Some of the biggest companies in the world are pulling their facial recognition technologies from law enforcement agencies across the country. Amazon (AMZN), IBM (IBM), and Microsoft (MSFT) have said that they will either put a moratorium on the use of their technology by police -- or are completely exiting the field citing human rights concerns. The technology, which can be used to identify suspects in things like surveillance footage, has faced widespread criticism after studies found it can be biased against women and people of color. And according to at least one expert, there needs to be some form of regulation put in place if these technologies are going to be used by law enforcement agencies. "If these technologies were to be deployed, I think you cannot do it in the absence of legislation," explained Siddharth Garg, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, told Yahoo Finance.

Soap bubbles that deliver pollen to flowers could offer an alternative way of fertilising plants as bee populations decline, while being more delicate than other methods. Eijiro Miyako at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and his colleagues developed the technique and successfully used it to pollinate a pear orchard. "I jumped for joy," he says. Miyako and his team mixed pear pollen grains with a soap solution containing nutrients and loaded the mixture into a bubble gun. They then used the gun to release bubbles into a pear orchard, with about two to 10 bubbles hitting each flower, and later measured their success rate by counting the flowers that bore fruit.

Despite worsening political ties between China and India, a Chinese automaker is making a large investment in the subcontinent. Great Wall Motors, or GWM, China's largest maker of sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, has signed a memorandum of understanding to invest $1 billion to upgrade an auto plant in India's western province of Maharashtra. The plant, a former General Motors (GM) facility located near the city of Pune and is expected to generate jobs for 3,000 people. "This would be a highly automated plant in Talegaon [a town near Pune] with advanced robotics technology integrated in many of the production processes," said Parker Shi, managing director of GWM India. GWM becomes the second large Chinese automaker to enter the Indian market after MG Motor, a unit of SAIC Motor Corp., did so last year.

Enterprise software news isn't usually how we'd start off your morning, but in a world where remote work is more common than ever, Google's new partnership with Parallels is worth noting. The virtualization company is best known for making Windows software work on Macs, but now it's going to do the same thing for Google's cloud-connected Chrome OS. More information is due in the "coming months," before the partnership launches this fall, but if the only thing keeping your organization away from Chrome OS is access to Microsoft Office and other apps then that's about to change. We've seen Boston Dynamics' four-legged robotic dog, Spot, help triage patients with COVID-19, hold the door for a fellow bot, herd sheep and more. But until now, Spot was only available under short-term lease in Boston Dynamics' Early Adopter Program.

Researchers have found a way to turn simple line drawings into photo-realistic facial images. Developed by a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, DeepFaceDrawing uses artificial intelligence to help "users with little training in drawing to produce high-quality images from rough or even incomplete freehand sketches." This isn't the first time we've seen tech like this (remember the horrifying results of Pix2Pix's autofill tool?), but it is certainly the most advanced to date, and it doesn't require the same level of detail in source sketches as previous iterations have. It works largely through probability -- instead of requiring detailed eyelid or lip shapes, for example, the software refers to a database of faces and facial components, and considers how each facial element works with each other. Eyes, nose, mouth, face shape and hair type are all considered separately, and then assembled into a single image. As the paper explains, "Recent deep image-to-image translation techniques allow fast generation of face images from freehand sketches.

Amazon launched Echo Auto in the US back in 2018, designed to bring Alexa voice commands to vehicles where they wouldn't normally be an option. Now, finally, it's arrived in the UK and Canada, as well as Germany, Italy and Spain (it was previously also available in Australia and India). The device uses your phone's cellular connection via a Bluetooth link, letting you talk to Alexa in the usual way -- asking about the weather or to play audiobooks, for example -- as well as carrying out journey-orientated tasks, such as turning on your houselights as you pull into your driveway. Many newer cars already include some kind of voice assistant as standard -- drivers of vehicles without have also had other Alexa-based options to choose from, such as Garmin's Speak series and Anker's Roav Viva. However, a more'official' Amazon Alexa device could be the thing to convince those that haven't yet adopted the technology, even if it's a couple of years in the making.

The first Amazon Echo device designed for use in a car has finally been launched in the UK and Ireland, after being first revealed by the tech giant back in 2018. Amazon Echo Auto allows drivers to play music, check the news, make calls and check their schedule without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. The £49.99 device, which clips to car air vent mounts, is powered by Alexa, the company's digital assistant, just like the rest of the Echo smart speaker range. Drivers can use Alexa voice commands such as'Alexa, start my road trip playlist' to enjoy their journey safely without being distracted by their phone. The three-inch-long black box gets internet connectivity by connecting to a user's smartphone and the Alexa app, and using its existing data plan.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has enlisted Airbus to help it build a Mars rover called'Fetch' that will find and retrieve rock samples on the Red Planet. The defence and space arm of the aerospace corporation won the upcoming phase of the contract to develop the robot as part of the'Mars Sample Return' mission. Fetch will travel across the surface of the Red Planet in 2028 collecting packaged rock samples left behind by the NASA's Perseverance rover. The four-wheeled ESA rover will ultimately transport these samples to a'Mars Ascent Vehicle' which will carry them into orbit for collection by another ESA spacecraft. The European Space Agency (ESA) has enlisted Airbus to help it build a Mars rover called'Fetch' that will find and retrieve rock samples on the Red Planet.

You can now buy one of those unnerving animal-like robots you might have seen on YouTube -- so long as you don't plan to use it to harm or intimidate anyone. Boston Dynamics on Tuesday started selling its four-legged Spot robots online for just under $75,000 each. The agile robots can walk, climb stairs and observe their surroundings with cameras and other sensors. But people who buy them online must agree not to arm them or intentionally use them as weapons, among other conditions. "The key goal for us is to make sure people trust robots," Michael Perry, the company's vice president for business development, said in an interview.

A deadly new virus circling the globe makes many people more anxious. The pandemic's psychological toll can be particularly weighty for people with an existing mental health condition. One 25-year-old on the US East Coast seeing a therapist for help with anxiety found additional support from an unexpected source: a chatbot. "Therapy twice a month was fine before, it's just now sometimes I have days where I feel like I need something extra," says the person, who identifies as gender nonbinary, and asked to remain anonymous. Their budget didn't allow more frequent therapy sessions, making them receptive when a friend mentioned Woebot, a chatbot built on Stanford research that delivers a digital version of cognitive behavioral therapy.