The Rubik's cube was devised by Hungarian architect Erno Rubik more than 30 years ago, but he likely never envisioned his puzzle being cracked this quickly. The machine, known as'Sub1 Reloaded' and developed by German tech company Infineon, was aided by one of the world's most powerful microcomputers, solved a Rubik's cube in 0.637 seconds at the Electronica Trade Fair in Munich, Germany earlier this year. The machine, known as'Sub1 Reloaded' and developed by German tech company Infineon, was aided by one of the world's most powerful microcomputers'Guinness World Records has spent some time carefully reviewing the evidence, including ensuring that the cube and the pre-scrambling met all WCA standards, before confirming the new record today,' the organisation said. The robot took a fraction of a second to analyse the cube and make 21 moves to solve the puzzle. Its time of 0.637 seconds beat the previous world record of 0.887 seconds, set by an earlier prototype of the same machine.

The Facebook chat bot that can help you fight a parking ticket is now helping refugees seek asylum and fill out immigration papers. The chat bot called DoNotPay, developed by Stanford Student Joshua Browder, was originally designed to help users get free legal advice to enable them to challenge parking tickets. It worked: Within two years of the bot's release, it had overturned more than 160,000 tickets. Browder has since updated the bot, and it's no longer limited to legal advice on parking and traffic tickets but has expanded to advising on immigration as well. The newest addition to the app can help refugees in the United States and Canada fill out the proper immigration forms, and in the UK it can help them apply for asylum support as well.

The iPhone 8 is going to be bigger than any phone Apple has ever made, according to a new report. The company will make an iPhone 7s and 7s Plus, in the same sizes as the models they replace. But the real new phone will be the iPhone 8 – a phone much bigger even than the 7 Plus. The new phone's OLED screen will stretch across 5.8 inches of the front of the screen, according to a new report from Nikkei Asian Review. But the iPhone 8 will save space by getting rid of the bezels that wrap around the display on the front of the phone, allowing the screen to take up most of the handset's size.

You can't have failed to notice the rise of the AI-powered assistants on phones, from Siri to Google Assistant to Cortana... and there are apparently more on the way in the near future. These apps offer a lot of the same features, though there are some differences too. Below we've taken four of the most well-known digital assistants of the moment and put them through their paces to see where their strengths and weaknesses lie, and to see whether some offer a better level of assistance than others. Apple was the first to put a voice-controlled assistant on a phone and Siri has grown from being a basic interface to your iPhone's functions to something much smarter and astute - and of course it's found its way to macOS now as well. Siri's still happier answering general questions it can look up on the internet rather than anything personal or specific, due in part to Apple's determination to put user privacy first (which means not collecting a load of information from your emails or your location like Google does) - but it can still bring up messages, calendar entries and so on.

We spoke to The Daily Beast to help make sense of ISIL's growing use of armed consumer drones in the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, we assisted The Verge in confirming that the jail sentence given to a Seattle man for crashing his drone during a parade was in fact unprecedented in the history of U.S. domestic drone use. A suspected U.S. drone strike in Pakistan killed two individuals near the border of Afghanistan. If confirmed, it would be the first U.S. drone strike in Pakistan under the Trump administration. The U.S. launched over 20 airstrikes in Yemen, targeting al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.

Dublin-based software firm Artomatix has closed a €2.1 million seed round with investors that include Enterprise Ireland. Artomatix, which employs 17 people, was founded in March 2014 by Dr Eric Risser, Neal O'Gorman and Bart Kiss. It has developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help automate 3D art creation for game design. The company's technology, known as Example Based Content Creation, relies on Dr Risser's expertise in machine learning, computer vision and graphics developed over 10 years of research. The technology gives 3D artists the ability to speed up their workflow thanks to algorithms that can generate thousands of images based on the initial design and parameters that an artist provides.

After conspicuously being absent when the group came together in September 2016, Apple has joined the Partnership on AI. Tim Cook's firm has become a founding member of the organisation, which includes Google/DeepMind, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and Amazon. Apple's Tom Gruber, the chief technology officer of AI personal assistant Siri, has joined the group of trustees running the non-profit partnership. "We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers," Gruber said in a statement . Although Apple didn't join the partnership from the beginning it is said discussions involving its membership have been ongoing.

Science fiction has long been obsessed with the idea of alien life forms and how they may appear. Over the years we have seen little green men, bug-eyed monsters and predatory killers take to the silver and smaller screens to represent our idea of life from outer space. But scientific fact may hold the key to a more realistic depiction of creatures and plants which have adapted to meet the harsh challenges of alien worlds. In the hunt for extra-terrestrial life, astronomers often try to find Earth-sized planets in what is called the'habitable zone' of their host star. This means they are orbiting at the correct distance for liquid water to exist on the planet.

Try again robot, you're doing it wrong. A brain-computer interface lets people correct robots' mistakes using the power of their thoughts. The system uses electroencephalography (EEG) to measure a person's brain signals as they watch a robot work. When it detects a signal suggesting the person has witnessed a mistake, it alters the robot's course. The system could be used to let humans control industrial robots simply by observing them.

For robots to do what we want, they need to understand us. Too often, this means having to meet them halfway: teaching them the intricacies of human language, for example, or giving them explicit commands for very specific tasks. But what if we could develop robots that were a more natural extension of us and that could actually do whatever we are thinking? A team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University is working on this problem, creating a feedback system that lets people correct robot mistakes instantly with nothing more than their brains. Using data from an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor that records brain activity, the system can detect if a person notices an error as a robot performs an object-sorting task.