An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.

The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an … Read More → "How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell"

Venezuela relies heavily on hydroelectric power generation but has been suffering from a long and heavy drought. Now it’s taking desperate action, introducing a three-day weekend to help reduce demand for electricity.

Water levels in the country’s major hydro plants are reported by Bloomberg to be reaching a ‘critical’ state. The water … Read More → "Venezuela switches to three-day weekend to conserve electricity"

A new predictive keyboard app called ShakeSpeak—released in honor of the upcoming 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death on April 23—will help you send messages like the famous Bard.

In order to create ShakeSpeak, the predictive keyboard app company SwiftKey analyzed the language used throughout the Bard’s complete works. As a result, the app can predict Shakespeare& … Read More → "Text like Shakespeare with a predictive text keyboard app"

A computer-generated portrait using machine learning algorithms created by The Next Rembrandt project has been shown off by a team from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The computer analysed Dutch master Rembrandt’s work, thoroughly tagged by humans.

“We examined the entire collection … Read More → "3D-printed masterpiece? Computer mimics brushstrokes of Rembrandt"

Browse through your Facebook News Feed and you’ll see photos play a prominent part, meaning visually impaired users are missing out on a lot of updates from their friends. Now Facebook’s engineers have harnessed the power of an artificial intelligence network to describe these pictures to blind or partially blind users.

Facebook is calling the system “automatic alternative text” and it’ … Read More → "Facebook is now using AI to describe photos to the blind"

Paro is a $5,000 therapy seal that’s said to have therapeutic effects on elderly individuals with dementia. The Front Porch Center, a California organization that runs retirement communities. It deployed Paro in seven homes, and studied the effects over the course of six months.

Unsurprisingly, the results were positive: … Read More → "Unnecessary study finds adorable robot seals make people happier"

Building a robot is hard work. It’s expensive. It requires expertise in a number of disciplines, and a willingness to make certain trade-offs for practical reasons. But many of those obstacles melt away when you can 3-D print a robot with liquids and solids simultaneously.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and … Read More → "MIT can now 3D print robots made of both solids and liquids"

If you need knee replacement surgery in the future, doctors may be able to create a custom-made joint from your own stem cells. A team from St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, have developed the Biopen, a type of 3D printer that uses “ink” made from hydrogel and stem cells. While 3D printing stem cells isn’t new, the exact shape of a patient’s … Read More → "‘Biopen’ lets doctors 3D print cartilage during surgery"

As electronic devices become ever more complex, and the densities of components in those devices increases exponentially, we are rapidly approaching the day when the limitations of Moore’s Law will be realized. In an effort to avert this eventuality, research has concentrated on moving away from traditional silicon technologies and into the realms of molecule-sized components and alternative materials. In this vein, researchers at the … Read More → "World’s smallest diode made from a single DNA molecule"

To build their squishy aquatic robots, a team of researchers in Italy drew inspiration from the octopus. The animal’s movements don’t require a lot of brainpower. Rather than relying on top-down instructions from the central nervous system, many of an octopus’s movements happen almost spontaneously–the result of the physical interplay between the … Read More → "Octopus-inspired robots can grasp, crawl, and swim"