Apple announced a new Airport Extreme earlier this week, and iFixit has already torn it apart. The good news? It's a hacker's dream.

Instead of opting for a new, custom case for the new router, Apple has opted to just reuse the case of its Time Capsule—just with the hard drive and connectors ripped out. That means there's a gaping 3.5 inch drive-shaped void on the inside, just waiting to be filled.

The iFixit teardown reveals that the SATA/power connectors required to use a drive are absent on the device they ripped apart. But no matter: if you feel so inclined, you could use the USB port and wire a bus-powered 2.5 inch hard drive around inside the case, as 9to5mac points out. Voila, a Time Capsule on a budget. Kinda. [iFixit]

A new mode of personal transportation has beat hoverboards to the market: the flying bicycle.

Czech companies Duratec, Technodat and Evektor have created a prototype of a flying electric bicycle. Unlike E.T.'s run-of-the-mill two-wheeler, however, this one looks more like a snow bike.

Including six battery-powered propellers, the bicycle weighs 209 pounds. It has four main motors and one main propeller. A Wednesday demonstration of the bike in Prague featured a remote-controlled, five-minute flight with a mannequin in the rider’s seat. Engineers working on the bike say it will need better batteries before actual people can take a spin in the sky.

Would you ride a flying bike? Tell us in the comments, below.

Researchers at several institutions have created a new technology that will empower future smart contact lenses. The team developed a “transparent, highly conductive, and stretchy mix of graphene and silver nanowires” that it then attached to an off-the-shelf soft contact lens to give it Google Glass-like features, Technology Review reported. The lenses were tested on rabbits because of similarities with the human eye and were found to be fully functional. The researchers noted that the rabbits didn’t attempt to rub their eyes nor did they grow bloodshot after five hours of testing.

“Our goal is to make a wearable contact-lens display that can do all the things Google Glass can do,” said research leader Jang-Ung Park, a chemical engineer at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology.

True smart contacts with heads-up displays are still quite a few years out, however — the “display” on the tested lens was only one pixel. Nevertheless, researchers have high hopes for smart contacts and have continued to test new and useful ways of implementing the technology, such as monitoring a person’s health using lenses with integrated biosensors or helping those with vision problems with lenses that can filter light.

Motorola dropped some jaws this week, when Advanced Technology and Projects Group chief Regina Dugan revealed the company’s tinkering on digital tattoos, week-long implanted electronics that could free you from the tyranny of remembering passwords. Dugan – a former DARPA head – described the tattoo as perfect for a wearables market targeting users that don’t actually bother wearing watches any more, instead turning the body into a walking authentication token. She also name checked mc10, a company not unfamiliar to SlashGear, as the brains behind the flexible tattoo-tech, but just what’s inside?

Cambridge, MA, based mc10 calls the tattoo “epidermal electronics”, and has in fact been working on the concept for some years now. The idea is relatively straightforward: rather than rely on the user carrying a device, or remembering to strap one on each morning, the technology is temporarily bonded to their skin.

That bond has another advantage, since the responses of the wearer’s skin can also be used to collect health data. The tattoo is made up of various sensors and gages, such as for tracking strain in multiple directions (how the user is flexing), EEG and EMG (electrical impulses in the skeletal structure or nerves), ECG (heart activity), and temperature, as well as light and other factors. In total, it’s a mini-lab for your arm, the side of your head, or anywhere else on the body.

Like NFC chips, the mc10 epidermal electronics get powered up from an external electricity source, using the embedded wireless power coil. It’s a similar system to the wireless phone charging Nokia and others have implemented in recent handsets, and it powers the tattoo’s transmitter. That’s all layered onto a sheet of water-soluble plastic that gets laminated to the skin; in fact, it can even be disguised with a regular temporary tattoo pattern, opening the door to potential branding and such.

Once they’re in place, they’re incredibly resilient. The tightly coiled structure of the electronics means that, even if the tattoo is stretched or twisted, the connections won’t break. It’s also waterproof, which means that even if you’re swimming or in the shower, the tattoo won’t be affected.

