odd look at news on the web
Robotic Ripsaw M1 built to scout and draw fire for US Marines
1 May 2026 @ 2:11 am
At the recent Modern Day Marine Exposition in Washington, DC, Textron Systems rolled out a robot made to fight alongside US Marines. Called the Ripsaw M1, it's designed to act as a robotic force multiplier for the Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle (ARV) and Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV).Continue ReadingCategory: Military, EngineeringTags: Textron, 6-sleeper split-room camper van amplifies the Ford Nugget blueprint
30 April 2026 @ 11:04 pm
German camper van upstart Alcovia Vans has taken the well-known Ford Nugget multi-room camper van layout and adapted it for the ever-popular Fiat Ducato full-size van. It elevates the floor plan's versatility and comfort by adding an extra bed, trimming it all out in warm wood and felt, slatting in adjustable separation between the two "rooms" on the main floor, and adding an extra available seat to carry and sleep up to six people.Continue ReadingCategory: DJI announces entry-level but fully capable Lito Series drones
30 April 2026 @ 5:30 pm
DJI is one of the leading manufacturers of drones for aerial photography and videography. As social media continues to grow, beginners and content creators are seeking lightweight, easy-to-use devices for short-form video. DJI’s latest releases are designed to meet that demand.Continue ReadingCategory: Drones, Consumer Tech, TechnologyTags: Brain-inspired chip could reduce AI energy use by 70%
30 April 2026 @ 4:30 pm
Replicating the brain's capabilities, an impossible task, may theoretically require thousands of H100, one of NVIDIA's most powerful GPUs. At 700 watts per chip, we are looking at power consumption in the megawatt range. The brain runs on 20 watts. Scientists have taken inspiration from this remarkable organ to create chips that could cut conventional energy use by 70%.Continue ReadingCategory: AI and Humanoids, A vacuum company is somehow building the world's quickest car
30 April 2026 @ 3:57 pm
You might recognize Dreame as a fast-growing electronics brand from China that specializes in vacuum cleaners. Somehow, it's found time in its busy dust-buster-manufacturing schedule to stick a couple of rocket boosters on a sportscar and engineer the living daylights out of it... to the point that it's expected to hit a never-seen-before 0-60 mph (0-100 km/h) time of 0.9 seconds.Continue ReadingCategory: The naps that are red flags as we age, backed by two decades of data
30 April 2026 @ 3:27 pm
Naps are one of life's pleasures, but as we age, they can also be an early sign of health issues we're unaware of. These findings are thanks to a groundbreaking study of more than 1,000 people who had their daytime naps tracked for up to 19 years.Continue ReadingCategory: Sleep, Wellness and Healthy Living, Body and MindTags:This cargo ebike could replace your family car but fits in your closet
30 April 2026 @ 2:27 pm
Most electric cargo bikes live in garages, because that's the only place big enough to put them. JackRabbit's new MG Cargo is so slim it can live in a closet or a hallway. It will still carry your kids, a week's worth of groceries, or an adult passenger on the back – all on a frame that weighs less than a suitcase.Continue ReadingCategory: Urban Transport, Compact home in Quebec brings the forest indoors
30 April 2026 @ 12:58 pm
A compact residential dwelling designed by Canadian architectural firm Nathalie Thibodeau Architecte has been completed in Boileau, Quebec. Dubbed La Maraude, the home is set within a wooded site near the Maskinongé River, and dissolves the boundaries between interior living zones and the outdoors. The project invites the forest indoors through its geometric layout, emphasizing light, openness, and continuity by positioning courtyards as integral spaces throughout the home.Continue ReadingCategory: Antarctic telescope spies alien worlds with ever-shifting orbits
30 April 2026 @ 11:46 am
Planetary systems evolve over dizzying timespans. It typically takes millions, even billions, of years for gravitational interactions to noticeably alter a planet’s orbital trajectory. This stability allowed life to take hold on Earth. It also means orbital planes are effectively fixed on human timescales.Continue ReadingCategory: Astronomy, VW takes aim at the uber-cool Renault 5 with the polite-faced ID.Polo
30 April 2026 @ 10:11 am
In response to a growing backlash to a decade of touchscreen overload, VW has taken a step back into traditional territory with its new electric hatchback. The ID.Polo is the first of the brand's new electric-vehicle (EV) range to revive a generic name from the ICE era. The futuristic styling of the ID.3 has been dumped and, best of all, VW has brought back tactile buttons on the dashboard.Continue ReadingCategory:
