Kiran Upadhyay

Parkour! That’s what we should all be devoting our combined robotics expertise towards. There’s no nobler human pursuit, so of course we should create a robot that can master the so-called ‘sport of kings.’ And yes, that is the true sport of kings. Boston Dynamics has shown off its new version of SpotMini, a robot dog that’s slightly less intimating cased in its more consumer friendly rounded future armor. But now it’s also catching us up on what’s been going down with its bipedal Atlas bot, the most humanoid of its creations. Atlas can now jump from elevated block to elevated block, and do a complete about-face in the air. It can leap pretty high, and also do a backflip – and then celebrate its backflipping ability. I could do without the grandstanding, future destroyer of worlds.

Tesla has unveiled a new Roadster, the new version of its original sports car. It’s the fastest production car ever made, according to Elon Musk, with speeds of just 1.9 seconds for 0 to 60 4.2 seconds for 0 to 100. It can handle a quarter-mile in 8.9 seconds. “This is the base model,” Musk said, then went on to mention that its top speed is above 250 mph. and it has a 200 kWh battery pack that offers 630 miles of highway driving range. It’s also a 2 by 2 four-seater, and it’s available in 2020 starting at $200,000, with the first 1,000 sold being Founder’s Series models that will retail for $250,000 apiece. Which is a steal for the fastest production car ever. Understandably, the crowd was in awe when Musk revealed the new Roadster, which has a look inside and out that owes a lot to classic sports car design. The car also ripped up the runway at the hangar where the event was held, before pulling to a stop and being flanked by the two new Tesla Semi trucks on either side.

Mozilla has released Firefox 57, codenamed Quantum, into the wild. This is the most ambitious version of Firefox released in a long time. It’s faster, better-looking, more streamlined, and more useful, and it may be able to give Chrome a run for its money. It certainly uses less RAM. In terms of web browsers, Firefox was once the big daddy. But now Google Chrome enjoys a 55 percent share of the market, and Firefox is down in third, behind Safari. Rather than carry on releasing incremental updates, Mozilla has taken a risk with a bold new version of Firefox… Firefox Quantum Is Flat Out Better Firefox Quantum has been built from the ground up, with Mozilla pulling out all of the stops to get back in the game. Mozilla claims Firefox Quantum is “the biggest update we’ve had since we launched Firefox 1.0 in 2004,” and “just flat out better in every way”. And this may well be true. The most obvious improvement is the speed, with Mozilla claiming Quantum is “twice as fast as Firefox

Since Puerto Rico was struck by Hurricane Maria in late September, the island has struggled to repair power lines, water pumps, cell phone towers, roads, and bridges. The electrical system has come under the most scrutiny. The commonwealth’s power provider—Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority or PREPA—was bankrupt going into the disaster and has faced scandal after scandal in recent weeks. After reconnecting more than 40 percent of its generating sources early last week, a major power line failed on Thursday, reducing the grid's online capacity to 18 percent. Although the line was quickly fixed, PREPA's grid is only working at 47 percent capacity now, according to statistics from the Puerto Rican government. With more than 50 percent of the grid offline, previously connected Puerto Ricans have been living off generators or solar panels for nearly 7 weeks, or they live without power. On Thursday, Governor Ricardo Rosselló demanded that his entire cabinet submit undated le

Record labels are obsolete. They haven’t kept up as music evolved from selling CDs to streaming songs to promoting concert tickets and merchandise. Labels were meant to help artists generate albums, fame, and money. But now anyone can record themselves and no one “buys” music. So today that requires being a technology company, combining analytics with hyper-targeted advertising. And the old labels don’t have the engineering talent for it. That’s why last year, the former president of Interscope Records Steve Stoute secretly raised $70 million from Google’s corporate umbrella Alphabet, prestigious venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and entertainment giant 20th Century Fox. Today, his startup UnitedMasters emerges from stealth. UnitedMasters is ready to give musicians an alternative to exploitative record label deals. Artists pay UnitedMasters a competitive rate to distribute their music across the internet from Spotify to YouTube to SoundCloud, and they split the royalties while

A few hours after announcing a review of its verification program, Twitter began revoking the verified status of some accounts. White supremacists Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler are among the users who no longer have a blue checkmark displayed on their profiles. On Wednesday, Twitter admitted in a thread on its support account that “verification has long been perceived as an endorsement,” something its critics have argued for years about the program, which began in 2009 to prevent impersonation accounts. The problem was compounded last year when the verification program opened to allow public submissions. Twitter said yesterday that it has stopped accepting public submissions as it reviews the program and “remove(s) verification from accounts whose behavior does not fall within these new guidelines.” Its updated rules says Twitter will now remove verification for “behaviors on and off Twitter,” including promoting hate and violence; threatening people on the basis of race, et

It's been one of the most contentious debates in anthropology, and now scientists are saying it's pretty much over. A group of prominent anthropologists have done an overview of the scientific literature and declare in Science magazine that the "Clovis first" hypothesis of the peopling of the Americas is dead. For decades, students were taught that the first people in the Americas were a group called the Clovis who walked over the Bering land bridge about 13,500 years ago. They arrived (so the narrative goes) via an ice-free corridor between glaciers in North America. But evidence has been piling up since the 1980s of human campsites in North and South America that date back much earlier than 13,500 years. At sites ranging from Oregon in the US to Monte Verde in Chile, evidence of human habitation goes back as far as 18,000 years. In the 2000s, overwhelming evidence suggested that a pre-Clovis group had come to the Americans before there was an ice-free passage