Current News/Innovations

An ambitious Conservative minister has set out a strategy to turn the UK's scientific expertise into new products and services that will generate jobs and wealth for the economy. That was in 1983. The minister was Kenneth Clarke, who launched the £350m Alvey programme. It was designed to propel Britain to the forefront of advanced computing. But the policy of government subsidies for the research and development of favoured companies - known as "picking winners" - did not fit in with Margaret Thatcher's policy of introducing free market principles to the economy. Five years after its inception, the government pulled the plug on the Alvey programme. Thirty five years on, another Mr Clark, the Business Secretary, Greg Clark, announced £140m to support collaboration between industry and academia in the so-called life sciences sector, which develops innovative new medical treatments. The money was announced earlier this year - but details were revealed o...

Can't wait to find out what happens next in the Game of Thrones ? A new artificial intelligence system has written the first five chapters of the next book of the popular fantasy series. The TV show Game of Thrones, which is based on the George R R Martin' book series A Song of Ice and Fire, has gained widespread popularity worldwide. The show's seventh season recently aired its last episode , and the fans will now have to wait till 2019 to know what happens next to their favourite characters. Martin is currently working on the sixth novel of the book series The Winds of Winter. Zach Thoutt, a software engineer in the US, trained an artificial intelligence (AI) system to predict the events of the sixth novel using the characters from the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. So far the AI has generated the first five chapters of the book after adding the 5,376 pages of the first five novels in the series. "I start each chapter by giving it a prime...

If you're an Android user and need to delete the data on your phone , then you know that there are a number of good options for backing up your phone first. A lot of this can be done via the Cloud, so that the content can be brought back easily, but backing up your SMS inbox requires the use of third-party tools. There are a lot of different options on Google Play, but the question becomes which one should you use. Most of the popular ones require access to your Gmail account to automatically create and restore the backups, but if you aren't comfortable giving this kind of access, we have a good option you can try, which we used ourselves as well to backup SMS messages on our Android phone. Here is everything you need to know about backing up (and restoring) your phone's SMS archive, which can be saved on the device, mailed to yourself, or saved to the cloud. This will be useful if you need to reset your phone to factory settings, or if you're switching...

WikiLeaks’ website appears to have been hacked by a group called OurMine, whose previous hacks have targeted tech CEOs, companies, and news sites. As of early Thursday morning, the  WikiLeaks.org homepage  displayed a message that read: “Hi, it’s OurMine (Security Group), don’t worry we are just testing your…. blablablab, oh wait, this is not a security test! Wikileaks, remember when you challenged us to hack you?” “Anonymous, remember when you tried to dox us with fake information for attacking wikileaks [ sic ]?” the message continues. “There we go! One group beat you all! #WikileaksHack lets get it trending on twitter [ sic ]!” The message was visible when the site was accessed from some locations Thursday morning. At the time of publication, some visitors to the site were greeted with a message saying that WikiLeaks’ account has been suspended. Last year, OurMine hacked  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account , as well as Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s  Q...

Logitech’s MX Master mouse has long been considered one of the best options out there for creative and professional users. And now the company is finally making a keyboard that meets the standard set by the MX series of mice — the Craft keyboard. The standout feature of the Craft is the “creative input dial,” a large silver knob in the top left corner of the keyboard. It’s sort of like a  smaller Surface Dial , minus the part where you have to own a Surface device. Logitech has built integrations for seven apps — Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and InDesign; and Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (although the Office integrations are only available on Windows for now). There are also some generic functions, like volume control or forward / back on pages that can be manually applied to any application (assuming it supports that input). The way it works is particularly clever: the top of the dial is touch sensitive, so simply tapping it brings up whatever contex...

TomTom, the Dutch company that makes mapping software, portable navigation devices, and GPS watches, will soon roll out a software update to its wearable devices that will calculate your fitness age. But before you get too excited (or depressed) about the body age that TomTom is going to assign you, know this: TomTom is essentially taking measurement of a metric that’s already available on many fitness tracking watches, and comparing that to a global average to determine your “age.” Through a free software update that will run on TomTom Spark 3 Cardio and TomTom Adventurer watches, TomTom will measure your VO2 Max, compare it to others in your age and gender group around the globe, and show you how you compare. From there, it will try to incentivize users by offering Fitness Points as they work towards their fitness age goals. TomTom says it also plans to offer more workouts on its devices that are personalized to help people meet their fitness age goals. Fitness age is a rela...

Philips is introducing one of its biggest Hue lights yet: a full-on fixture meant to hang from your ceiling and illuminate your dinner table with a big, seamlessly glowing disk of light. I got to see the new smart light fixture, called the White Ambiance Cher Suspension light, in person recently, and it has a nice look that strikes a balance between not being too futuristic and tacky and not being too showy, either. It’s sort of designed to blend perfectly into a really generic West Elm catalog. That said, I can also see the light standing out too much in a lot of dining rooms — the glowing disk is pretty unique. But that’s kind of the hard part about selling light fixtures instead of just standalone bulbs: even if someone wants a Hue-connected fixture, it has to match their home’s style first. Rather than do the all-out color-changing thing that Hue lights are known for, this fixture only moves between shades of white, from warmer tones for the evening to cooler tones for the m...

