The chirp of the cicada, the sound of many summers, has received an electronic upgrade that turns the insects into cyborg loudspeakers playing anything from Pachelbel’s Canon to the theme from Top Gun. The researchers behind the work say it could be used to spread warning messages during an emergency. Naoto Nishida and his colleagues…
From sundials to atomic clocks, our understanding of time has become a lot more accurate as technological developments allowed us to measure it more precisely. Much more than helping us arrive on time, clocks permit us to discern our location. Longitude, for example, is determined by measuring the difference in time from a set position,…
Many people have strong beliefs about whether abortion should be legal Michael Bihmayer/Imago/Alamy Does God exist? Should we legalise all drugs? Are the Harry Potter books any good? Your position on these thorny questions and more can now be predicted by an artificial intelligence model that was trained on the beliefs of more than 40,000…
Microsoft compared Liquid Glass to Windows Vista on its Instagram account It’s rather late to the party in drawing this kind of comparison Mind you, if anyone has a right to do so, it’s Microsoft, which brought in transparency with the Aero effect on the desktop of Vista Microsoft has joined the throng of those…
Illustration of a chip containing quantum bits, or qubits Pete Hansen/Shutterstock The effort to build truly useful quantum computers often comes down to making them bigger by adding qubits, the quantum bits that are the basic building blocks of these devices. But creating quantum chaos inside them could have the same effect – and let…
Researchers from the University of Rochester and University of California, Santa Barbara, engineered a laser device smaller than a penny that they say could power everything from the LiDAR systems used in self-driving vehicles to gravitational wave detection, one of the most delicate experiments in existence to observe and understand our universe. Laser-based measurement techniques,…
The first iOS 26 developer is out now ahead of its public beta launch in July One of its upgrades is a new option called ‘Keep Audio in Headphones’ This should reduce auto-switching problems for wireless headphones If you’re tired of your iPhone automatically switching to every other Bluetooth device other than your headphones, then…
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is getting an online multiplayer mode called Fox Hunt Fox Hunt is a “completely original online battle mode” Director Yu Sahara said the mode is set in the same world as the main game, but “gameplay is completely different” Konami has announced that Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater…
A Danish-German research collaboration with participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) aims to develop new quantum light sources and technology for scalable quantum networks based on the rare-earth element erbium. The project EQUAL (Erbium-based silicon quantum light sources) is funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark with 40 million Danish crowns (about 5.3 million euros). It…
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has signed an online child safety bill that requires Apple and Google to ensure that their app stores verify the age of users in the nation’s second most populous state. Under the new law, minors will need parental approval before they can download apps or make in-app purchases. The bill was…
