Robots can’t solve any of these problems for us, but one machine can now brave the angst that is the crumbling tower of wooden blocks: Researchers at MIT report today in Science Robotics that they’ve engineered a robot to teach itself the complex physics of Jenga. This, though, is no game—it’s a big step in the daunting quest to get robots to manipulate objects in the real world. But the researchers didn’t teach it how to win against a human. Instead, the researchers asked the robot to do some exploring, probing blocks at random. “It knows what the blocks look like and where they are, but it doesn't really understand how they interact with each other,” says MIT roboticist Nima Fazeli, lead author on the new paper.
As the robot explored, it discovered that some blocks are looser and require less pressure to move, while others are harder to budge. Like a human Jenga player, the robot has no way of knowing by sight alone what is going to be a good brick to tackle. “You look at the tower and your eyes don't tell you anything about which piece you should touch,” says MIT mechanical engineer Alberto Rodriguez, coauthor on the paper. “That information comes from probing it—it requires interactive perception.” With both sight and touch, the physics of a Jenga tower become more apparent.
Apple customers discovered a software bug on Monday that lets people listen in on other users by way of the company’s FaceTime video chat service. The bug allows a user to call someone on FaceTime and automatically begin hearing the other person before they pick up the call. The other person isn’t aware that the caller can hear them. The bug, confirmed by Bloomberg News, happens when a user creates a FaceTime conference call, puts in their phone number, and then adds the number of another person. The flaw was discussed on social media and picked up by website 9to5Mac.com.
Apple added multi-person FaceTime calling at the end of last year via a software update that was, in part, designed to address previous software bugs. Mobile users can disable FaceTime by going into their device’s settings. In the meantime, the Group FaceTime feature was temporarily made unavailable, according to Apple’s system status webpage. By disabling that feature at the source, the company appears to have prevented any further exploitation of the bug.
One of the major flaws with a touchscreen you wear on your wrist is that it’s not really going to be suitable for everyone. Just imagine how utterly useless a device based around a touchscreen is for someone who can’t see, and relies on physical touch to communicate things. But one company is at least trying, and has developed a smartwatch for people who are vision impaired, communicating in braille.
The concept here is called the “Dot”, and it’s a rather unusual smartwatch, taking the circular shape of a standard watch, but throwing in a mechanism to raise and lower dots on its surface to spell out words from notifications. The technology here is a form of active braille, because while static braille always exists in the form it was printed in, active allows the display to change, raising and lowering a series of 36 dots based on the needs of what’s being transmitted to the Dot watch.
Engineers haven't heard from the beleaguered robot since June 10, 2018, shortly before a global dust storm developed on Mars. The Opportunity rover, which is solar-powered, has ignored hundreds of calls from Earth since it first fell silent, which made team members worry that its mission has come to an end. NASA has developed a new, more powerful collection of commands to try to force the long-silent Opportunity rover on Mars to resume operations.
As the silence stretched on over the summer, mission members hoped that the storm had simply dropped dust on the solar panels that power Opportunity and that a natural seasonal weather phenomenon on Mars could clear that dust away, letting the rover recharge. (Those dust-clearing events began in November and were expected to continue through this week.) The new commands are designed to tackle that possibility and two others: the failures of its primary or of both its X-band radios. (In the statement, NASA called these scenarios unlikely.) With this new approach, Opportunity will be told not just to beep but also to switch communication modes entirely. The agency said it will send the new commands to Opportunity for "several weeks"; if the rover remains silent, NASA will then need to decide whether to give up all hope for the mission.
Those few seconds before opening an email about a university application can be excruciating. What comes afterward could be a wave of joy -- or a wall of dread. For 277 students who applied to the master's program at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, a mistake by the Ivy League school meant applicants experienced both emotions, in relatively quick succession. Columbia's admissions office accidentally informed the applicants Wednesday that they were accepted to the program, only to rescind the acceptance within an hour, the university said in a statement to CNN.
