Latest Technology

If you’ve never picked a raspberry, well, first of all that’s too bad, because a fresh raspberry is a beautiful thing. But second, and more immediately relevant in this case, you would not know that there is a technique to it that, surprisingly, robots aren’t super good at because they tend to be… crushy. But this robo-berry designed by Swiss researchers could usher in a new era of gentle, automated robo-pickers. The secret to picking a raspberry is to grip it just enough to get purchase and then pull it downwards off the little stem, apparently called the “receptacle,” which seems backwards. Seems simple — and it is, but only our hands are among the most sensitive and finely controlled constructions in the universe, the culmination of a hundred million years of evolution, outdone only by (I suspect) raccoons. Robots simply don’t have the senses necessary to figure out the perfect technique for picking a berry. But what if it could communicate with the berry to better sense the forc

The race is certainly on in the electrification of boating … even if everyone is jockeying for position before the market materializes. Flux Marine is joining the likes of Pure and Zin in trying to convert some of our waterways’ gas-guzzling outboards to cleaner, quieter battery powered ones, and the company just raised $15.5 million ahead of a planned summer shipping date. The conversion of the boating world to electrics is progressing slowly for lots of reasons, but it also seems as inevitable as the electrification of land vehicles. Boats are such big investments, and used so differently from cars, and physically are so much more power-hungry, that it’s not quite as simple to make the switch. Flux has designed for, it claims, both convenience and efficiency, with a new take on the traditional rear-mounted outboard. “We’ve taken a ground-up design approach that places the electric motor above the waterline for scalability, but does not use any legacy combustion outboard parts,

China’s augmented reality startup Nreal is on a roll. The company, which hopes to bring AR to the masses by making bright-color, lightweight smart glasses, has just received $60 million in a Series C extension round, bringing its total funding in the last 12 months to a handsome $200 million. The new investment is led by Alibaba, which has historically been a more hands-on but less active corporate investor than its archrival Tencent . The Chinese e-commerce giant has a reputation for acquiring controlling stakes in startups which can potentially be a complementary piece to its giant retail ecosystem. Alibaba’s investment in Nreal, however, is purely financial. In theory, the two could have generated strategic synergies. One could easily imagine Alibaba hooking Nreal up with its gaming and video streaming units, or even having it develop smart glasses for its millions of food delivery riders — who recently began wearing voice-controlled helmets . But with the onset of China’s antitru

Meet the Devialet Dione, a brand new speaker from high-end speaker manufacturer Devialet . With this new product, the company is entering a new market — home cinema sound systems. The Devialet Dione is an all-in-one soundbar compatible with Dolby Atmos 5.1.2 and it costs $2,400 (€2,190). “We are at the high end of the market but we have a product that is an all-in-one audio system,” Devialet CEO Franck Lebouchard told me. What he means by that is that you shouldn’t compare the Dione with an average soundbar. For instance if you’re trying to find an equivalent device in Sonos’ lineup, Lebouchard says you should compare Devialet’s speaker with the Sonos Arc soundbar paired with two Sonos One speakers and a Sonos Sub. And that package currently costs more than $2,000 as well. “The tech achievement is that we managed to put everything in a single device. It means that we had to make 17 speakers fit, which is unheard of,” Lebouchard added. The company set up a testing room in its offic

Figuring out what’s going on in the brain is generally considered to be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible. One major challenge is that the best ways to do so are room-sized machines relegated to hospitals — but brain.space is hoping that its portable, powerful, and most importantly user-friendly EEG helmet (plus $8.5M in funding) could power new applications and treatments at home and — as a sort of cork pop for its debut — in space. Electroencephalography, or EEG, is an established method for monitoring certain signals the brain produces, and which can indicate which areas of the cortex are active, whether the user is concentrating, agitated, and so on. It’s not nearly as precise as an MRI, but on the other hand all you need for an EEG is a set of electrical contacts on the scalp, while an MRI machine is huge, loud, and incredibly expensive. There’s been precious little advancement in EEG tech, though, and it’s often done more or less the same way it was done dec

This week, Nvidia, a company best known for its high-powered graphic processing units (GPUs) debuted a platform for the development of AI-powered medical devices. The device, called Clara Holoscan MGX , provides computing power allowing medical sensors to process multiple data streams in parallel, train AI algorithms, and visualize biology in real time. Clara Holoscan MGX, debuted at the Nvidia’s 2022 GTC conference, is an “open, scalable robotics platform,” as CEO Jensen Huang put it in a keynote address . It’s a hardware and software stack designed to help connect robotic medical devices or sensors, with AI applications. How might that work? Take the process of endoscopy as an example. Typically, a doctor will insert a small camera inside your body and take a look around. Clara Holoscan MGX can connect directly to that camera, and process the data that’s being collected in real time. That data could then be fed into AI models that could detect anomalies, navigate through your anato