However, epidermal electronics don’t just have to stop at being biometric keys for your laptop and your Netflix account. Studies using the technology have found that they can also track muscle movements around speech, when applied to the throat, potentially turning the tattoos into half of a wireless hands-free kit. Since you don’t actually have to speak out loud, it could pick up sub-vocal commands, too. Alternatively, they can even track brain signals with enough accuracy to control a computer, which might mean simply thinking about making a call and having your nearby smartphone place it. Similar sensors have been used to fly remote-control planes and drones, something mc10 is working on replicating with its more compact tattoos.

They were some of the possibilities mc10 co-founder Ben Schlatka spoke to us about last year, when we talked to him about the advantages of persistent sensing. The company is also working with the US army on embedded electronics in battlefield clothing, which could collect energy and convert it into electricity to power the gadgets soldiers carry.

“Imagine a kids’ fake tattoo that can sense how our bodies work: data from the heart, the brain, muscles, body temperature – even hydration levels,” Schlatka told us. “When a sensing technology conforms to the consumer and not the other way around, it can capture more insights for longer periods of time without discomfort or distraction.”

Motorola isn’t the only company intrigued. Back in April, mc10 announced it had closed a new $8m financing round, taking the company’s total Series C funding to $18m. Exactly which investors have come on-board is yet to be confirmed, though mc10 did say that it now has backers across its consumer, digital health, and medical devices divisions.

Whether Motorola will actually release a wearable using mc10 technology remains to be seen; the Google-owned company still needs to prove it has a solid foot in the smartphone market, though the new Moto X could address that. Still, it’s clear that the digital tattoo is capable of further breaking down the boundary between users and their devices. If Motorola can leverage that, alongside Google’s own ongoing research into wearables like Glass, it could be the differentiator the company needs from the increasingly crowded Android market, not to mention finally silencing the critics who doubted the wisdom of the smartphone company’s acquisition in the first place.

Here's a space-age idea if you've ever heard one: NASA is building a galactic GPS system that will provide astronauts a better, more accurate map through our solar system. This is obviously an ambitious undertaking, one that will take generations, not years, to complete.

As Jason Mitchell, an engineer on the project as NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explained to IEEE Spectrum, the new system "will allow our descendants to accurately and autonomously navigate not only throughout the solar system but beyond it as well." Mitchell explained that the further we travel from Earth, the less sense our current system makes. "Maybe in the future, when we’re exploring space regularly, we won’t need to rely on a gigantic, Earth-based infrastructure," he said.

If astronauts aren't relying on technology back home, though, then where do they turn? The stars of course. That's right, just like swashbucklers sailing the Seven Seas and nomads wandering the desert, this new super advanced system draws on the same basic principles of navigation that have been in use for millenia. There is a futuristic component that sets it apart from the Antikythera mechanism, though, and it involves pulsars.

Traditionally, space navigation depends on radio waves being beamed from Earth out to the space craft. This is time-consuming since radio waves only travel so fast, and it's also limiting since the craft is almost literally tethered to Earth by the signal. The new system, however, is fully autonomous. Rather than relay messages themselves, the space crews will look to pulsars, zombie stars that blink at regular intervals, to serve as points of reference. The pulsars work a lot like lighthouses, the pretty things in Maine and elsewhere that have long kept ships from running into shore in areas of low visibility.

It wouldn't be quite right to think of pulsars as blinking lights that astronauts could spot outside of portholes. (See above for the sort of cyberpunk effect that is a blinking pulsar.) But again, this is the future, and some futuristic methods are necessarily. IEEE Spectrum explains the workflow:

A craft heading into space would carry a detector that, similarly to a GPS receiver, would accept X-rays from multiple pulsars and use them to resolve its location. These detectors—called XNAV receivers—would sense X-ray photons in the pulsars’ sweeping light. For each of four or more pulsars, the receiver would collect multiple X-ray photons and build a “light curve.” The peak in each light curve would be tagged with a precise time. The timing of these peaks with respect to one another would change as you traveled through the solar system, drawing nearer to the source of some and farther from others. From this pattern of peaks, the spacecraft could calculate its position.

