A Justice Department indictment unsealed on Monday details an alleged conspiracy by the Chinese device maker Huawei to steal the details of a T-Mobile robot. Here, a woman uses her smartphone outside a Huawei store in Beijing on Tuesday. A Justice Department indictment unsealed on Monday details an alleged conspiracy by the Chinese device maker Huawei to steal the details of a T-Mobile robot. Here, a woman uses her smartphone outside a Huawei store in Beijing on Tuesday. But only one of them reads like the script of a slapstick caper movie.

Clear, intelligible speech using computer processing of human brain activty has been acheived by scientists for the first time. Researchers at the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University were able to reconstruct the words a person heard by monitoring their brain activity. The breakthrough is an important step towards creating a brain-computer interface capable of reading the thoughts of people who are unable to communicate verbally. "Our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one's voice due to injury or disease is so devastatting," said Professor Nima Mesgarani, a principal investigator at Columbia University who led the study. He added: "We have a potential way to restore that power. We've shown that, with the right technology, these people's thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener."

Floods are among the most common -- and deadly -- natural disasters in the world. Every year, they're responsible for tens of thousands of fatalities and hundreds of millions of displaced homeowners. And they're extraordinarily costly -- in the U.S. alone from 2005 to 2014, the average flood claim was $42,000, and total flood insurance claims averaged more than $3.5 billion per year. Accurate flood forecasting is a desirable goal, needless to say; according to some studies, early warning systems can reduce deaths and economic damages by over a third. Fortunately, it's one scientists continue to inch toward with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). In a new paper ("ML for Flood Forecasting at Scale") published on the preprint server Arxiv.org,

DeepTech companies combine cutting edge science and advanced engineering with the objective of making a profound impact on humanity. One of the sectors most impacted by DeepTech is AI for Drug Discovery. In the second article in our DeepTech Series, we will focus on AI for Drug Discovery and profile four top tier companies in this sector. Drugs are among the most effective ways to combat disease. Drugs are used to fight cancer, relieve pain, prevent cardiovascular disease, alleviate mental illness, cure infectious disease, and much more.

The twin criminal indictments against Huawei unveiled by US authorities on Monday are packed with emails and financial transactions allegedly showing how the Chinese technology giant carried out criminal conspiracies. But the finer points of the 23 charges are less important than the overall shot they deliver across China's bows. The US considers Huawei to be an arm of the Chinese state – and their devices to be potential spying equipment for Beijing. Charges that Huawei illegally violated US sanctions on Iran hold the most symbolic significance. They allowed Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, to stress the company's activities had been "detrimental to the security of the United States".

With less than a month to go until the unveiling of the next Samsung flagship smartphone – presumably called the Galaxy S10 – the latest leak suggests there will be a major update to the device's wireless charging capabilities. Samsung already supports wireless charging for its high-end Galaxy S-series and Note range of phones, but its next-generation handset may be able to share its battery power with other phones. Huawei introduced this feature last year with the Mate 20 Pro, which uses a charging coil in the back of the phone to give as well as receive wireless charging. All that is needed to share the battery is to enable the charging function in the phone's settings and place it near another device compatible with Qi wireless charging. The Galaxy S10 is also expected to support 5G, according to separate leaks, though this may only be available for owners in the US and South Korea.

With the introduction of its latest delivery drone iteration, the Scout, Amazon is once again reassuring the shopping public that automated package delivery services are just just around the corner. Just as they've been promising since 2013, when founder Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and claimed that the technology would be commonplace within 5 years. But unfortunately for his predictions, the march of progress rarely sticks to a set schedule. Over the past half decade, a litany of companies worldwide have sought to build and deploy dozens of drone-based delivery services, with varying degrees of success. Last May, Ele.me, Alibaba's online meal ordering service, began using drones in Jinshan Industrial Park to get meals to mouths in just 20 minutes, a fraction of the time it'd take a human courier to drive through Shanghai traffic.

Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to. For example, when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program defeated South Korean Master Lee Se-dol in the board game Go earlier this year, the terms AI, machine learning, and deep learning were used in the media to describe how DeepMind won.

In July 2018, the battle between Apple and Samsung to be the world's most popular smartphone maker was finally interrupted. After eight years, a Chinese upstart had entered the fray to challenge Samsung – but few people outside of Asia had ever heard of them. Huawei had overtaken Apple by selling more than 54 million units in the space of three months, largely helped by the success of its hugely popular flagship phones that boasted some of the most impressive specs on the market. Yet various political issues meant only a few thousand of those sales came from the highly lucrative US market. Since then, several other western governments have raised concerns about Huawei in relation to the firm's alleged ties with the Chinese government, with allegations that Huawei devices are being used as spy tools by Beijing.

An alarming bug in iPhones allows people to snoop on their owners without their knowledge. The issue means that people can listen into people when their phones are ringing – allowing them to hear what people are saying even if they never accept the call. Some versions of the bug even allow people to see video at the same time. Apple says the problem will be fixed later this week, when an iPhone and iPad software update is rolled out to users. Until then, it has turned off the group FaceTime feature entirely, according to its website. But some users report that the feature is still turned on – and, therefore, the bug is still active – even after Apple made that change.