New Wearable Device Is Virtual Ski Coach Inside Your Boot

The Carv is a smartphone-connected wearable device that acts like a virtual ski instructor.
CREDIT: Carv

Whether you fear face-planting the moment you get off a chairlift or you're perfectly at home on the slopes but want to better navigate a tricky black-diamond course, a new wearable gadget for skiers is here to help.

Mars Comes to Earth: Scientists 'Visit' Red Planet with Augmented Reality

A screen view from OnSight, a software tool developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in collaboration with Microsoft. OnSight uses real rover data to create a 3D simulation of the Martian environment.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — NASA is aiming to send astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s, but a new technology could help scientists explore the surface of the Red Planet — from its sprawling craters to its enormous volcanoes — from right here on Earth.

The Real Reason AI Won’t Take Over Anytime Soon

Much of the recent progress in AI research has been courtesy of an approach known as deep learning.
CREDIT: PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek | Shutterstock.com

Artificial intelligence has had its share of ups and downs recently. In what was widely seen as a key milestone for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, one system beat a former world champion at a mind-bendingly intricate board game. But then, just a week later, a "chatbot" that was designed to learn from its interactions with humans on Twitter had a highly public racist meltdown on the social networking site.

Ultrathin 'E-Skin' Turns Your Hand into an Electronic Display

Japanese scientists have demonstrated a superflexible electronic skin (or e-skin) display made from organic electronics.
CREDIT: Someya Lab/University of Tokyo

Your smartphone could one day be replaced by an electronic display laminated to the back of your hand, if the inventors of a new ultrathin "e-skin" have their way.

Cosmic Ray Tech May Unlock Pyramids' Secrets

Researchers fill detectors with gas at CEA lab in France.
CREDIT: Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, HIP Institute and the Faculty of Engineering (Cairo University)

A new generation of muon telescopes has been built to detect the presence of secret structures and cavities in Egypt's pyramids, a team of researchers announced on Friday.

DARPA Space Plane Could Make Daily Satellite Launches Possible

This artist's illustration shows one possible Boeing design for the U.S. military's XS-1 Experimental Spaceplane concept.
CREDIT: Boeing

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is now entering the second and third phases of its ambitious Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program, which aims to make launching satellites a daily occurrence.

New Debugging Method Finds 23 Undetected Security Flaws in Popular Web Applications

A new debugging system found 23 previously undiagnosed security flaws in 50 popular Web applications, and it took no more than 64 seconds to analyze any given program.

By exploiting some peculiarities of the popular Web programming framework Ruby on Rails, MIT researchers have developed a system that can quickly comb through tens of thousands of lines of application code to find security flaws.

We are closing in on possible whereabouts of Planet Nine

Mike Brown: that’s where it is (maybe)

Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty

By Shannon Hall

The search zone is growing smaller. Astronomers have further constrained the likely whereabouts of Planet Nine: the planet that, if it exists, is more massive than the Earth and roams the outer reaches of the solar system.

Google wins copyright battle over books

Image copyrightGetty Images

The US Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Google in its 11-year legal battle with an authors group.

The Court said it would not hear an appeal from the Authors Guild, which claimed Google breached copyright laws by scanning books without permission.

How monitoring behaviour could unmask the fraudsters

Image copyrightThinkstock

Image captionCould the man behind the mask be pretending to be you?

Thieves and fraudsters want to get their hands on our cash and data. And these days they can attack us from all corners of the globe.

Financial fraud losses totalled £755m in the UK last year. Worldwide, the figure runs into billions.

Intel demos 3D XPoint, showcases Optane’s 2GB/s performance

Last year, Intel and Micron announced that they’d developed a new memory standard. This new memory, 3D XPoint (pronounced “crosspoint”) is a non-volatile memory that Intel is advertising as the first major memory breakthrough in 25 years. Early speculation was that 3D XPoint would be based or at least related-to phase change memory, but Intel has denied that this is the case without specifying the exact details of how Optane actually works. Intel has been claiming that 3D XPoint (marketed as Optane) would deliver up to 1000x the performance of NAND flash, and the company actually demoed the new technology live at Shenzhen IDF this week.

Whatsapp adds end-to-end encryption

Image copyrightGetty Images

Instant messaging service Whatsapp has announced it will encrypt all its users' communications from Tuesday.

With end-to-end encryption, messages are scrambled as they leave the sender's device and can only be decrypted by the recipient's device.

Computer paints 'new Rembrandt' after old works analysis

Image copyrightThe Next Rembrandt

Image captionThe painting was produced by a computer that had analysed existing Rembrandt works

A team of technologists working with Microsoft and others have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Dutch master Rembrandt.

The portrait was created after existing works by the artist were analysed by a computer.

Hackers Broke Into Hospitals Despite Software Flaw Warnings: Report

The hackers who seriously disrupted operations at a large hospital chain recently and held some data hostage broke into a computer server left vulnerable despite urgent public warnings since at least 2007 that it needed to be fixed with a simple update, The Associated Press has learned.