This itsy-bitsy robot can't climb up the waterspout yet but it can run, jump, carry heavy payloads and turn on a dime. Dubbed HAMR-JR, this microrobot developed by researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, is a half-scale version of the cockroach-inspired Harvard Ambulatory Microrobot or HAMR. About the size of a penny, HAMR-JR can perform almost all of the feats of its larger-scale predecessor, making it one of the most dexterous microrobots to date. "Most robots at this scale are pretty simple and only demonstrate basic mobility," said Kaushik Jayaram, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and the Wyss Institute, and first author of the paper. "We have shown that you don't have to compromise dexterity or control for size."

Army researchers have designed a new drone that can transform mid-flight, making it capable of both high-speed flight and hovering in place at a target destination. The drone was a joint effort from the US Army Research Laboratory and engineers Texas A&M, who presented their research at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aviation Forum and Exposition. The drone transforms by either bending its wings upward or fully extending them depending on the needs of the mission and the types of maneuvers it needs to execute. For'dash' segments of missions, which require travel to and from a target, the wings will be folded inward to allow for faster and more efficient travel, while'loiter' phases of a mission will see the wings fully extended for increased stability. 'During dash segments, short wings are desirable in order to go fast and be more maneuverable, but for loiter segments, long wings are desirable in order to enable low power, high endurance flight.'

A breakthrough that led to the creation of new neurons in mice could be used to transplant brain cells in Parkinson's patients and cure them of the disease. University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers created neurons in mice using a new, much simpler method that involved rewriting genes. Parkinson's disease is characterised by a loss of dopaminergic neurons in a region of the brain responsible for reward and movement - replacing those cells could help to reduce or even reverse the symptoms of the degenerative disease. A small study involving mice with Parkinson's saw those given the'new neuron treatment' return to normal within three months and stay disease free for life. The researchers said it could one day be used to'cure' any disease caused by the loss of neurons but warned this was a long way off and hadn't been tested. Left: mouse cells (green) before reprogramming and then right shows neurons (red) induced from mouse cells after reprogramming.

A key question before Stanford HAI and the California Future of Work Commission: Can AI be a positive, equalizing force...

Jess Whittlestone at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues published a comment piece in Nature Machine Intelligence this week arguing that if artificial intelligence is going to help in a crisis, we need a new, faster way of doing AI ethics, which they call ethics for urgency. For Whittlestone, this means anticipating problems before they happen, finding better ways to build safety and reliability into AI systems, and emphasizing technical expertise at all levels of the technology's development and use. At the core of these recommendations is the idea that ethics needs to become simply a part of how AI is made and used, rather than an add-on or afterthought. Ultimately, AI will be quicker to deploy when needed if it is made with ethics built in, she argues. I asked her to talk me through what this means.

Samsung has partnered with London-based fintech startup Curve to launch a digital payments card later this year. The Samsung Pay Card will allow users to link all of their bank and loyalty cards to a single digital card on their phone, the tech giant said. It will also allow people with Samsung smartphones to control their money and view all their spending from a single place. The company is also working with Mastercard to launch the new feature. The announcement continues a growing trend of technology firms such as Google and Apple offering a variety of digital payment solutions on their smartphones – last year Apple launched its own credit card for the first time through its Apple Wallet payments app.

Google will start automatically deleting users' data as part of a plan to increase privacy on its services. The new change is just one of a wide number of alterations intended to show the company's commitment to privacy, according to chief executive Sundar Pichai. It will also allow people to more easily turn on incognito mode, invest in better technology to protect privacy, and more easily perform checks that alert users if their password is caught up in large breaches. Perhaps the largest of the changes is the switch so that activity gathered about people's physical location as well as about their behaviour on the internet is automatically deleted after 18 months. That option has been available for users since last year, but has been turned off by default.

Honeywell, a company best known for making control systems for homes, businesses and planes, claims to have built the most powerful quantum computer ever. Other researchers are sceptical about its power, but for the company it is a step toward integrating quantum computing into its everyday operations. Honeywell measured its computer's capabilities using a metric invented by IBM called quantum volume. It takes into account the number of quantum bits – or qubits – the computer has, their error rate, how long the system can spend calculating before the qubits stop working and a few other key properties. Measuring quantum volume involves running about 220 different algorithms on the computer, says Tony Uttley, the president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions.

Many critics of police facial recognition use warn of the potential for racial bias that leads to false arrests, and unfortunately that appears to have happened. The ACLU has filed a complaint against Detroit police for the wrongful arrest of Robert Williams when a DataWorks Plus facial recognition system incorrectly matched security footage against Williams' driver's license, marking him as a suspect. Officers showed the match to an offsite security consultant who identified Williams as the culprit, but this person never saw the perpetrator first-hand. The ACLU argued that the DataWorks system "can't tell Black people apart" and that the whole system was "tainted" by officers' assumptions that the facial recognition system produced the right suspect. In a Washington Post opinion piece, Williams added that he was concerned about the tech even if it was completely accurate -- he didn't want his daughters' faces to go into a database and prompt future police questioning when they're spotted at a "protest the government didn't like."

On an almost weekly basis news about breaches dominates headlines. The prevalence of attacks has created an ever-growing pool of stolen credentials that are routinely used to open fraudulent accounts, take out onerous loans, or max out cards. To deal with this problem, experts at Visa have come up with a way to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to reduce the stress felt by banks in trying to determine what applications are fake and which are real. Melyssa Barrett, Visa's vice president of Identity & Risk Products, explained in an interview that studies show 13 billion data records have been lost or stolen in global breaches since 2013 and there have been $10.2.billion in combined estimated losses in new account fraud ($3.4 billion) and account takeover ($6.8 billion) in the US in 2019. Visa said it created the Advanced Identity Score to reduce the amount of digital identity fraud.