Got that? You can compare the system to lighthouses or you could compare it to the sonar navigation systems on submarines. Either way, it's pretty amazing. [IEEE Spectrum via PopSci]

It seems I’m not the only one obsessed with new user interfaces for controlling the internet of things. Four researchers at the University of Washington have unveiled their research using Wi-Fi to build out a gesture-based interface for connected devices in the home. They call it WiSee.

The technology would be embedded in a Wi-Fi device, like a router or access point and would figure out the motions someone was making based on how those motions affected the Wi-Fi network.

For those who don’t think about the electromagnetic radiation Wi-Fi produces (that’d be most of us) it’s important to realize that Wi-Fi is sending out a steady array of signals that bounce and bump into things into your home. If you could see the airwaves in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band you’d see that every move results in a ripple effect, like a type of radar system.

Normally those ripples are too small to be detected, but the WiSee researchers have discovered algorithms that help amply the Doppler effect created by a gesture disturbing a Wi-Fi network. It then can translate that difference into one of nine corresponding gestures with 94 percent accuracy rate.

Check out the video above and for those who have read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy feel free to recollect Zaphod’s challenges in getting the radio in the Heart of Gold tuned to a specific station and stay there. For those who have missed the book, he basically has to stay very still.

The researchers at WiSee have solved this challenge using an opening sequence of gestures that would act as a means to turn on the receiver and let it know you are ready to take action. From the paper on the topic:

Over a 24-hour period, WiSee’s average false positive rate—events that detect a gesture in the absence of the target human—is 2.63 events per hour when using a preamble with two gesture repetitions. This goes down to 0.07 events per hour, when the number of repetitions is increased to four.

The technology differentiates from different people in the room by using MIMO, an antenna technology that relies on multiple antennas on a device and at an access point that essentially identifies and tracks the “target user.” The paper notes that the WiSee receiver can identify the correct person as the target 90 percent of the time in a room of three people.

Okay, so we didn't quite know what to make of Gigabyte's lamp / Ultrabook hub. But what about its new smartphones? The company is showing off three handsets here at Computex 2013 -- the Maya, Sierra and Simba, in ascending order of impressiveness -- all of which have dual SIM slots, IPS displays, 1GB of RAM and a stock build of Android 4.2. To tell the truth, none of them are exactly high-end (even the top-tier Simba runs just a dual-core Snapdragon 400 processor), but we were impressed by the quality of those IPS screens, which offer wide viewing angles even under harsh lighting.

They've all got thick, plastic builds too, but some are at least nicer-feeling than others. The 5-inch Sierra has a slightly metallic finish that could possibly pass for metal at a glance. The 5-inch Simba is done up in a trendy white, but with a glossy, tacky sort of look. And the lowest-end Maya (4.5-inches) is made of plain, drab plastic. Not much to see there. On the inside, as we said, the Simba has a Snapdragon 400 (Krait) SoC, while the other two make do with a 1.2GHz, quad-core processor from MediaTek. As for screen quality. the Maya has QHD resolution whereas the Sierra and Simba step up to HD; either way, no 1080p flagships here. That's about all we have to share at this point -- Gigabyte hasn't announced pricing or availability -- but a company rep did tell us these phones should at the very least be headed to Asia and Eastern Europe. For now, head past the break for a quick video tour.

While Intel gave us the technical rundown on its next iteration of Thunderbolt two months earlier, it's now announced that it will officially be known as the not-particularly-original Thunderbolt 2. Promising 20 Gbps throughput and support for 4K video, Intel is now vowing to bring the port to market sometime this year. For a reminder, we've added the company's NAB demo after the break.

