LJUBLJANA – Electrical equipment-producer Yaskawa, which is building an industrial robot factory in Slovenia, has decided to build another factory in the country to produce electrical components. The new factory will make inverter drives, servo drives and servo motors, Yaskawa said Monday. "Expanding our production capacity will enable us to further improve the supply chain, shorten our lead times and enhance the service for our European customers," Manfred Stern, head of Yaskawa Europe, said in a statement. Yaskawa did not reveal the value of the new investment, but according to local media it will be worth some €25 million ($30 million) and will create up to 250 new jobs. The company already makes industrial robot parts in Slovenia.

Here come the cyborg beetles. Electronic-filled backpacks have been used to create controllable flying bio-robots. Male M. torquata beetles had electrodes implanted into four of their flight muscles. Small electric pulses were then administered to steer them left or right. Their acceleration could be increased by upping the frequency of the pulses.

Lithium (Li) metal electrodes are not deployable in rechargeable batteries because electrochemical plating and stripping invariably leads to growth of dendrites that reduce coulombic efficiency and eventually short the battery. It is generally accepted that the dendrite problem is exacerbated at high current densities. Here, we report a regime for dendrite evolution in which the reverse is true. In our experiments, we found that when the plating and stripping current density is raised above 9 milliamperes per square centimeter, there is substantial self-heating of the dendrites, which triggers extensive surface migration of Li. We show that repeated doses of high-current-density healing treatment enables the safe cycling of Li-sulfur batteries with high coulombic efficiency.

For the last eight months, farms near Kisarazu City in Japan have been home to a horrifying robot wolf. But don't worry, it wasn't created to terrorize local residents (although, from the looks of the thing, it probably did). Its official name is "Super Monster Wolf," and engineers designed it to stop animals from eating farmers' crops. In truth, the story of the robowolf is more than a little sad. As Motherboard reports, wolves went extinct in Japan in the early 1800s.

Japanese farmers are using terrifying robotic wolves with beaming red LED eyes to scare off wild boars, deer and other pests from grazing on the country's rice and chestnut crops. The "Super Monster Wolf" stands at 50cm tall, is 65cm long and runs on rechargeable solar-batteries, using motion-sensors to detect when other mammals approach and letting out an alarming primal howl in response. The robo-wolf can cover distances of up to half a mile and has been used in trials to patrol fields near Kisarazu City, Chiba, as a deterrent to pests, effectively acting as a moving scarecrow. In addition to its satanic stare, the creature features a realistic fur hide and snarling rubber jaws. Chikao Umezawa of the Japan Agricultural Cooperative, the man who commissioned it, said he has seen a significant drop in the number of crops devoured by animals since the beast was unleashed.

Dyson has stopped making full-size, plug-in vacuum cleaners and revealed the products that will replace them. The company is going to focus on its smaller, battery powered models, it said. It made the announcement as it revealed its new Cyclone V10 cordless vacuum, which it says is "why we've stopped developing corded vacuums". At the same time, the company launched the new version of its Pure Cool fan, a purifier that is able to clean things out of the air. Together, Dyson hopes the new products offer the future of "clean home technology". The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Neural networks are powerful things, but they need a lot of juice. Engineers at MIT have now developed a new chip that cuts neural nets' power consumption by up to 95 percent, potentially allowing them to run on battery-powered mobile devices. Smartphones these days are getting truly smart, with ever more AI-powered services like digital assistants and real-time translation. But typically the neural nets crunching the data for these services are in the cloud, with data from smartphones ferried back and forth. That's not ideal, as it requires a lot of communication bandwidth and means potentially sensitive data is being transmitted and stored on servers outside the user's control.

According to the report, Apple is seeking to lock down a long-term deal, securing several thousand metric tons a year, for a last five years. The move puts Apple in direct competition with other big players who are also looking for a similar agreement, and advantage. BMW, Volkswagen and Samsung's own battery division are thought to be engaged in similar negotiations for their own EV projects. It's clear from the piece that Apple is only seeking to secure material for batteries that go inside its consumer hardware. CEO Tim Cook has been open about his company's interest in the "autonomous systems" market, but wouldn't be drawn on what exactly was being worked on.

MIT researchers have developed a chip designed to speed up the hard work of running neural networks, while also reducing the power consumed when doing so dramatically – by up to 95 percent, in fact. The basic concept involves simplifying the chip design so that shuttling of data between different processors on the same chip is taken out of the equation. The big advantage of this new method, developed by a team led by MIT graduate student Avishek Biswas, is that it could potentially be used to run neural networks on smartphones, household devices and other portable gadgets, rather than requiring servers drawing constant power from the grid. Because it means that phones of the future using this chip could do things like advanced speech and face recognition using neural nets and deep learning locally, rather than requiring more crude, rule-based algorithms, or routing information to the cloud and back to interpret results. Computing'at the edge,' as its called, or at the site of sensors actually gathering the data, is increasingly something companies are pursuing and implementing, so this new chip design method could have a big impact on that growing opportunity should it become commercialized.

In the tech world in 2017, several trends emerged as signals amid the noise, signifying much larger changes to come. As we noted in last year's More Than Noise list, things are changing--and the changes are occurring in ways that don't necessarily fit into the prevailing narrative. While many of 2017's signals have a dark tint to them, perhaps reflecting the times we live in, we have sought out some rays of light to illuminate the way forward. The following signals differ considerably, but understanding them can help guide businesses in the right direction for 2018 and beyond. When a team of psychologists, linguists, and software engineers created Woebot, an AI chatbot that helps people learn cognitive behavioral therapy techniques for managing mental health issues like anxiety and depression, they did something unusual, at least when it comes to chatbots: they submitted it for peer review. Stanford University researchers recruited a sample group of 70 college-age participants on social media to take part in a randomized control study of Woebot. The researchers found that their creation was useful for improving anxiety and depression symptoms.