Electronics

In the United States, 11% of adults over age 45 self-report some cognitive decline, which may impact their ability to care for themselves and perform tasks such as cooking or paying bills. A team of Washington University in St. Louis researchers has integrated two novel vision-language models that create a... Read more

How quickly we reply, how active we really are in chats—many people misjudge their own behavior. Researchers at Bielefeld University have, for the first time, used anonymized WhatsApp metadata to make such misperceptions visible. Their study shows that personalized, data-based feedback can help people better understand their own communication habits;... Read more

What if you could put a 10-inch tablet in your pocket as easily as your smartphone?... Read more

Apple will rely on Google to help finish its efforts to smarten up its virtual assistant Siri and bring other artificial intelligence features to the iPhone as the trendsetting company plays catch up in technology's latest craze.... Read more

It was cute. But it was still a lie. Gemini invented a news outlet that doesn't exist and named it fake-example.ca (or exemplefictif.ca, in French).... Read more

AI took over CES 2026, powering coffee machines to brew the perfect espresso, a device to create your perfect scent, and ball-hitting tennis robots that make you forget it's human against machine.... Read more

The promise of artificial intelligence was front and center at this year's CES gadget show. But spicing up a simple machine like a refrigerator with unnecessary AI was also a surefire way to win the "Worst in Show."... Read more

Exoskeletons are shedding their bulky, sci-fi image to become lightweight, AI-powered consumer devices that manufacturers hope will become as commonplace as smartwatches, targeting everyone from hikers to seniors seeking to stay active.... Read more

Tampa crowds are currently sailing underneath Vincent van Gogh's twinkling "Starry Night" and drifting through his golden "Wheat Fields" in the 360-degree digital art exhibition, "Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience." The ongoing popularity of this award-winning attraction begs the question: Is virtual cultural tourism the new frontier in arts enrichment?... Read more

Health tech gadgets displayed at the annual CES trade show make a lot of promises. A smart scale promoted a healthier lifestyle by scanning your feet to track your heart health, and an egg-shaped hormone tracker uses AI to help you figure out the best time to conceive.... Read more

Sometime around Christmas, Sarah Burzio noticed that the holiday sales bump for her stationery business included some mysterious new customers: a flurry of orders from anonymous email addresses associated with Amazon.com Inc.... Read more

Video games have come to be regarded as valuable educational resources. Through a combination of interactive environments and learning objectives, they have proven to be an effective tool in multiple fields, from school education to corporate training. However, their full adoption in formal education remains limited by a lack of... Read more

AI companies are on the hunt to design the ideal device to deliver AI's superpowers, and some new enterprises are convinced that headphones or earbuds are the way.... Read more

The actual use-value of smart glasses remains keenly debated—but less so among blind people, who are increasingly relying on the latest models to improve their lives.... Read more

A century after Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated the first mechanical television system, TVs face mounting competition from a much more recent invention: smartphones.... Read more

Sure, Nvidia, AMD and Intel all had important chip and AI platform announcements on the first day of CES 2026, but all audiences wanted to see more of was Star Wars and Jensen Huang's little robot buddies.... Read more

With the start of the New Year squarely behind us, it's once again time for the annual CES trade show to shine a spotlight on the latest tech that companies plan to offer in 2026.... Read more

Autonomous vehicles could dramatically reduce traffic accidents and injuries on U.S. roads. Drawing on historical data and current trends, a recent JAMA Surgery study projected that self-driving cars could prevent more than 1 million injuries between 2025 and 2035, resulting in a 3.6% reduction in traffic-related injuries over the next... Read more

It's hardly a revelation that we're living in an era of distraction and smartphone addiction. Our phones interrupt us, hijack our attention, and tempt us into scrolling. Even when we aren't interacting with them, their mere presence makes it difficult to concentrate.... Read more

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