Electronics

Inside Groupon's 2-year-old headquarters on the 25th floor of the Leo Burnett Building in downtown Chicago, a giant cat in a spaceship with flashing lights greets visitors in an otherwise staid office tower.... Read more

In artificial intelligence, 2025 marked a decisive shift. Systems once confined to research labs and prototypes began to appear as everyday tools. At the center of this transition was the rise of AI agents—AI systems that can use other software tools and act on their own.... Read more

Stuffed animals that talk back. Chessboards with pieces that move on their own. And a chatty holographic fairy in a crystal ball.... Read more

Google has finally answered users' cries, allowing Gmail users to swap out embarrassing teenage email addresses.... Read more

"Feral" gossip spread via AI bots is likely to become more frequent and pervasive, causing reputational damage and shame, humiliation, anxiety, and distress, researchers have warned.... Read more

A single laundry load containing synthetic clothing can release thousands of plastic microfibers from nylon, acrylic and polyester materials. Lab testing of an SA-made washing machine filter at Flinders University shows it can be a useful new way to help protect waterways from polyester and other synthetic microparticles.... Read more

Meta's decision to end its professional fact-checking program sparked a wave of criticism in the tech and media world. Critics warned that dropping expert oversight could erode trust and reliability in the digital information landscape, especially when profit-driven platforms are mostly left to police themselves.... Read more

How safe are autonomous vehicles?... Read more

With the Christmas trading period peaking, traditional surveillance technologies like CCTV can help reduce job stress caused by customer aggression, but QUT research has found wearable devices may increase stress levels among frontline employees, especially those uncomfortable with technology.... Read more

"It makes me feel like I am right there on Country." This was the response of a student after they used a new virtual reality (VR) tool I codeveloped to help Indigenous people around Australia learn on Country.... Read more

Single-phase power factor correction (PFC) circuits—a kind of front-end AC/DC converters—are ubiquitous in a variety of consumer electronic devices, including laptop adapters, LED driver power supplies, and portable chargers. They enhance the current quality drawn from the source, delivering stable DC voltage with high efficiency.... Read more

Imagine a future where you board an American Airlines flight without a gate agent scanning a boarding pass.... Read more

Each year as Spotify Wrapped drops, social media timelines fill with neon slides declaring who we "really" are. We trade our top artists and most-played songs like postcards from a year already fading.... Read more

As platforms rush to verify users' ages, experts warn consumer-grade cameras lack the technology to reliably authenticate minors.... Read more

Once the domain of buttons and knobs, car dashboards are increasingly home to large touchscreens. While that makes following a mapping app easier, it also means drivers can't feel their way to a control; they have to look. But how does that visual component affect driving?... Read more

Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.... Read more

Digital concerns around privacy, online misinformation, and work-life boundaries are highest among highly educated, Western European millennials, finds a new study from researchers at UCL and the University of British Columbia.... Read more

What generative AI typically does best—recognize patterns and predict the next step in a sequence—can seem fundamentally at odds with the intangibility of human creativity and imagination. However, Cambridge researchers suggest that AI can be a useful creative partner, as long as there is clear guidance on how ideas should... Read more

Zohran Mamdani as a creepy trick-or-treater, Gavin Newsom body-slamming Donald Trump and Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero. This is not the setup to an elaborate joke. Instead, these are all examples of recent AI-generated political videos. New easy-to-use tools—and acceptance of those tools by politicians—means that these fake videos are... Read more

AI-supported recommender systems should provide users with the best possible suggestions for their inquiries. These systems often have to serve different target groups and take other stakeholders into account who also influence the machine's response: e.g. service providers, municipalities or tourism associations.... Read more

Amazon.com Inc.'s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is the company's most serious effort yet to turn its e-reader into a productivity tool. But with a starting price of $630—making it the priciest Kindle yet—Amazon will need to persuade even its most loyal readers that the upgrade is worth it.... Read more

Electronic gifts are very popular, and in recent years, retailers have been offering significant discounts on smartphones, e-readers and other electronics labeled as "pre-owned." Research I have co-led finds that these pre-owned options are becoming increasingly viable, thanks in part to laws and policies that encourage recycling and reuse of... Read more

The Australian Federal government's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, commonly referred to as the "social media ban," is now in effect.... Read more

From automatically generated overviews to chatbots in spreadsheets, so-called artificial intelligence is increasingly being integrated into our watches, phones, home assistants and other smart devices.... Read more

