Technology

Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the nineties shooter “Doom” and say they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It’s the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. ...

Russia has significantly increased its efforts to acquire Western technology and defense-related information as international sanctions continue to strain its war-driven economy, according to senior European intelligence officials. Officials from Sweden, Finland and Estonia told The Associated Press that Russian intelligence services are using a range of methods, including front companies, intermediaries and cyber operations, to obtain restricted technologies and ...

The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE), a joint mission by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the European Space Agency (ESA), was successfully launched Tuesday from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Carried by a Vega-C rocket, the satellite has entered its planned orbit with its solar panels successfully deployed. The SMILE mission is the first comprehensive, mission-level ...

There is a reason the most recognizable planet orbiting two stars is the fictional desert world of Tatooine from Star Wars. So far, astronomers have only located 18 examples of circumbinary planets—a fraction of the over 6,000 exoplanets known to science. However, researchers at Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) believe there’s a better way to spot potential dual-sun ...

A satellite image captured a stunning ring of phytoplankton that had enough splashes of color to make even the most ambitious fantasy film director blush. NASA Earth’s Facebook page shared the shimmering halo that formed near the Chatham Islands, some 500-plus miles away from New Zealand’s South Island and the city of Christchurch. As the post described, satellites can spot ...

Japan Airlines (JAL) will start using humanoid robots in ground handling tasks at Tokyo’s Haneda airport beginning May in a two-year trial, with a view to deploying them permanently as a solution to the country’s chronic labor shortage. The Chinese-made humanoids will move travellers’ luggage and cargo on the tarmac at Haneda, which handles more than 60 million passengers a ...

Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new artificial intelligence model on Friday, more than a year after it stunned the world with a low-cost chatbot that matched the capabilities of US rivals. The long-awaited DeepSeek-V4 “features an ultra-long context of one million words, achieving leadership in both domestic and open-source fields across agent capabilities, world knowledge, and reasoning performance”, the company ...

YouTube is offering Hollywood celebrities and entertainers a free detection tool to help combat their deepfakes, expanding the Google-owned video platform’s efforts to guard against AI-driven impersonations. Last month, YouTube introduced its likeness protection tool — which helps identify content in which a person’s face appears altered or generated using AI technology — to government officials, journalists, and political candidates. ...

A blue-eyed humanoid robot carefully opens a box and places a tool inside as a crowd of visitors watch the demonstration of “physical AI” skills at a major industrial trade fair in Germany. Made by German startup Agile Robots, it was among a host of robots showing off their moves at the event, underlining hopes of a coming AI-powered boost ...

Apple on Monday named longtime hardware boss John Ternus as its next CEO, turning to another insider to steer the iPhone maker after Tim Cook as it navigates a world radically altered by artificial intelligence, a technology it has lagged on. Cook, a supply-chain genius who boosted Apple’s market value by $3.6 trillion in his 15 years at the helm, ...