Dyson driving towards all-terrain electric car

James Dyson, famed for his vacuum cleaners, hinted Thursday that his electric car would be more energy efficient than rivals—and with "very large wheels" for city and rough-terrain driving.

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A multi-scale body-part mask guided attention network for person re-identification

Person re-identification entails the automated identification of the same person in multiple images from different cameras and with different backgrounds, angles or positions. Despite recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), person re-identification remains a highly challenging task, particularly due to the many variations in a person's pose, as well as other differences associated with lighting, occlusion, misalignment and background clutter.

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Making a case for robotic objects as anger outlets

Coochi coo. Robots have undergone impressive designs and engineering for social use, manifested in puppy-like robots with expressive, blinking eyes, to little space robots. These little pals and helpers appeal to the home-confined elderly and children. These are social robots designed to understand and respond to cues.

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Storm water banking could help Texas manage floods and droughts

Massive, destructive floods such as those caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 are a stark reality in Texas, but so are prolonged ground-cracking droughts.

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How Uber and other digital platforms could trick us using behavioral science—unless we act fast

Uber's business model is incredibly simple: It's a platform that facilitates exchanges between people. And Uber's been incredibly successful at it, almost eliminating the transaction costs of doing business in everything from shuttling people around town to delivering food.

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Research spotlights the role of cover crops in slowing herbicide resistance

An article in the most recent edition of the journal Weed Science shows that cover crops can play an important role in slowing the development of herbicide resistant weeds.

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Show your hands: Smartwatches sense hand activity

We've become accustomed to our smartwatches and smartphones sensing what our bodies are doing, be it walking, driving or sleeping. But what about our hands? It turns out that smartwatches, with a few tweaks, can detect a surprising number of things your hands are doing.

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Hummingbird robot uses AI to soon go where drones can't

What can fly like a bird and hover like an insect?

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Rideshare firms have snarled up San Francisco: study

The ride-hailing era ushered in by Uber and Lyft once promised to complement public transit, reduce car ownership and alleviate congestion.

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A friction reduction system for deformable robotic fingertips

Researchers at Kanazawa University have recently developed a friction reduction system based on a lubricating effect, which could have interesting soft robotics applications. Their system, presented in a paper published in Taylor & Francis' Advanced Robotics journal, could aid the development of robots that can efficiently manipulate objects under both dry and wet conditions.

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AI develops human-like number sense – taking us a step closer to building machines with general intelligence

Numbers figure pretty high up on the list of what a computer can do well. While humans often struggle to split a restaurant bill, a modern computer can make millions of calculations in a mere second. Humans, however, have an innate and intuitive number sense that helped us, among other things, to build computers in the first place.

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We must rip up our environmental laws to address the extinction crisis

Humans are causing the Earth's sixth mass extinction event, with an estimated one million species at risk of extinction.

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Many young women find pleasure in sexually explicit material but it still reinforces gender inequality

Pornography is ubiquitous, highly accessible, and vivid. It is increasingly influential in the sex lives and sexual development of consumers around the world.

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Modern economic theory explains prehistoric Mediterranean societies

A Florida State University professor's research suggests a theory by famed economist Thomas Piketty on present-day wealth inequality actually explains a lot about how smaller-scale societies in the prehistoric Mediterranean developed.

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Microsoft to turn next chapter in raising talk to conversations

On Monday at Build 2019, Microsoft's annual conference for developers, the company showed off the technology for a conversational engine, to integrate with voice assistant Cortana.

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Scientists discover a new class of single-atom nanozymes

Nanozymes—catalytic nanomaterials with enzyme-like characteristics—offer the advantage of low cost, high stability, tunable catalytic activity and ease of mass production. For these reasons, they have been widely applied in biosensing, therapeutics and environmental protection.

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Study finds high levels of abnormally fast brain waves in mild brain injury

A new study funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Navy finds that veterans and service members with a history of combat-related mild traumatic brain injury—compared with those in a control group—have much higher levels of abnormally fast brain waves in a region that plays a key role in consciousness.

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How sea level rise affects birds in coastal forests

When saltwater inundates coastal forests as sea levels rise, it kills salt-sensitive trees, leaving "ghost forests" of bare snags behind. A new study from North Carolina State University explores how changes in vegetation affect coastal bird species.

* This article was originally published here