Video Creation Bolts Ahead – Intel's Thunderbolt™ 2 Doubles Bandwidth, Enabling 4K Video Transfer & Display

Everybody seems to be sharing video these days - at higher resolutions than ever. This always-increasing demand has helped expand growth and adoption of Intel's Thunderbolt™ technology in 2013, especially for the video editors creating the best and richest content. Originally brought to market in conjunction with Apple*, Thunderbolt is now a standard feature of Mac* computers sold in the market today. The last year has also seen the PC industry get on board in earnest, as Thunderbolt is currently included on over 30 PCs and motherboards worldwide, including on more than a dozen new 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor-based products. In addition, there are more than 80 Thunderbolt-enabled peripheral devices, covering everything from storage drives, expansion docks, displays, and a myriad of media capture and creation hardware. More than 220 companies worldwide are developing Thunderbolt-enabled products, and that's only going to increase.

At the video geekfest National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in April, Intel announced plans for an important advancement in Thunderbolt technology – the upcoming controller codenamed "Falcon Ridge" running at 20Gbs, a doubling of the bandwidth over the original Thunderbolt. Named "Thunderbolt™ 2", this next generation of the technology enables 4K video file transfer and display simultaneously – that's a lot of eye-popping video and data capability. It is achieved by combining the two previously independent 10Gbs channels into one 20Gbs bi-directional channel that supports data and/or display. Current versions of Thunderbolt, although faster than other PC I/O technologies on the market today, are limited to an individual 10Gbs channel each for both data and display, less than the required bandwidth for 4K video transfer. Also, the addition of DisplayPort 1.2 support in Thunderbolt 2 enables video streaming to a single 4K video monitor or dual QHD monitors. All of this is made possible with full backward compatibility to the same cables and connectors used with today's Thunderbolt. The result is great news for an industry on the cusp of widespread adoption of 4K video technologies.

"By combining 20Gbs bandwidth with DisplayPort 1.2 support, Thunderbolt 2 creates an entirely new way of thinking about 4K workflows, specifically the ability to support raw 4K video transfer and data delivery concurrently," says Jason Ziller, Marketing Director for Thunderbolt at Intel. "And our labs aren't stopping there, as demand for video and rich data transfer just continues to rise exponentially."

Professionals and enthusiasts alike will be able to create, edit, and view live 4K video streams delivered from a computer to a monitor over a single cable, while backing up the same file on an external drive, or series of drives, simultaneously along the same device daisy-chain. Backing up terabytes of data will be a question of minutes, not hours. And finally, since Thunderbolt 2 is backwards compatible, original investments in cables and connectors continue to pay off while supporting dramatically improved performance. Thunderbolt 2 is currently slated to begin production before the end of this year, and ramp into 2014.

Boeing is using robots to help speed the production of its 777 commercial aircraft at an assembly plant in Washington state.

The Seattle Times reports that two robots now help paint Boeing 777 wings at the aerospace company's assembly plant in Everett, Wash. What normally takes a human team 4.5 hours to paint the first coat, the robots can complete in only 24 minutes.

It's a robotic system called the "Automated Spray Method" or ASM. Boeing says the robots take care of washing, priming and painting the wings, as the wings are horizontally held in place. Human employees still have to press a few buttons, as well as load/unload paint, mask the wings and service the robots.

This automation is also improving the overall paint job.

"The robot has two different guns on it and will apply two different paints at two different thicknesses, simultaneously together in as seamless operation so you won’t see the two different coatings,” ASM Implementation Manager Ken Brewer said in a Boeing feature story.

The Boeing 777 is among the world's most popular commercial airplanes and the company now builds 100 of them per year.

But even though the robots have take over what was previously manual labor, a Boeing director told The Seattle Times that no layoffs happened because of this new technology. Unlike car makers who may have moved toward more automation, airplane manufacturing can still involve significant human labor.

“We’re 90 percent manual,” Jason Clark, director of 777 manufacturing, told The Seattle Times.

