Microsoft to turn millions of PCs and tablets into smart'home hubs' to take on Amazon's Echo and Google's Home Google's $130 Home speaker went on sale earlier this month Amazon's Alexa has been a huge hit with 5.1m sold Both can do everything from control lights to answer questions Microsoft plans to take them on with a new Home Hub app for Windows PCs Google's $130 Home speaker went on sale earlier this month Amazon's Alexa has been a huge hit with 5.1m sold The app will turn the millions of Windows PCs, laptops and tablets already in homes into a'home hub' that can do everything from control lights to answer questions. Has YOUR Google account been hacked? Researchers say... Apple goes Red for World AIDS day as firm is revealed to... Britain traded with the Middle East 1,300 years ago: Bitumen... The original human ancestor'Lucy' was a tree climbing... Has YOUR Google account been hacked? Researchers say... Apple goes Red for World AIDS day as firm is revealed to... Britain traded with the Middle East 1,300 years ago: Bitumen...

MIAMI – An agile jumping robot that was inspired by some of the animal world's best leapers could one day help in rescue efforts after earthquakes or building collapses, U.S. scientists said Tuesday. Known as Salto, the 10-inch (26-cm) tall robot can jump higher than a bullfrog and almost as high as a galago, or bush baby, a small primate found in Africa. The robot can jump up to 1 meter in less than one second, according to the report in the journal Science Robotics. That's better than a human but not the highest of any robot -- other machines have been made that can jump more than 3 meters in a single leap. But Salto does hold the crown in vertical jumping agility, which researchers define as the ratio of the maximum jump height to the time it takes to complete one jump.

The robot, called Salto, can jump into the air and spring off a wall, at a rate of 1.75 metres (5.74 feet) per second. Its designers hope that one day the robot could be used to jump around rubble in search and rescue missions. Salto weighs just 100 grams (3.5 ounces), and is 26 centimetres (10.2 inches) tall when fully extended. To build the robot, engineers from the University of California, Berkley, studied the animal kingdom's most vertically agile creature - the African bush baby, or galago. Galagos can jump five times in four seconds to gain a combined height of 8.5 metres (27.8 feet).

Ron Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley is famous for its stable of bite-sized bio-inspired robots, and Duncan Haldane is responsible for a whole bunch of them. He's worked on running robots, robots with wings, robots with tails, and even robots with hairs, in case that's your thing. What Haldane and the other members of the lab are especially good at is looking to some of the most talented and capable animals for inspiration in their robotic designs. One of most talented and capable (and cutest) jumping animals is a fluffy little thing called a galago, or bushbaby. They live in Africa, weigh just a few kilos, and can leap tall (nearly two meter) bushes in a single bound.

HAL 9000, the sentient computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, offers an ominous glimpse of a future in which machines endowed with artificial intelligence reject human authority. After taking control of a spacecraft and killing most of the crew, HAL responds to a returning astronaut's order to open the ship's pod bay door in an eerily calm voice: "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." In the recent science-fiction thriller Ex Machina, the seductive humanoid Ava tricks a hapless young man into helping her destroy her creator, Nathan. Her machinations lend credence to Nathan's dark prediction: "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction."

President Obama is making a push for transparency in his last days in office before handing off the vast counter-terrorism apparatus he has built to President-elect Donald Trump, starting with a major address Tuesday defending his record on national security. Obama's speech, at the U.S. military's Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., will also explain the legal and policy underpinnings that his administration has established over eight years in deciding whether and how to detain, interrogate or kill suspected terrorists. The White House released some details on its legal rationale ahead of the speech. The efforts at transparency were striking for an administration criticized for being secretive by news and watchdog organizations; Obama has used the Espionage Act more times than all other U.S. presidents combined to investigate leaks of government information. The bid for openness also served to make public additional facts that can be used to hold the Trump administration accountable, though the White House downplayed any message to the president-elect.

The United Nations forecasts that the global population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a big number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, who fear that population growth will outstrip the food supply, leaving a hungry planet. Others appear in the tirades of anti-immigrant populists, invoking the specter of a rising tide of humanity as cause to slam borders shut. Still others inspire a chorus of neo-Luddites, who fear that the "rise of the robots" is rapidly making human workers obsolete, a threat all the more alarming if the human population is exploding. They may be the one thing that can protect the global economy from the dangers that lie ahead.

A few weeks ago, Montreal-based AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio launched Element AI, a Silicon Valley-style startup incubator dedicated to deep learning. Despite its modest (but growing) startup scene, Montreal is already a hotbed in AI talent, with a trove of deep learning researchers across the city. Bengio -- along with Jean-François Gagné, Nicolas Chapados, Jean-Sébastien Cournoyer, and the rest of their team of tech mavericks -- is hoping to accelerate the proliferation of AI startups and researchers in Montreal to turn the city into an AI center. As a proud Montrealer and bot maker, I couldn't be happier with this news. Surprisingly, though, the launch received some mixed feedback locally.

Former Alaska Airlines CIO Veresh Sita has joined Emaar Properties as its chief digital officer, a role in which he will oversee a technology transformation intended to drive growth for the Dubai-based global real estate developer. His core focus is incorporating artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet of things (IoT) into sophisticated properties, or "digital smart cities," Sita says. Emaar Properties is one of the largest real estate developers in the United Arab Emirates and is renowned for building and owning both the tallest building and largest mall in the world. With six business segments and 60 companies, Emaar has a presence in 36 markets across the Middle East, North Africa, Pan-Asia, Europe and North America. One of its key current projects, Dubai Creek Harbour, is expected to be among the most digitally sophisticated housing developments when it's completed in 2018.

The pizzeria vowed on Monday to stay open despite a shooting incident sparked by a fake news report that it was fronting a child sex ring run by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. On Sunday afternoon, a 28-year-old man walked into a Washington, D.C. ping-pong bar and pizzeria. He was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle – hardly standard-issue hardware for a round of table tennis. He fired one or more shots, as people fled Comet Ping Pong, before surrendering to police officers. Edgar Maddison Welch told police he had traveled from his home in Salisbury, N.C. to the nation's capital to investigate a pre-election conspiracy theory, wherein Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton allegedly led a child-trafficking ring out of Comet Ping Pong.