Automakers Renault and Nissan say they will develop electric cars with a Chinese state-owned partner, adding to a series of tie-ups between global auto brands and local partners in the biggest electric vehicle market. The venture Dongfeng Motor Corp. aims to develop a vehicle based on an SUV platform shared by Renault and Nissan, the companies announced Tuesday. Production is due to begin in 2019. Global automakers are investing heavily to develop electric vehicles for China, responding to rising demand and government pressure on the industry to speed up technology development. Chinese planners see electrics as a promising industry and a way to clean up smog-choked cities. They have supported sales with subsidies to buyers, while a proposed quota system will require automakers to meet targets for electric vehicle production or buy credits from competitors that do. Sales of pure-electric and gasoline-electric hybrids in China rose 50 percent last year over 2015 to 336,000 vehi...

Foxconn Technology Group is being enticed to come to Wisconsin with numerous regulatory waivers, raising concerns from environmentalists who are wary of the company's reputation in China, where it has been accused of polluting rivers. The Taiwan-based company best known for manufacturing Apple products insists that its new plant won't damage the environment. Regulators say they're simply streamlining the process for the company to set up shop, while still policing its activities. But this being Foxconn's first plant in the U.S., the assurances from the company and its supporters have done little to quell worries about the long-term impacts to wetlands and the state's waterways. Foxconn would be producing liquid crystal display panels, or LCDs, for computers, televisions and other devices. Making LCDs requires heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium, chromium, zinc and copper, said Peter Adriaens, professor of environmental engineering at the University of Mich...

A Chinese national has been charged in California with distributing a type of computer malware that has been linked to attacks on U.S. businesses and to the theft of personnel records of millions of U.S. government employees, authorities said. Defendant Yu Pingan, 36, knew the rare malware known as "Sakula" would be used to hack U.S. companies, the FBI said in court documents obtained Friday. The malware has also been linked to hacks at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in 2014 and 2015, when hackers accessed massive amounts of information from security clearance forms of federal workers and contractors. The court filing against Yu does not specifically mention those hacks. U.S. officials have said the Chinese government is responsible for those breaches. Asked about the arrest of Yu, Hua Chunying, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman in Beijing, said at a regular briefing that she was unaware of the situation. But, she added, "China has a clear and c...

The neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer finally crossed a line following the killing of a civil rights activist at a white supremacist rally it helped organize in Charlottesville, Virginia: a blogpost attacking victim Heather Heyer lead to it being chased from the web, first by technology companies who steadily refused to provide service, then by hackers who tried to crash the site. Eventually, it sought refuge in the so-called dark web, launching a special type of site called a Tor hidden service, impervious to conventional internet censorship. In doing so it shone a spotlight, yet again, on a controversial technology that provides protection for dissidents in oppressive regimes at the same time as harboring Nazis, illicit marketplaces and child abuse rings. The developer of the protocol that allows sites to exist hidden within the dark web and the encrypted browser used to connect to them and normal websites in a protected fashion, the Tor Project, spoke out shortly after the Daily Sto...

For the first time since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, NASA says it may soon have the capability to send astronauts to the International Space Station from U.S. soil. Critical milestones are on the horizon for Boeing and SpaceX, the space agency's commercial crew partners: Flight tests of their spacecraft, including crewed missions, are planned for 2018. That's launched something of a "new space race" at the Kennedy Space Center, officials said. "We have invested a lot as a center, as a nation into Kennedy Space Center to ready us for that next 50 years of spaceflight and beyond," said Tom Engler, the center's director of planning and development. "You see the dividends of that now, these commercial companies buying into what we're doing." The public-private partnership is transforming Kennedy Space Center into a multiuser spaceport. NASA is developing the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft for missions to...

South Korea's Supreme Court said a former worker in a Samsung LCD factory who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis should be recognized as having an occupationally caused disease, overturning lower court verdicts that held a lack of evidence against the worker. In a milestone decision that could aid other sickened tech workers struggling to prove the origin of their diseases, the Supreme Court ruled there was a significant link between Lee Hee-jin's disease and workplace hazards and her working conditions. Lower courts had denied her claim, partly because no records of her workplace conditions were publicly available. The Labor Ministry and Samsung refused to disclose them when a lower court requested the information, citing trade secrets. In its ruling Tuesday, the court said the lack of evidence, resulting from Samsung's refusal to provide the information and an inadequate investigation by the government, should not be held against the sickened worker. Instead,...

Photos with pleas for help in finding the missing from Tropical Storm Harvey are being posted, cut-and-pasted and retweeted by thousands of people as desperate family members seek loved ones who they fear might be dead, but may only have a dead phone. No official number of the unaccounted-for had been released Tuesday night amid the vast uncertainty of the storm's fourth day, with authorities saying the 18 deaths confirmed so far could surge in the days to come. Pictures and pleas for dozens of toddlers, brothers and grandfathers are circulating on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The posts appeared to be getting results, though not always good news. "Pleaseeeee," read the Instagram posting seeking 8-month-old Paige Booth, showing the baby sitting on a couch with a pacifier. Her mother and grandmother were evacuating from their Houston home Monday and holding her above their heads as the water rose to their chests and a current pushed them along. "It wa...

Nest is debuting a new version of its thermostat today, the first truly different model since the product was introduced in 2011. It’s called the Nest Thermostat E, and it can do nearly everything the regular Nest Thermostat can do, except it’s cheaper and housed in a brand new design — one that’s intentionally much, much plainer. Rather than a glossy metal ring with a big, bright screen in the middle of it, this version of the Nest Thermostat looks a lot more like other, duller thermostats. It’s a relatively plain white puck, and when it’s on a wall, it’s really easy to ignore. But that’s the point: Nest is trying to make a version of its thermostat with appeal beyond the gadget-loving crowd. It wants this to be a thermostat that you buy and forget about, but still get all the benefits that come with having some built-in intelligence. Namely, a reduced heating bill. The simplified interface is really nice, although the display itself looks a bit fuzzy. I know it’...