The competition to create ever smaller, ever better robots is a fierce one, and Cornell University is out front now with a set of bots small enough to sit on a human hair but that can move on their own using nothing but light as a power source. Now, you may remember a similarly small machine from a few months ago, sitting proudly on the rim of a penny. Small, yes — but calling it a robot isn’t quite accurate. It was a tiny machine, for sure, but it operated through being repeatedly he ...read more

What just happened? Rust will soon be part of Linux, Torvalds has decided. The memory safe programming language will join C and the other traditional languages developers use to create new pieces and drivers of the ubiquitous open source kernel. The debate around the inclusion of Rust in Linux has seemingly ended: Linus Torvalds, the original creator and current maintainer of the open source kernel, has decided that, "unless something odd happens," Rust will be part of the final Linux 6.1 rel ...read more

from the well-well-well-if-it-isn't-the-consequences-of-our-actions dept Courthouse News Service takes home another win in the ongoing fight for the respect of the First Amendment. For years, courts received filings printed on paper. Those filings were routinely made available to journalists almost immediately. Whatever processing needed to be done could be interrupted long enough to make copies for reporters. Nothing slowed down and the presumptive openness of the courts was preserved. Then ...read more

Cutting corners: The LibreOffice Foundation is offering a paid version of the eponymous productivity suite to Apple users. The money will be used to fund the project's development, or rather to "educate" organizations about the added value of professional services and official distribution channels. Or so they say. Shortly after the release of LibreOffice 7.4.1 Community Edition, The Document Foundation has started a new paid distribution of the office suite on the Mac App Store. LibreOffice ...read more

French startup Bump has signed a multi-year financing partnership with DIF Capital Partners in order to roll out more charging stations for electric vehicles and double down on growth in general. It is an equity and quasi-equity $180 million deal that will be progressively unlocked from 2022 to 2030. Yesterday, ZePlug also announced a significant investment — but ZePlug focuses on a different market with partnerships with residential and office buildings. Today’s news is extremely important ...read more

In brief: Most early reviews of the new iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro mentioned Apple's crash detection feature but nobody actually put it to the test, likely because Apple almost certainly forbid it for safety reasons. Now that the phones have launched, there is nothing Apple can do to prevent owners from seeing if it really works which is exactly what one YouTuber recently did. TechRax rigged up a Mercury Grand Marquis with a crude remote-controlled setup to plow the car into stationary targe ...read more

Things I learned on TikTok: The hole in a pasta spoon is one serving of spaghetti. What to do when a debt collector comes knocking. How to hot wire a Kia using a USB cord and a screwdriver. Oh yes, you read that right. A trending TikTok challenge publicizing a technique for stealing certain makes and models of Kia and Hyundai vehicles caused vehicle thefts to soar across the country, according to reports from several police departments. Now, Kia and its parent company Hyundai are getting ...read more

from the expert-analysis dept When the Elon Musk/Twitter drama landed in the Delaware Court Of Chancery, it thrust specialist publication The Chancery Daily into the spotlight, and they began offering up excellent explainers on this important court that most people knew very little about. The people behind the publication have decided to remain anonymous amidst the influx of attention, but today one of them joins us on the podcast to discuss just what’s going on as Elon Musk takes his ...read more

Something to look forward to: Hot on the heels of Nvidia's unveiling of the RTX 4000 graphics cards, AMD announced a release date for its latest GPU generation. The company expects to launch RDNA 3 graphics cards on a schedule similar to Nvidia's Ada Lovelace rollout this fall. Around the same time Nvidia announced the price and launch dates of its new RTX 4000 series graphics cards this week, AMD confirmed it plans to reveal and launch its RDNA 3 GPUs on November 3. The company promises more ...read more

This is a guest post in recognition of IEEE Quantum Week 2022. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.Few fields invite as much unbridled hype as quantum computing. Most people’s understanding of quantum physics extends to the fact that it is unpredictable, powerful, and almost existentially strange. A few years ago, I provided IEEE Spectrum an update on the state of quantum computing and looked at both the positive ...read more