The mistake was "due to human error," according to Columbia University Vice Dean for Education Julie Kornfeld.
"We deeply apologize for this miscommunication," Kornfeld said in the statement. "We value the energy and enthusiasm that our applicants bring to the admissions process, and regret the stress and confusion caused by this mistake." Columbia, in New York, is not the first university to experience this kind of problem. In the past few years, similar acceptance errors have occurred at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 2016, SUNY Buffalo accidentally sent out acceptance emails to 5,109 applicants when an incorrect email list was generated from a database of people who had applied.
On Tuesday, Google’s Jigsaw unit published a quiz that tests users’ abilities to identify phishing emails. The quiz tests you on a series of emails to see if you can distinguish telltale signs of phishing. “Phishing is, by far, the most common form of cyberattack,” Jigsaw explains in a blog post. “One percent of emails sent today are phishing attempts.” According to the post, the quiz is based on trainings Jigsaw held with “10,000 journalists, activists, and political leaders.” In total, there are eight examples that Google tests you on, some representing legitimate emails and others phishing scams. Many of the examples are actually based on real events, such as the massive phishing attempt that hit Google Doc users in 2017 or an email that Russian hackers sent to Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016.
Jigsaw is an experimental incubator project within Google that’s aimed at tackling broad geopolitical problems in the tech space, often through relatively simple microsites and software projects. In the past, the group has produced troll-detecting software, an open-sourced tool to help media organizations provide journalists with VPNs, and AI tools that filter out abusive language.
How John Podesta's email account was hacked: When the phishing email first arrived, John Podesta referred it to a number of aides. An aide named Charles Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately.” But according to the Times report, that email was a simple flub — at least according to the aide in question. Delavan says he knew the email was a fraud, based on similar phishing attempts that had been spotted and blocked. He had meant to write “illegitimate email,” and simply mistyped. On that recommendation, the email was opened and the account was compromised, resulting in the publication of Podesta’s archive. Unaffiliated trolls subsequently used information from the emails to compromise Podesta’s iCloud account and remotely wipe his iPhone and iPad.
THERE ARE BREACHES, and there are megabreaches, and there’s Equifax. But a newly revealed trove of leaked data tops them all for sheer volume: 772,904,991 unique email addresses, over 21 million unique passwords, all recently posted to a hacking forum. The data set was first reported by security researcher Troy Hunt, who maintains Have I Been Pwned, a way to search whether your own email or password has been compromised by a breach at any point. (Trick question: It has.) The so-called Collection #1 is the largest breach in Hunt's menagerie, and it’s not particularly close. The trove appeared briefly on MEGA, the cloud service, and persisted on what Hunt refers to as “a popular hacking forum.” It sat in a folder called Collection #1, which contained over 12,000 files that weigh in at over 87 gigabytes. While it’s difficult to confirm exactly where all that info came from, it appears to be something of a breach of breaches; that is to say, it claims to aggregate over 2,000 leaked databases that contain passwords whose protective hashing has been cracked.
This is pretty darn serious! While it doesn't appear to include more sensitive information, like credit card or Social Security numbers, Collection #1 is historic for scale alone. A few elements also make it especially unnerving. First, around 140 million email accounts and over 10 million unique passwords in Collection #1 are new to Hunt’s database, meaning they’re not just duplicates from prior megabreaches. Then there’s the way in which those passwords are saved in Collection #1. “These are all plain text passwords. If we take a breach like Dropbox, there may have been 68 million unique email addresses in there, but the passwords were cryptographically hashes making them very difficult to use,” says Hunt. Instead, the only technical prowess someone with access to the folders needs to break into your accounts is the ability to scroll and click.
And lastly, Hunt also notes that all of these records were sitting not in some dark web backwater, but on one of the most popular cloud storage sites—until it got taken down—and then on a public hacking site. They weren’t even for sale; they were just available for anyone to take.