From ancient slavery to the factory floor, progress has often relied on the exploitation of human beings. We might like to believe those days are well behind us. But in the digital age, AI and the metaverse risk repeating that pattern with new forms of invisible labor and inequality.... Read more

A modeling study shows how, under some conditions, increasing numbers of households with rooftop solar panels can lead to higher rates for those without their own solar system. When utility customers cancel their accounts after switching to residential solar panels, the utility must spread their fixed costs around to a... Read more

A popular portable phone charger sold online has been recalled after reports that it can overheat and catch fire, federal officials said.... Read more

The humble pocket calculator may not be able to keep up with the mathematical capabilities of new technology, but it will never hallucinate.... Read more

The world is loud. A walk down the street bombards one's ears with the sound of engines revving, car horns blaring, and the steady beeps of pedestrian crossings. While smartphone alerts to excessive sound and public awareness of noise exposure grows, few tools help people take protective action.... Read more

Shopping assistant chatbots were a novelty a year ago. Now, they're everywhere.... Read more

Reducing the visibility of polarizing content in social media feeds can measurably lower partisan animosity. To come up with this finding, my colleagues and I developed a method that let us alter the ranking of people's feeds, previously something only the social media companies could do.... Read more

CISPA researcher Tejumade Àfọ̀njá has co-authored a new international study that uses food as a starting point to reveal significant cultural blind spots in today's AI systems. The study also introduces a new participatory research approach to create more inclusive datasets and evaluate biases in AI models.... Read more

A new device uses focused sound cues to keep users grounded amid digital distractions, with possible benefits for anxiety and ADHD as well.... Read more

When Kendrick Lamar began his Super Bowl halftime show earlier this year, he picked a stage design likely familiar to anyone tuning in: a square, triangle, cross and circle.... Read more

Remember Animal Crossing: New Horizons? During the height of its popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, the game, built for the Nintendo Switch console, was averaging 1 million copies sold per day. Now, almost six years since the start of the pandemic, University of California, Santa Cruz Professor of Computational Media... Read more

In China, AI glasses let the wearer pay in shops with just a glance at a QR code and a voice command, as a growing number of companies look to conquer both growing domestic and overseas markets.... Read more

Samsung launched its first triple-folding phone on Tuesday, a special-edition product with an eyewatering price tag placing it out of the reach of the average consumer.... Read more

Digital platforms have gained strong economic positions in many industries. On the one hand, they enable more providers than ever before to make their products, services, or information available. On the other hand, this means that more providers now compete for users' attention. The user interface (UI) of platforms acts... Read more

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often seen as a tool to automate tasks and replace humans, but new research from Swansea University challenges this view, showing that AI can also act as a creative, engaging and inspiring partner.... Read more

When OpenAI's Sam Altman told reporters in San Francisco earlier this year that the AI sector is in a bubble, the American tech market reacted almost instantly.... Read more

Snapchat, an app whose disappearing messages and silly face filters made chatting with loved ones more casual, is close to a milestone that few social media platforms achieve: reaching 1 billion monthly users.... Read more

After wowing World Expo visitors, a human washing machine is now on sale in Japan, a company spokesperson said Friday.... Read more

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has released an important new book about the problems we face online and how to solve them. It is called "This is for Everyone," meaning that the internet should be for all.... Read more

A study by the University of Stuttgart, the California State University at Fullerton, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has found that there are benefits to representing one's real-life disability through an avatar in virtual reality.... Read more

Earlier this year, Elon Musk was accused of cheating to fake his ranking in the action role-playing video game Diablo IV. At first glance, it looks ridiculous.... Read more

Over the last few years, systems and applications that help visually impaired people navigate their environment have undergone rapid development, but still have room to grow, according to a team of researchers at Penn State. The team recently combined recommendations from the visually impaired community and artificial intelligence (AI) to... Read more

It's a cliché that any "geek" who knows how to program computers will also probably play Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D. If you need to find someone at work who can explain to you the latest episode of Stranger Things, then you could probably safely start in the IT department... Read more

Since early chatbots were first conceived more than 50 years ago, they have become increasingly sophisticated—in large part, thanks to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.... Read more

They perform spectacular shows at amusement parks and sporting events. They deliver medicine and help monitor security. They make great gifts. What are they?... Read more

For technology adopters looking for the next big thing, "agentic AI" is the future. At least, that's what the marketing pitches and tech industry T-shirts say.... Read more