an amoeba is capable of generating approximate solutions to a remarkably difficult math problem known as the “traveling salesman problem.” The traveling salesman problem goes like this: Given an arbitrary number of cities and the distances between them, what is the shortest Read more about An Amoeba-Based Computer Calculated Approximate Solutions to an 8 city Travelling Salesman Problem[…]

A new approach to controlling magnetism in a microchip could open the doors to memory, computing, and sensing devices that consume drastically less power than existing versions. The approach could also overcome some of the inherent physical limitations that have been slowing progress in this area until now. Researchers at MIT and at Brookhaven National Read more about Study opens route to ultra-low-power microchips[…]

In a statement on Wednesday, the Italian competition authority, the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), said both companies had violated consumer protection laws by “inducing customers to install updates on devices that are not able to adequately support them.” It fined Apple €10m ($11.4m): €5m for slowing down the iPhone 6 with Read more about Apple, Samsung fined in Italy for slowing people’s phones.[…]

Why is Xiaomi’s fitness tracker detecting a heartbeat from a roll of toilet paper? Weibo users are confused, but the answer isn’t as wild as it seems Does a roll of toilet paper have a heart? Obviously not. So why does Xiaomi’s fitness band display a heart rate when it’s wrapped around a roll of Read more about Why are Xiaomi’s fitness tracker and Apple watches detecting a heartbeat from a roll of toilet paper and bananas?[…]

Researchers from Linköping University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have proposed a new device concept that can efficiently transfer the information carried by electron spin to light at room temperature—a stepping stone toward future information technology. They present their approach in an article in Nature Communications. Light and electron charge are the Read more about Nanoscale pillars as a building block for future information technology[…]

Over on the EEVblog, someone noticed an interesting chip that’s been apparently flying under our radar for a while. This is an ARM processor capable of running Linux. It’s hand-solderable in a TQFP package, has a built-in Mali GPU, support for a touch panel, and has support for 512MB of DDR3. If you do it Read more about A $1, Linux-Capable, Hand-Solderable Processor[…]

Metals are widely used for antennas; however, their bulkiness limits the fabrication of thin, lightweight, and flexible antennas. Recently, nanomaterials such as graphene, carbon nanotubes, and conductive polymers came into play. However, poor conductivity limits their use. We show RF devices for wireless communication based on metallic two-dimensional (2D) titanium carbide (MXene) prepared by a Read more about 2D spray on transparent wireless antennae created[…]

Lenovo is making it easier for their customers running Linux to update their firmware now on ThinkPad, ThinkStation, and ThinkCenter hardware. Lenovo has joined the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and following collaboration with the upstream developers is beginning to roll-out support for offering their device firmware on this platform so it can be easily Read more about Lenovo To Make Their BIOS/UEFI Updates Easier For Linux Users Via LVFS[…]

There are, to date, seven different HDMI versions, starting with 1.0, which was introduced back in 2002, and currently ending with 2.1, which was only announced back in November of 2017. The amount of bandwidth each each version is capable of supporting, as well as any additional cool features a version may possess, is decided Read more about You Are Probably Using the Wrong HDMI Cord[…]

Nvidia’s flagship Titan V graphics cards may have hardware gremlins causing them to spit out different answers to repeated complex calculations under certain conditions, according to computer scientists. The Titan V is the Silicon Valley giant’s most powerful GPU board available to date, and is built on Nv’s Volta technology. Gamers and casual users will Read more about 2 + 2 = 4, er, 4.1, no, 4.3… Nvidia’s Titan V GPUs spit out ‘wrong answers’ in scientific simulations[…]

March 19 is the first day of IBM Think 2018, the company’s flagship conference, where the company will unveil what it claims is the world’s smallest computer. They’re not kidding: It’s literally smaller than a grain of salt. But don’t let the size fool you: This sucker has the computing power of the x86 chip Read more about IBM unveils ‘world’s smallest computer’ with blockchain at Think 2018[…]

Razer is a vendor that makes high-end gaming hardware, including laptops, keyboards and mice. I opened a ticket with Razor a few days ago asking them if they wanted to support the LVFS project by uploading firmware and sharing the firmware update protocol used. I offered to upstream any example code they could share under Read more about Razer doesn’t care about Linux[…]

A joint China-Austria team has performed quantum key distribution between the quantum-science satellite Micius and multiple ground stations located in Xinglong (near Beijing), Nanshan (near Urumqi), and Graz (near Vienna). Such experiments demonstrate the secure satellite-to-ground exchange of cryptographic keys during the passage of the satellite Micius over a ground station. Using Micius as a Read more about Real-world intercontinental quantum communications enabled by the Micius satellite[…]

The Japanese company will unveil and test its “brain-to-vehicle” technology at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The “B2V” system requires a driver to wear a skullcap that measures brain-wave activity and transmits its readings to steering, acceleration and braking systems that can start responding before the driver initiates the action.The driver still Read more about Nissan’s Car of the Future Will Read Your Brain Waves[…]