Computer Science

A new device concept opens the door to compact, high-performance transistors with built-in memory.

Electronic rings wirelessly connected to an AI system are capable of translating multiple sign languages into text, a new study finds.“I believe this is an important step toward making sign language translation systems more practical, lightweight, and usable in real-world environments,” says Ki Jun Yu, an associate professor of electrical and electronic engineering at Yonsei University in Korea.More than 300 differen tsign languages are used worldwide, and many research projects are developing translation devices for communicating with people who do not know a sign language. However, these projects have faced many setbacks.For example, some projects used cameras and computer vision algor..

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNARSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEActuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOEnjoy today’s videos! Bulk material handling is a critical, labor-intensive operation across various industries, traditionally performed by human operators using heavy hydraulic manipulators equipped with free-swinging, underactuated grippers. This work presents the f..

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines China’s short drama industry is fueled by bite-sized, melodramatic, and smutty shows built for smartphone scrolling. Now, many are being made entirely with…

Every year the World Health Organization publishes a global health statistics report. It features the numbers behind world health trends and, importantly, assesses whether we’re on track to reach ambitious goals set in 2015. It’s a bit like a health grade. The 2026 report was published on Wednesday. And the results aren’t looking brilliant. While…

In a dimly lit bedroom, a frightened young woman is thrown onto a bed by a tall, muscular man. He grabs her hand, and flame-like vines crawl across her body, fusing with her flesh. She levitates, then drops. A dragon-shaped tattoo appears across her chest. “Two months,” the man says. “Give me an heir, or…

In the final week of the Musk v. Altman trial, lawyers traded blows over Elon Musk’s and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s credibility. Altman was grilled on his alleged history of lying and self-dealing involving companies that do business with OpenAI. But he fired back, painting Musk as a power-seeker who wanted to control the development…

The Government has set out its vision for transforming care through its Neighbourhood Health Framework, supported by NHS England’s latest guidance to Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) on developing Neighbourhood Health Centres (NHCs).

A survey conducted by Policing Insight, supported by a steering group comprising the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), the Police Federation of England and Wales, the Home Office, and the Police Digital Service, has found that more than half of police officers are dissatisfied with the current provision of digital, data and technology (DDaT) within police forces.

Recent years have witnessed the unprecedented development of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things. These two technologies have significantly facilitated data collection from different sources for numerous tasks, such as reconstruction, classification, and prediction, for next-generation applications. However, the effective fusion and interpretation of these multi-source datasets remain challenging, making it a thriving area of research.

This sponsored article is brought to you by Applied Materials.At pivotal moments in history, progress has required more than individual brilliance. The most consequential breakthroughs — such as those achieved under the Human Genome Project — required a new operating paradigm: Concentrate the world’s best talent around a single mission, establish a common platform, share critical infrastructure, and collapse feedback loops. When stakes are high and timelines are compressed, sequential and siloed innovation simply cannot keep pace.Today’s AI era is creating an engineering race with similar demands. Every company is pushing to deliver higher-performance AI systems, faster. But performa..

A hydrated leaf is a healthy leaf. That’s true for the leaves of crop plants in a farmer’s field and for the leaves of trees in an area vulnerable to forest fires.But the traditional techniques to monitor leaf hydration require cutting them from their plants, which is time-consuming and cannot give live measurements. That’s why many researchers are building sensors that measure a plant’s health in real time.Now, researchers in Texas have developed a graphene “tattoo” that can be stuck directly onto a leaf to provide real-time moisture readings. The researchers also believe it could one day be the building block for a new kind of plant monitoring, by turning the patches into a neu..

Financial services companies have unique needs when it comes to business AI. They operate in one of the most highly regulated sectors while responding to external events that are updated by the second. As a result, the success of agentic AI in financial services depends less on the sophistication of the system and more on…

When generative AI first moved from research labs into real-world business applications, enterprises made a tacit bargain: “Capability now, control later.” Feed your proprietary data into third-party AI models, and you will get powerful results. But your data passes through systems you do not own, under governance you do not set. The protections you rely…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn When Jennifer got a research job in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted…

The Tesla Semi has officially arrived. The company recently released a photo of the first vehicle rolling off its new full-scale production line. This moment has been nearly a decade in the making: The company first announced the truck in late 2017. And now we’ve got final battery specs, official prices, and big news about…

When Jennifer got a job doing research for a nonprofit in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see if the tech would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than 10 years before, when she was in her early 20s. It did in fact return…

The Government's Growing Up in the Online World consultation closes on 26 May. techUK sets out its positions ahead of submitting a formal response.

Computer scientists at UC Riverside have identified troubling flaws in a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents designed to take over routine computer chores while users are away—sorting emails, organizing files, analyzing data, and handling other everyday digital tasks that might otherwise consume hours.

New work explaining the inner workings of artificial intelligence could provide a way around the threat of AI "model collapse," potentially averting growing numbers of AI hallucinations in the future.

One of the earliest stated goals for computing in medicine was to aid in clinical reasoning: the decision-making steps required to reach a diagnosis and form a treatment plan. And over the years, researchers have built many clinical decision support systems, which have typically been purpose-built, with painstakingly written rules about symptoms, test thresholds, and medication interactions. As artificial intelligence capabilities develop, clinical reasoning is a natural application.Now, a large language model (LLM) from OpenAI has outperformed physicians on several clinical reasoning tasks using real emergency room records, according to a study published 30 April in Science. The new finding..

When I sat down with bell hooks’ personal journals at an archive at Berea College in Kentucky, I expected an intimate peek into her private thoughts, her voice before the editing. What I got instead was frustration. Her handwriting was dense cursive, all loops that looked identical to my eye, and there were years of journals to go through. I found myself photographing pages and feeding them to ChatGPT just to read what she’d written. My tool of choice worked well, and it turns out I’m not the first person in an archive to have figured this out.Getting computers to reliably read human handwriting, in all its variations, has challenged AI researchers since the earliest days of the field...

People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI—and there’s apparently no easy way to prevent it.  A Redditor recently wrote that he was “desperate for help”: for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from “strangers” who were “looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial A startup called Varda Space Industries is betting that the future of pharmaceuticals lies in orbit. The company has signed a…

Varda Space Industries, a startup that’s been pitching its ability to perform drug experiments in space, says it has signed up the pharmaceutical company United Therapeutics in what may be remembered as a notable step toward in-orbit manufacturing. The idea of building things in outer space for use on Earth has so far been explored…

What the 2026 legislative agenda means for investment, innovation, and the UK’s digital economy.

Today’s King’s Speech outlined the government’s legislative priorities for the year ahead, including an upcoming Bill covering Digital Identity, called the Digital Access to Services Bill. The focus of the Bill is to modernise how citizens interact with public services.

On the 12 May, the government published the annual Cyber Security Sectoral Analysis 2026 report, sharing insights on the size, growth and focus areas for the UK cyber security sector.