Aedan O'Brien

Popular video platform YouTube took down a number of combat robotics videos – robot vs. robot competitions popularised by the show BattleBots – on the grounds that they include “deliberate infliction of animal suffering or the forcing of animals to fight”, including “cock fighting”.   A recent video by YouTube channel Maker’s Muse brought the strange

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the Moon in 1969, they helped to cement the idea of a “moonshot” – a goal or achievement that challenges what we thought was possible.   While few moonshots measure up to the Apollo program, many of the world’s greatest inventions were once thought of as

Researchers have developed an electronics heat shield just 10 atoms thick, a shield that has the potential to make our gadgets both safer to use and more compact in the future.   Heat and electronics don’t mix well, which is why you might find your laptop shutting down in protest if you use it in

People around the world may be worried about nuclear tensions rising, but I think they’re missing the fact that a major cyberattack could be just as damaging – and hackers are already laying the groundwork.   With the US and Russia pulling out of a key nuclear weapons pact – and beginning to develop new

In July, the French daily newspaper Le Monde reported that the 0.6-mile (1 kilometre) solar road was a fiasco. In December 2016, when the trial road was unveiled, the French Ministry of the Environment called it “unprecedented”. French officials said the road, made of photovoltaic panels, would generate electricity to power streetlights in Tourouvre, a

After reports emerged that contractors had reviewed voice recordings for Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, all three companies moved to change their policies.   Although customers theoretically have the final word over their digital assistants, they’re not given the option of blocking the recordings outright. The companies say the data is collected and

Facebook has been clandestinely accumulating written transcriptions of its users’ conversations, which the social media giant recorded through their phone microphones. That’s according to third-party contractors who spoke to Bloomberg about the practice.   The contractors said that they were paid to listen in on countless, occasional vulgar conversations among Facebook Messenger users, though the

There are more pieces of plastic in the ocean than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Up to 14 million tons of plastic enters the ocean annually, 40 percent of which is considered “single-use”, which means it goes into the water within the same year that it was produced.   Most plastics never fully break

A pair of Romanian scientists have built a flying saucer — and it actually flies a lot like the ones you’ve probably seen in the movies. Razvan Sabie and Iosif Taposu unveiled the All-Directional Flying Object (ADIFO) in March, releasing a video that not only showed the saucer in flight, but also broke down the

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced via a tweet on Saturday that he would be launching The Boring Company China, the first international extension of his infrastructure and tunnelling construction company, in late August while in Shanghai for the second World Artificial Intelligence Conference.   In another tweet, the founder and CEO of The Boring Company confirmed that it

Despite weighing less than one tenth of a gram, a new robot out of the University of California, Berkeley, can withstand the weight of a 60-kilogram (132-pound) person stepping on it — drawing comparisons to a well-known pest.   “People may have experienced that, if you step on the cockroach, you may have to grind

Researchers have developed artificial cells that can respond to external chemical forces, just like real ones do. This exciting step could get us closer to using synthetic biological structures in real-world situations, such as targeted drug delivery or cleaning up pollution.   In this proof-of-principle study, scientists have succeeded in getting artificial cells to glow

Tesla on Monday announced its largest battery product. Called Megapack, it’s designed to simplify the installation process for large energy-storage projects. Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours of energy and convert up to 1.5 megawatts of energy from a direct current (DC) to an alternating current (AC) so homes can use it.

A new disruptive technology is on the horizon and it promises to take computing power to unprecedented and unimaginable heights. And to predict the speed of progress of this new “quantum computing” technology, the director of Google’s Quantum AI Labs, Hartmut Neven, has proposed a new rule similar to the Moore’s Law that has measured

Research on robotic prostheses is coming along in leaps and bounds, but one hurdle is proving quite tricky to overcome: a sense of touch. Among other things, this sense helps us control our grip strength – which is vitally important when it comes to having fine motor control for handling delicate objects.   Enter a

Facebook’s Messenger Kids is supposed to provide parents complete control over who their children chat can with on the app. But as The Verge reported on Monday, that key promise appears to have been broken, thanks to a design flaw with the app.   According to the report, Messenger Kids had a design flaw that

Solar cells that transfer sunlight into electricity are a brilliant part of modern technology, but one particular aspect has proven to be a huge headache. They’re not super efficient – most of the sunlight they absorb is lost in the form of heat.   As a result, the average efficiency of a commercial solar panel

Finding cheap and practical ways of removing salt from seawater could potentially help some of the 844 million people worldwide without regular access to clean water – and scientists just found a new nanoscale method for doing just that.   Using a tiny disc made of super-hydrophilic filter paper, layered with carbon nanotubes for light