Smartphone cameras have gotten quite good, but it’s getting harder and harder to improve them because we’ve pretty much reached the limit of what’s possible in the space of a cubic centimeter. Glass is a startup looking to fundamentally change how the camera works, using a much bigger sensor and an optical trick from the depths of filmmaking: anamorphic lenses. It may not be obvious that cameras won’t get better, since we’ve seen such advances in recent generations of phones. But we’ve used up all the slack left in this line, as it were. To improve the image, you need a bigger sensor, better lens, or some kind of computational wizardry. Unfortunately, sensors can’t get much bigger because they’d need bigger lenses to match. And lenses can’t get bigger because there’s just no room for them in the phone body, even when you “fold” the camera. Meanwhile, computational photography is great, but there’s only so much it can do — stacking a few images to get better dynamic range or depth inf

Mining is one of the oldest industries out there, but it has increasingly embraced high-tech methods as demand has increased. Plotlogic uses hyperspectral imaging, a technique generally found in labs and satellites, to add a new layer of data and automation to these crucial but often dated operations. Hyperspectral imagery is basically a photo that captures light outside the visible range, allowing differentiation of substances that look the same to human eyes. As with pretty much everything else, nature got there first: birds and insects can see wavelengths we can’t, for a start, and it changes their entire view of the world. We’ve adopted the idea in a variety of circumstances: it’s ultimately a form of spectral analysis, where you bounce radiation off an object and see what’s reflected or absorbed. Every substance has its own spectral signature, from skin to cement to rare earth minerals. The latter category is obviously where Plotlogic is aiming. Founded in 2018 in Brisbane, A

The first DJI Mavic turned the world of consumer drones on its head when it was released back in late-2016. The compact, foldable design launched a million copy cats around the world — including a number under the drone giant’s own umbrella. Compact certainly isn’t the first word that comes to mind in the enterprise space, however. Those designs tend to be far heavier and more robust than products designed to be stored in a photography backpack. Two years after the first model arrived, the company introduced enterprise capabilities for the Mavic 2 . The biggest change there was the addition of a modular mount that could be used to add on things like a spotlight and a speaker to help it fly in less than ideal conditions. But for all intents and purporses, the Mavic 2 Enterprise was still a consumer drone with some added work benefit. Image Credits: DJI This morning, the company announced the Matrice 30, a purpose-built drone for enterprise applications that brings the Mavic’s mos

Twenty years ago, getting a human genome sequenced was a billion-dollar, international project. Today, you can get your dog’s genome sequenced by the end of the month for a few bucks. It speaks to the speed with which genetics has permeated our lives, but despite massive improvements to the technology, the process can still be a bit clunky in the lab. Before you can even start to disentangle someone’s genetic code, you have to start with a sample. And that sample has to get prepped the right way. It’s a relatively boring process that is often sidelined in favor of flashier applications of genome sequencing (read: reviving mammoths ). But it’s a place where Volta Labs is aiming to bring a new focus. Founded in 2018, Volta Labs is a startup spun out of MIT’s media lab focusing on creating a programmable approach to DNA sample prep. The team is in the process of creating a desktop-sized instrument that can automate the processes used to get genetic samples ready. “The entire world co

If you want to monitor the temperature, humidity and exposure over 100 square miles of forest, you’re going to spend a lot of time tying tech trees. But what if you could scatter your sensors the same way dandelions and elms scatter their seeds? UW researchers have put together devices light enough to be carried by the wind . The project pushes the boundaries of small-scale and purpose-built computing, and while it’s still very much a prototype, it’s an interesting direction for embedded electronics to take. “Our prototype suggests that you could use a drone to release thousands of these devices in a single drop. They’ll all be carried by the wind a little differently, and basically you can create a 1,000-device network with this one drop,” said Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor and prolific device creator. It’s made possible primarily by the removal of any sort of battery, which lowers the mass of the electronics considerably. Equipped with only a few tiny sensors, a wireless transc

At Apple’s March event, the company announced the Studio Display , a new, 27 inch external monitor that starts at $1,599—a huge step down in price from the company’s only other monitor, the Pro Display XDR, which starts at $5,000 . The announcement of the Studio Display is big news for many who have been waiting for Apple to offer a replacement for its popular Thunderbolt Display, which was released more than a decade ago and was eventually discontinued in 2016 when Apple pulled out of the display business entirely . In the tech industry, I know many product designers that refused to give up their Thunderbolt Displays, keeping them limping along despite their limited resolutions and outdated ports, in the hope Apple might eventually release a successor. When Apple discontinued the Thunderbolt Display, it left a large gap in the market: there are practically zero all-in-one displays that combine a monitor with a webcam, microphone, speakers, and USB ports into a single product. The L

We’ve been shipping things across the oceans for centuries, and the world’s supply chains increasingly rely on diesel-powered megaships big enough to block entire channels by themselves. How do you decarbonize this monolithic industry? FleetZero thinks it can with electric vessels making short hops all the way around the Pacific, while relying on smaller ports and a clever battery-sharing scheme. This problem is a serious one for anyone looking at emissions and impact on the climate and oceans, as these huge ships carry a large proportion of the world’s cargo and emit on the order of a billion tons of carbon per year. There’s a lot of opportunity here, but like other legacy industries — and indeed the ships themselves — it can be difficult to overcome inertia. Steven Henderson and Mike Carter grew up in and around the shipping world and, as engineers, they understand the immense forces and challenges at play for anyone looking to change how the industry works. Electrifying a consumer