When the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi river in Minnesota collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people, it was because of defects in steel plates that safety inspectors had missed. A new robot helper could help avoid such tragedies by making bridge checks cheaper and more accurate.

When the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi river in Minnesota collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people, it was because of defects in steel plates that safety inspectors had missed. A new robot helper could help avoid such tragedies by making bridge checks cheaper and more accurate. Surveying a bridge used to involve drilling into the road to check the concrete and steel structures underneath. Although radar has simplified the work since the 1980s, sending out teams of people to check bridges is still expensive and can require extended road closures. The upshot is that many bridges are overdue a health check – thousands in the US alone, for instance.

A paedophile has been jailed after authorities used a special video file to get him to unsuspectingly reveal his IP address. The paedophile, Roy Harvender Jr. from New Castle County, Delaware, had been using an anonymising network to access child sexual abuse images, but the video lured him into opening "an internet connection outside of the network software", allowing the FBI to track him down. The 59-year-old was a member of Website 19, a child pornography website on the'Dark Web', which was operational from 2012 to December 2014. 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. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into Uber's use of a secret software that was used to evade authorities in places where its ride-hailing service was banned or restricted, according to a person familiar with the government's probe. The investigation, in its early stages, deepens the crisis for the embattled company and its chief executive and founder, Travis Kalanick, who has faced a barrage of negative press this year in the wake of high-profile sexual harassment complaints, a slew of executive departures and a consequential trade-secrets lawsuit from Google's parent company. The federal criminal probe, first reported by Reuters, focuses on software developed by Uber called "Greyball." The program helped the company evade officials in cities where Uber was not yet approved. The software identified and blocked rides to transportation regulators who were posing as Uber customers in an effort to prove that the company was operating illegally.

Google's offering voice assistants to your next DIY computing project, we review the new BlackBerry phone (yes, it is 2017), and test-ride an electric dirt bike. Raspberry Pi has teamed up with Google to bring voice integration to the Pi with a clever combination of hardware and software. Packed with the same tech that powers Google Home, the companies have released a kit that transforms a regular Raspberry Pi 3 into your very own virtual assistant. The collaboration marks the first time that Google has produced something for hobbyists. The initiative is called "Artificial Intelligence Yourself" (AIY), and Google's project director said that he wants to create more hobbyist uses for Google software.

Uber could be facing a criminal probe by the Department of Justice into its use of a ghost-app program called Greyball, according to a Reuters report late Thursday. The controversial program allowed Uber engineers to take over a user's app and send them a map that did not accurately reflect which drivers were in the area. Uber admitted that Greyball was used in part to track and avoid regulators who might be hailing rides to scrutinize the company's business practices, and discontinued the practice five days after a March 3 New York Times report exposed the program. If true, a criminal investigation would represent a significant ratcheting up of problems for the world's most valuable startup, which already is dealing with an internal probe about a sexist work environment and a lawsuit from Waymo over allegedly stolen self-driving car technology. Uber declined to comment, but provided a letter the company sent to Portland, Ore., officials in March that describes the program.

Look around your home or office. To the left is a new Amazon Echo. Across the hall is a Nest thermostat. And each device is collecting data on you, your habits, and your lifestyle – every minute. Large scale data analytics are almost unavoidable.

"We have to go through miles of case law on this one." "We don't know because we can't track events like that." Spend enough time in or around government agencies, and these are the kinds of pressures you're likely to hear about. How can governments overcome challenges like these that are both detail-oriented and labor-intensive? Increasingly, they could be turning to artificial intelligence (AI).

Robots are picking up sexist and racist biases based on information used to program them predominantly coming from one homogenous group of people, suggests a new study from Princeton University and the U.K.'s University of Bath. Lead study author, Aylin Caliskan says the findings surprised her. "There's this common understanding that machines are supposed to be objective. But robots based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning learn from historic human data and this data usually contain biases," Caliskan tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti. Machine learning takes statistics and information that has been inputted and Caliskan argues it's only until humans become completely unbiased that the possibility of an unprejudiced robot can exist.

A U.S. judge on Wednesday said he had not seen clear evidence that Uber Technologies Inc had conspired with an engineer on its self driving car program to steal trade secrets from Alphabet Inc's Waymo, and that he was wrestling with whether to issue an injunction against the ride service. At a hearing in San Francisco federal court, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said it was undisputed that the engineer, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded about 14,000 documents shortly before he stopped working for Waymo. If it were proven that Levandowski and Uber conspired in taking Waymo's information, that could have dire consequences for Uber, say legal and ride-hailing industry experts. High-profile: Levandowski, a'swaggering' six-foot-seven tech leader, is one of Silicon Valley's most significant figures in the development of self-driving cars In lidar -- or light detection and ranging -- scanning, one or more lasers sends out short pulses, which bounce back when they hit an obstacle, whether clouds, leaves or rocks. In self-driving cars, the sensors constantly scan the surrounding areas looking for information and acting as the'eyes' of the car.