Transforming a newly discovered software vulnerability into a cyberattack used to take months. Today—as the recent headlines over Anthropic’s Project Glasswing have shown—generative AI can do the job in minutes, often for less than a dollar of cloud computing time.But while large language models present a real cyber-threat, they also provide an opportunity to reinforce cyberdefenses. Anthropic reports its Claude Mythos preview model has already helped defenders preemptively discover over
This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics.This April, Hong Kong-based DAIMON Robotics has released Daimon-Infinity, which it describes as the largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI, featuring high resolution tactile sensing and spanning a wide range of tasks from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by collaborative efforts of partners across China and the globe, including Google DeepMind, Northwestern
Laboratory or in-field measurements are often considered the gold standard for certain aspects of power system design; however, measurement approaches always have limitations. Simulation can help overcome some of these limitations, including speeding up the design process, reducing design costs, and assessing situations that are often not feasible to measure directly. In this presentation, we will discuss two examples from the power system industry. The first case we will discuss involves corona performance testing of high-voltage transmission line hardware. Corona-free insulator hardware performance is critical for operation of transmission lines, particularly at 500 kV, 765 kV, or higher voltages. Laboratory mockups are commonly used to prove corona performance, but physical space constraints usually restrict testing to a partial single-phase setup. This requires estab
When it comes to AI models, size matters.Even though some artificial-intelligence experts warn that scaling up large language models (LLMs) is hitting diminishing performance returns, companies are still coming out with ever larger AI tools. Meta’s latest Llama release had a staggering 2 trillion parameters that define the model.As models grow in size, their capabilities increase. But so do the energy demands and the time it takes to run th
Many of the world’s most advanced electronic systems—including Internet routers, wireless base stations, medical imaging scanners, and some artificial intelligence tools—depend on field-programmable gate arrays. Computer chips with internal hardware circuits, the FPGAs can be reconfigured after manufacturing.On 12 March, an IE
It started with word, cave, and storytelling,A line scratched on stone walls:“Meet me when the young moon rises.”The first protocol for connection.Coyote tales, forbidden scripts,Medieval texts hidden from flame.What lived in Aristotle’s lost Poetics II?Was it God who laughed last, or we who made God laugh?Letters carried by doves, telepathic waves.Then Nikola Tesla conjured radio,electromagnetic pulses across the void,the founding signal of our networked age.Wiener dreamed in feedback loops.Shannon mapped the mathematics of longing.
Electric vehicles, whether they’re cars on the road or electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, are built around similar electric motors. But there are vital differences including component costs, mass, and redundancy.Jon Wagner spent five years as the senior director of battery engineering for Tesla before joining California-based eVTOL developer Joby Aviation in 2017. He spoke with IEEE S
This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering.The traditional approach to academic research goes something like this: Assemble experts from a discipline, put them in a building, and hope something useful emerges. Biology departments do biology. Engineering departments do engineering. Medical schools treat patients.NYU is turning that model inside out. At its new Institute for Engineering Health, the organizing principle centers around disease states rather than traditional disciplines. In
This webinar covers power system modeling and simulation across multiple timescales, from quasi-static 8760 analysis through EMT studies, fault classification, and inverter-based resource grid integration.What Attendees will LearnProgrammatic network construction and multi-fidelity modeling — Learn how to build power system networks programmatically from standard data formats, configure models for specific engineering objectives, and work across fidelity levels from quasi-static phasor simulation through switched-linear and nonlinear electromagnetic transient (EMT) analysis.Quasi-static and EMT simulation workflows — Explore 8760-hour quasi-static simulation on an IEEE 123-node distribution feeder for annual energy studies, and EMT simulation on transmission system benchmarks including
When Yong Wang recently received one of the highest honors for early-career data visualization researchers, it marked a milestone in an extraordinary journey that began far from the world’s technology hubs.Wang was born in a small farming village in southern China to parents with limited formal education. Today the IEEE member and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Data Science atNanyang Technological University, in Singapore. He studies how people can emp