Half of the human wing-painting team have been reshuffled to other roles, Clark told the newspaper.

Clark told the Times that the inspiration behind all this was from seeing the amount of automation at a BMW factory in Munich, Germany.

Check out the painting robots in action in this video below, courtesy of Boeing:

Eye-Fi cards have been around since 2006 as a way to wirelessly transmit your digital camera photos to your computer or mobile device. The catch was that you had to connect to a Wi-Fi network before in order to do so. Not so with the new Eye-Fi Mobi.

The new Mobi cards will let you transfer photos absolutely anywhere, since the card is its own WiFi hotspot. You just have to download a free app for iOS or Android and connect it with your card, a process that Eye-Fi claims is simple and seamless. We hope so, because the setup process for the original Eye-Fi cards was a real pain.

The Eye-Fi Mobi is available now at $50 for an 8 GB card, and $80for a 16 GB card (both Class 10). [Eye-fi]

Without fingers, nothing can be gripped. But many people have lost their fingers in accident. South African carpenter Richard van As is trying to change the lives of youngsters born without fingers or who have lost fingers with the 3D-printed Robohands.

South Africa-based woodworker Richard Van As, lost his four fingers in an accident in 2011. After the loss, however, he managed to make a Robohand for himself that could do work instead of his fingers. But, this Robohand was very expensive.

Later, Van As started collaborating with Seattle-based prop designer Ivan Owen, to create a design for inexpensive prosthetics that could work as effectively as real hands and fingers. When 3D printer company MakerBot heard about the project, it donated a MakerBot Replicator 2 desktop 3D printer to each of them.

Using that MakerBot Replicator 2 printer, together they created a low-cost Robohand, which was actually a 3D-printed mechanical hand with prosthetic finger. The low-cost Robohand works by a series of cables and bungee cords that are controlled by movements of the wrist and arm.

Later they made four Robohands, of which the first Robohand was tested by a 5-year-old boy named Liam who was born without fingers on his right hand. Check out this video of Liam using his Robohand.

Now the duo is trying to raise $10,000 by 11:59 pm PT, June 11 through an Indiegogo campaign, so that they can help more children for free. The collected money will be spent to buy materials such as PLA plastic for the 3D printer and hardware to assemble the hands. As of writing, the team has collected $6,400.

Although a private effort hopes to send some people on a one-way trip to Mars, chances are good that the first people to reach the red planet will be government-supported astronauts who will be taking a round trip. But one of NASA's own instruments has just suggested that there might be an advantage to a one-way journey: a far lower dose of radiation.

The work takes advantage of a bit of hardware that NASA sent to Mars for a completely unrelated project: the radiation detector on the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity. The Radiation Assessment Detector is actually two sensors; one tracks radiation via the energy it deposits in silicon, and the other watches for flashes of light that occur as radiation travels through a hunk of plastic. Agreement between the two sensors is used to determine the amount of radiation the detector is receiving.

The hardware is meant to sample the radiation environment on Mars (which also has significant implications for future exploration). But a large team of scientists realized that its travel to Mars provided a glimpse of the sorts of exposures crew members might receive during their journey through interplanetary space to Mars.

We have already sent probes to sample the radiation of interplanetary space, but all of those probes have been essentially bolted on to the exterior of the spacecraft. Humans making the journey will undoubtedly be inside a well-shielded capsule, which would (hopefully) reduce their exposure to cosmic rays and ions blasted away from the Sun. The Radiation Assessment Detector was quite different; it was located on the top deck of the rover, so the body of the robot shielded it to some extent. Further coverage was provided by the heat shield that protected the hardware while it entered Mars' atmosphere and the equipment and fuel used to lower the rover to the planet's surface.

Overall, the authors conclude that the shielding was probably much more irregular than humans would probably be given, but it provides some indication of what might get through even the best shielding.