Imagine: your feet swell during a basketball game because you’ve been running back and forth on the court, and your sneakers detect your blood pressure. Instead of reaching down and untying your laces, the shoes loosen automatically. Never again will you have to fuss around with your laces because, guess what, your shoes already know what you want to do.
The Adapt BB, priced at $350, does more than just lace itself. Using a power lacing system called Fit Adapt, users can adjust to find the perfect fit whether it's manually or digitally, using the Nike Adapt mobile app. A custom motor and gear train tighten or loosen to customize to your foot. For Nike, this opens a new world of smart data insights into athletes' workouts. For athletes, it represents a new era and way they interact with sneakers.
This company is changing the way we see prostheses. Open Bionics is a UK-based start-up tech company. Its mission is to create affordable 3D printed prostheses. They are about 30 times cheaper than other prostheses on the market. They operate using sensors attached to the skin to detect muscle movements. The muscle movements control the hand and open and close fingers.
Open Bionics is currently working on arms that are straight out of the science fiction universe. Themes from Marvel, Disney, and Star Wars franchises are available. The goal is to make kids feel proud of their prostheses. This changes the image of prostheses from medical devices to bionic arms inspired by characters.
Doing laundry is never fun, but the worst part might just be all the folding that comes after your clothes have gone through the dryer, thanks to how tedious and time-consuming it can be. So, what if you never had to fold your laundry again? The FoldiMate is a tech tool that's designed to make laundry day so much easier by folding your clothes for you. It's basically a robot that folds all your clothes quickly and perfectly every time, and it'll make you feel like you're really living in the future. The Jetsons may have flying cars, but honestly, I'll take freshly folded clothes over cruising through space any day.
FoldiMate just demoed the most recent prototype of their invention at CES 2019, and the new iteration of the device (which, by the way, looks a little like a sleek version of the copier in your office) has been redesigned and is even more advanced than previous models. The new FoldiMate can now fold a full load of laundry made up of around 25 items in less than 5 minutes, all while automatically adapting to each clothing item type and size. Size-wise, the FoldiMate can adapt to kids' clothing from 6 years old, and up to size XXL, as well as medium-sized towels. It's not suitable for small things like socks and baby clothes, and large and bulky items like sheets and hooded sweatshirts should be avoided as well.
Days ago, a leftover from the solar system's formation was minding its own business more than a billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit. Then, just as humans back on Earth celebrated the new year, a robotic explorer—NASA's New Horizons spacecraft—flew by the object at ten miles a second, snapping pictures and beaming them back home. Today, the New Horizons team shared with the world the first full-fledged images of the space rock, which is officially called 2014 MU69 and nicknamed by the team Ultima Thule.
Way back in 2018, researchers had speculated that the object was shaped like a bowling pin. Now we know that they have a frosty, 21-mile-tall snowman on their hands. The latest imagery of MU69 reveals that it is actually made of two roughly spherical lumps of rock and ice, seemingly welded together in a gentle collision and pirouetting in space every 15 hours or so. The images also show that MU69's two lobes measure 12 and nine miles across and are a ruddy, mottled brown.
Students at University of the Pacific are about to have a futuristic dream come true: a robot that delivers you snacks. PepsiCo's Hello Goodness brand, which was created in 2015 to provide healthier snacks and beverages to consumers on the go, partnered with the San Francisco Bay Area-based Robby Technologies to bring this self-driving snack robot — or "snackbot" — to life. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., students at the private university in Stockton, California, can order food and drinks to one of more than 50 locations across campus through the snackbot app.
All snacks and beverages are part of a Hello Goodness portfolio. These include Pure Leaf Tea and LIFEWTR on the drinks side, and Baked Lay’s potato crisps and SunChips for food. The University of the Pacific will serve as a test site with three to five snackbots roaming across campus starting today, following several weeks of testing, according to Scott Finlow, vice president of innovation and insights for global foodservice at PepsiCo.
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