Two self-driving prototype vehicles, one operated by Google and the other operated by Delphi Automotive, earlier this week avoided a collision in Palo Alto, California. Neither car touched the other, but the incident spurred a number of rattled headlines over the so-called "near miss." In actuality, both vehicles responded as they were supposed to, the companies said in response to the media brouhaha....

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During its annual developers conference held last week, Google I/O, the company revealed its latest effort to drive development of Cardboard VR apps and spur the growth of VR content across YouTube. Google has released blueprints for VR headsets made of cardboard and encouraged third parties to bring their best designs to market. Several are available for purchase with a "Works with Google...

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Windows 10 is a well-meaning effort by Microsoft to mollify Windows 8 haters and coax Windows 7 loyalists to upgrade — all while stubbornly sticking to its goal of a single OS for every possible platform. And by framing the problem that way, Microsoft has given itself a nearly impossible task. To the company’s credit, each new build lurches closer to being usable, although...

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After more than a decade of research, scientists at Stanford University have created a working computer based on the physical movement of water droplets. It’s a breakthrough in physical computing that gets at the most basic definition of a computer: any programmable device that can carry about logical (mathematical) operations. By combining cutting-edge theory in fluid dynamics with very-much-not-cutting-edge theory in computing, the team was able...

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Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled the Surface Hub, a large-screen device meant to dramatically improve business collaboration. The 55-inch and 84-inch interactive displays marry white boards with presentations, voice with video, speakers with addressees, Android with iOS, and Windows 10 with conference rooms. The Surface Hubs will go on sale July 1, and on Sept. 1, they'll start shipping out of a Microsoft facility...

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HGST (Formerly Hitachi’s hard drive division) has been talking about its helium storage devices for several years and the firm is finally ready to ship the new drives for enterprise deployments. The Ultrastar Archive Ha10 isn’t just filled with helium — it also uses new Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to write data to the disk. While this allows for unprecedented areal density, there...

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Apple this week announced Swift 2 and said it would open-source it later this year. Swift 2 is a programming language for iOS, OS X and watchOS. It has a new error handling model that works with Apple SDKs and NSError. Two new features in Objective-C -- nullability annotations and generics -- make Swift 2 work better with Apple SDKs. "Generating higher-quality code...

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Chrome developers have announced that an upcoming version of Chrome will prevent video ads from automatically playing when a website loads. The new feature has already been pushed out to beta builds and can be manually enabled by opening Chrome’s content settings and adjusting the plugin content options. This push comes as part of an overall effort to improve Chrome’s performance on modern...

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Despite the isolated success of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease, and a few other impressive parlor tricks with BCIs, running massive networks of wire electrodes through the brain is probably not going to be a long-term solution to any brain problem. Recognizing this truth, many researchers have turned to nanoparticle-based approaches for remote, non-invasive stimulation of the brain. A single 10 ug...

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Researchers at Linz University in Austria has developed the world’s first artificial leg capable of simulating some of the “feeling” in a normal leg. Professor Hubert Egger led a live demonstration during a Vienna press conference, detailing how the Austrian researchers have fitted a human being with a leg prosthesis that sends feelings to its wearer. Here’s how it works: Doctors surgically move the...

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Depending on how you look at it, the new crop of Intel Bay Trail quad core Atom convertible Windows 8.1 tablets are an amazing value or they're just netbooks with detachable screens. In fact both are true, as we learned with the Asus Transformer Book T100, one of the first Windows 8.1 Bay Trail tablets with detachable keyboard that sells for just $349-...

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We've waited a long time for the Asus Taichi Windows 8 convertible Ultrabook-tablet, first announced in June 2012, well ahead of Windows 8's official Oct. 26, 2012 launch date. Delayed a few months, the computer is just now hitting stores in its 11.6" Taichi 21 form. The Asus Taichi 31, the 13.3" version with identical specs except the larger display panels and an...

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There's nothing like the 5.3" Samsung Galaxy Note, the world's first phablet to achieve mass market success. Available first overseas at the end of 2011, it made its way to AT&T in the late winter of 2012 and now it's finally available on T-Mobile US. What's a phablet? A smartphone that's big enough to be a small tablet. This Android smartphone has a...

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The Motorola Droid RAZR M is everything that the Motorola Droid RAZR was, but less. It's smaller and much less expensive than the RAZR was at launch. Despite the price, you get most everything that was captivating about the Droid RAZR: a slim design with a Kevlar back, Gorilla Glass and a water resistant nano-coating. It is as daring and sexy looking as...

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The statement that “human-level artificial intelligence is the last invention mankind need ever make” has been much bandied about of late. It implies that once we have invented something as smart as ourselves, it can take over and start making the inventions itself. The concept is most often pronounced by a computer scientists speaking from a podium and resembling nothing so much as a...

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Do you love to learn? Then you should take a look at this massive sale happening over at Udemy. Thousands of online courses are being discounted to just $10 a pop, so you can take multiple courses even if you’re on a budget. Whether you need to learn how to design logos or how to speak Arabic, there’s something for nigh-on every area...

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