Overall, the Sun isn't much of a concern. It provided a steady background of ions that struck the detector, but these were generally low energy. There were five instances where the Sun sent off bursts of material that passed by the Mars Science Laboratory during its journey, and each of these created noticeable spikes in the amount of radiation received. Overall, though, these turned out to be a relatively small contribution to the total radiation received on the trip.

The same could not be said for cosmic rays, however. The five solar events in total only exposed the radiation detectors to the equivalent of 15 days of cosmic ray exposure. Because cosmic rays are so high-energy, it's highly unlikely that we're going to be putting enough shielding on any mission to keep them from passing through the crew area—it would simply weigh too much.

The rover's cruise to Mars took 253 days, and over that time the exposure of the instrument added up to nearly 500 milli-Sieverts (one Seivert creates a five percent chance of developing cancer). Humans would probably take a shorter trip—180 day flights are possible—but would, of course, turn around and come back, getting another 180 days of exposure. If done with equivalent shielding, the shortest round trip possible would result in 660 milli-Sieverts of exposure, and that doesn't count time spent orbiting Mars or exploring the surface.

Better, more even shielding would improve matters, but only a bit, since 95 percent of the exposure comes from cosmic rays that would pass right through most shields.

"It is clear that the exposure from the cruise phases alone is a large fraction of (and in some cases greater than) currently accepted astronaut career limits." the authors conclude. For the ESA and Canada, these limits are 1 Sievert; NASA sets its limit as a three percent chance of developing a fatal cancer as a result of exposure. All of that would seem to indicate that any astronauts lucky enough to complete a round-trip journey to Mars would probably find themselves permanently grounded afterwards.

Haswell is hardly a secret at this point: there's been a steady drip-drip of of demos and technical leaks since as far back as 2011, and just a month ago we brought you the low-down on its integrated graphics. But today, finally, we have official pricing for a number of variants, a concrete date for availability (this coming Tuesday, June 4th) and, perhaps most importantly, some detailed benchmark claims about what Haswell is capable of -- particularly in its mobile form.

Sure, Intel already dominates in MacBooks, Ultrabooks (by definition) and in hybrids like Surface Pro, but the chip maker readily admits that the processors in those portable PCs were just cut-down desktop chips. Haswell is different, having been built from the ground up with Intel's North Cape prototype and other mobile form factors in mind. As a loose-lipped executive recently let slip, we can look forward to a 50 percent increase in battery life in the coming wave of devices, with no loss of performance. Read on and we'll discover how this is possible and what it could mean for the dream of all-day mobile computing.

Mobile Haswell

Although Intel has previously claimed a 10 hour battery life for North Cape, that figure isn't actually promoted in today's slide deck. Instead, we're told Haswell will provide up to 9.1 hours of HD video playback on an Ultrabook-class Core i7. Video playback isn't particularly processor intensive, but nonetheless this benchmark bodes well compared to what an Ivy Bridge machine can manage, and indeed it's said to be the "biggest battery life increase in Intel history."

The above slide also hints at how this sort of gain is achieved: largely through a drop in power from 20W in Ivy Bridge (17W for the processor plus 3W for the chipset) down to 15W in Haswell (which now incorporates both components). Of course, these wattages are just upper limits, and the chip has plenty of scope to scale down further during easier tasks. A Haswell-based Ultrabook actually draws less than 6W during video playback, or two thirds that of an Ivy Bridge system. It also supports an ultra low-power standby state that can hold fresh data for up to 13 days, which is three times as long as Ivy Bridge, and it can wake from sleep mode in three seconds instead of seven.

All of this should come alongside a 40 percent increase in graphics performance in Ultrabook-class machines with HD 5000 GPUs, which ought to make Tomb Raider playable at 1,366 x 768 and medium settings, and BioShock Infinite almost playable with a frame rate of 27fps. On the other hand, fatter Haswell laptops with higher wattages (above 28W) and Iris-branded GPUs should see more of an improvement over the last generation, of up to 2x.

Desktop Haswell

You can blame us for neglecting the desktop components up until now, but hey -- Intel started it. You have to scroll some way through the presentation before you get to concrete desktop info.

