"In practice, we don't usually get any further than a sort of reference face, such as 'a European male.' That's not much use to a forensic investigator."

It was once a shoreline buried by enough trash to render it invisible, warranting the unfortunate nickname “toilet bowl”. Now the Philippines' Manila Bay beach is unrecognisably clean compared with a few months ago, a transformation so sudden and extreme that it brought tears to the eyes of residents.

With the election approaching, lawmakers are facing up to the fact they need to do something about the explosion in manipulated media.

A research group led by Washington State University scientists has found a way to turn daily plastic waste products into jet fuel.

Few human-made structures last for millenia, but as Alexander Rose explains, it is possible for design for extreme longevity if you look to the lessons of history.

Netflix is still winning the war for consumers' hearts.

Consultants say 60% will be grown in vats or plant-based products that taste like meat

By 2100 there could be 4.9bn dead users on Facebook. So who controls our digital legacy after we have gone? As Black Mirror returns, we delve into the issue

Michelin Uptis passenger-car tires will be road tested on the Chevy Bolt EV and could be on sale as soon as 2024.

Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that any plan to sufficiently address the climate crisis will need to cost at least $10 trillion.

Two UCLA scientists have developed a technology to extract the electrical charge from snow and convert it into power.

Listen: ‘Robots’ are not coming for your jobs. I hope we can be very clear here—at this particular point in time, ‘robots’ are not sentient agents capable of seeking out and applying for your job and then landing the gig on its comparatively superior merits. ‘Robots’ are not currently algorithmically scanning LinkedIn and Monster.com with an intent to displace you with their artificial intelligence. Nor are ‘robots’ gathered in the back of a warehouse somewhere conspiring to take human jobs en masse. A robot is not ‘coming for’, or ‘stealing’ or ‘killing’ or ‘threatening’ to take away your job. Management is.

Even if the Boring Company's “people mover” for the Las Vegas Convention Center is a bust, it helps burnish the city's high-tech brand.

A new study shows that quantum technology will catch up with today’s encryption standards much sooner than expected. That should worry anybody who needs to store data securely for 25 years or so.

As autonomous vehicles proliferate, insurers face lower premiums

The thing is robots don't (yet) autonomously arrange to show up at your workplace, uninvited, and take your job. Instead, your boss entertains sales calls (or solicits them!) from companies who want to see your work replaced with a robot, and then your boss makes a decision about whether that replacement will come with an equitable sharing of the fruits of automation (shorter hours and higher pay all around!) or whether they will be hoarded by the forces of capital ("sorry, the robot stole your job, nothing I can do about it").

DARPA, the Department of Defense's research arm, is paying scientists to invent ways to instantly read soldiers' minds using tools like genetic engineering of the human brain, nanotechnology and infrared beams. The end goal? Thought-controlled weapons, like swarms of drones that someone sends to the skies with a single thought or the ability to beam images from one brain to another.

Since the birth of the space age, the dream of catching a ride to another solar system has been hobbled by the “tyranny of the rocket equation,” which sets hard limits on the speed and size of the spacecraft we sling into the cosmos. Even with today’s most powerful rocket engines, scientists estimate it would take 50,000 years to reach our closest interstellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. If humans ever hope to see an alien sunrise, transit times will have to drop significantly.

These military bots that mimic snakes, birds, and insects have a "Black Mirror" vibe.

Satellite data plus artificial intelligence equals no place to hide.

In Ted Chiang’s new collection of stories, technology can be a force for human—and robotic—good. By Joyce Carol Oates.

Could Tesla owners one day farm out their cars as self-driving taxis?

Chess and Go were child’s play. Now A.I. is winning at capture the flag. Will such skills translate to the real world?

A consensus is emerging about what the rules for AI should be, at least in rough outline. But it's still unclear who will do the regulating.

After a century, Americans are choosing to live together–transforming not just the buildings we live in, but the way we live in them.

Welcome to the home of the future in a time of climate change. As weather gets wilder and less predictable, firms that design, construct or improve housing with storm safety and resiliency in mind are increasingly in demand.

Canberra will be effectively powered by renewable energy from October 1, according to the ACT's Climate Change Minister.

Film is sci-fi, but its premise may one day be true. Could we move Earth to a wider orbit?

The behavioral revolution in economics was triggered by a simple, haunting question: what if people don’t act rationally? This same question now vexes the technology field. In the online world, once expected to be a place of ready information and easy collaboration, lies and hate can spread faster than truth and kindness. Corporate systems, too, elicit irrational behavior. For example, when predicting sales, employees often hide bad deals and selectively report the good ones.

Our very attempts to stave off disaster make unpredictable outcomes more likely.

Pro tip: AI trained on human faces has no idea how to generate glasses, jewelry, or backgrounds.

Thanks to advances in machine learning, computers have gotten really good at identifying what’s in photographs. They started beating humans at the task years ago, and can now even generate fake images that look eerily real. While the technology has come a long way, it’s still not entirely foolproof. In particular, researchers have found that image detection algorithms remain susceptible to a class of problems called adversarial examples.

Artificial intelligence has defeated chess grandmasters, Go champions, professional poker players, and, now, world-class human experts in the online strategy games Dota 2 and StarCraft II. No AI currently exists, however, that can outduel a human strapped into a fighter jet in a high-speed, high-G dogfight. As modern warfare evolves to incorporate more human-machine teaming, DARPA seeks to automate air-to-air combat, enabling reaction times at machine speeds and freeing pilots to concentrate on the larger air battle.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that humans aren’t great at predicting the consequences of technology. After all, social media platforms, which began as a way for friends to connect online, are today being used to radicalize terrorists and potentially swing presidential elections. Imagine, then, the chaos that could ensue with new technologies that don’t even pretend to be friendly.

A new Li-ion battery technology developed by the US Army has piqued the interest of Jeff Dahn, Tesla’s main battery research partner.