In terms of gaming, both Tomb Raider and BioShock Infinite should now be playable at 1080p and medium settings without recourse to a discrete graphics card, thanks in part to the use of embedded DRAM to reduce latency in communication between the CPU and GPU. Further gains should be possible from enhanced overclocking on K-branded products, and in particular the ability to increase base clock tuning ratios.

Finally, we also have pricing for the quad-core desktop parts that are set to become available to end users this coming Tuesday. These will start at $192 for the lowest-spec Core i5-4570 and go up to $242 for an unlocked Core i5-4670K and $339 for the Core i7-4770K. Pricing and various other details for dual-core SKUs will follow soon, but we've already reviewed our first quad-core Haswell gaming laptop -- MSI's GT70 Dragon Edition -- with some pretty encouraging results.

In The Terminator, we’ve seen robots killing people who they believe are their enemies. Although that was a sci-fi movie, lately the United Nations (UN) has raised a very vital question – should robots be allowed to take human lives, without direct supervision or command in real world? According to a UN official, robots will not be allowed to kill people.

On May 31, a moratorium on Lethal Autonomous Robots (LARs) was held in Geneva. The UN called for the establishment of an international body to set guidelines for the development and use of Lethal Autonomous Robotics (LARs). Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, compared the situation of autonomous lethal robot weapons with the drones. He said, “With drones, the genie is out of the bottle. With robots the genie is still in the bottle.” He added, “War without reflection is mechanical slaughter.”

Although fully autonomous weapons have not yet been developed, Heyns said that “there is reason to believe that states will, inter alia, seek to use lethal autonomous robotics for targeted killing.” In his 22-page submitted report on “lethal autonomous robots”, he clearly uttered that “LARs refers to robotic weapon systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator. The important element is that the robot has an autonomous ‘choice’ regarding selection of a target and the use of lethal force.” He also said that the deployment of such robots “may be unacceptable because no adequate system of legal accountability can be devised” and because “robots should not have the power of life and death over human beings.”

His report highlights that despite recent advances, current military technology is still “inadequate” and unable “to understand context.” This makes it difficult for robots to establish whether “someone is wounded and hors de combat” or “in the process of surrendering.” Heyns also added in his report that “a further concern relates to the ability of robots to distinguish legal from illegal orders.”

However, having understood the scenario, Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch said, “The UN report makes it abundantly clear that we need to put the brakes on fully autonomous weapons, or civilians will pay the price in the future. The US and every other country should endorse and carry out the UN call to stop any plans for killer robots in their tracks.”

Officially, governments who are capable of producing Lethal Autonomous Robots are not currently planning to use them.

Source: The Register

One of the most annoying things while travelling from one part of the world to the other is undoubtedly the required time. To overcome the timing issue, earlier we have seen researchers making hypersonic aircrafts that could travel from New York to London in 1 hour. Recently, a company named Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies (ET3) has planned to make a high-speed tube train that could take us from New York (NY) to Los Angeles (LA) in 45 minutes!

Each an Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) high-speed transportation tube would be 16 feet long, 5 feet in diameter and would weigh 183 kg (400 lbs). In each tube, a maximum number of 6 people or a maximum weight of 367 kg (800 lbs) would be able to fit. There will be a compartment in each tube where travelers would be able to keep their luggage.

The ETT will use magnetic levitation and it would be able to travel at speeds of up to 4,000 mph or 6,500 km/h. There would be no food or waiting service, like aviation, in the tube, but there would be TV for travelers to enjoy the ride.

Usually, a plane takes around 5 hours to travel from New York to Los Angeles. But as ETT would be airless and frictionless, so travelers would be able to cross that distance in 45 minutes just by paying $100 only. That’s not all. Travelers would be able to reach from New York to Beijing in two hours!

According to ET3, with automated passive switching, a pair of ET3 tubes would be able to exceed the capacity of a 32 lane freeway. Besides, ET3 can be built for 1/10th the cost of High Speed Rail, or 1/4th the cost of a freeway. The tube would cost about $2 million/mile. That means it would take around $5.5billion to make a tube spanning from NY to LA.

ET3 has mentioned, if ETT high-speed transportation tubes are really made in future, then it would be initially used to transport cargo, not people.

Source: ET3

For that price, you get to build "a tree-trunk hideout, secret Lightsaber stash, spider web, net traps, slide, catapults, an elevating throne, a bridge, rope walkways, vine and leaf elements, kitchen, food storage area, bedroom and a planning room." Plus! this cool speeder bike.

The company says that with this set "builders can construct one of the most famous Star Warsscene when Luke and Leia realize they are siblings." Yes, they are talking about this:

Awkward!

Lego also says that kids will love to "use the rammer function to take out the Scout Trooper’s speeder." Adults, on the other hand, will love to use a hammer to smash it—then use the great pieces to build something really cool. Like a scene from the Lord of the Rings or something. Of course, don't destroy the minifigs. Some are new and not available elsewhere, like Endor Princess Leia, Endor C-3PO, Endor Luke, Endor Han Solo and the damn Wicket.

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Honestly, the set looks very nice and detailed. Kids will love it. And, for adult Lego fans, it's a great source of pieces. Also, it's huge. Over a foot tall.

The set will be available on September 2013.

On just day one of the Kickstarter project, Singaporean 3D printer startup Pirate3D saw overwhelming support with backers flocking to pledge crowd funded cash for the ‘Buccaneer’ 3D printer.

Right now on Saturday morning, a full 24 hours after hitting Kickstarter, Pirate3D has seen $366,763 pledged for it Buccaneer 3D printer. The warm response from the Kickstarter community must have surely surprised the folks at Pirate3D who set a $100,000 target. There are 28 more days to go so we can expect more money to be pledged.

As we explained earlier this week, Pirate3D had vowed not only a discount but also to ship its printer in December this year to a limited number of early crowdfund pledgers – which likely caused the huge rush on Friday to support the project.

Pirate3D’s Kickstarter page explains how the Buccaneer works at home. It looks really simple. Users can log on to the Buccaneer printer over wi-fi and start customizing and printing from a laptop or smartphone. The startup will also have an online store with 3D designs to print out. If you are interested to find out more, click here to go to Pirate3D’s Kickstarter page. If you have some spare cash, do consider pledging some bucks. There are still some slots left to get the 3D printer for the regular price of $397 along with the assurance that it’ll ship to you in February 2014.

The current $249 Samsung Chromebook is already a solid value yet it may be time for a refresh. This model uses Samsung’s dual-core Exynos 5250, but sources tell Mobile Geeks that a new version is in the works. This time around Samsung’s Chromebook will get a boost to the octo-core Exynos, which will blend power efficiency with improved performance.

If Samsung can keep the price at or near the same $249 level, it should be a worthy upgrade. The current ARM-powered Samsung Chromebook tested a bit slower than Samsung’s similar device with an Intel chip when I compared the two in October. But you can get at least an extra hour of battery life out of the slower unit. I routinely saw 6 to 6.5 hours of run time on a charge when using the Samsung Chromebook with Exynos chip.

So what’s the difference in the old Exynos and the new one that’s reportedly going to power the next Samsung Chromebook? Instead of two processing cores, the latest Exynos has eight. But you won’t be using all eight at the same time. Instead, the chip uses the ARM big.LITTLE architecture with a quad-core A15 and a quad-core A7.

For heavy-duty tasks, the faster A15 quad-core handles the load, but uses more power. So lighter tasks are intelligently offloaded to the slower but more power-efficient A7 silicon. That means better performance as needed, without draining the battery faster.

My hope is that Samsung also opts for 4 GB of memory instead of the 2 GB in the current Samsung Chromebook; that will help keep more tabs open without them refreshing when hitting memory limits.