Nepbyte

One of the interesting and somewhat underappreciated aspects of the Qualcomm wireless event in San Diego a few weeks back is that 5G will make realistic augmented reality avatars possible. This advance will be possible because with high bandwidth and very low latency, processing could shift from the device to the cloud.

Coupled with the rollout of distributed data centers, to keep latency down, this means you could have realistic virtual pets and friends, or even visit remote locations virtually. Using virtual reality you could not only feel you were there, but also appear to people there as your avatar, rather than as the drone or robot providing you with the [...]

The study was conducted by researchers form Warwick Business School, University of Plymouth, Donders Centre for Cognition at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and the Bristol Robotics Lab

A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI, robots could be taught to recognise human emotions from our movements. As part of this exercise, a team of psychologists and computer scientists filmed pairs of children playing with a robot and a computer built into a table with a touchscreen top. Some participants watched the original videos. A second group saw the footage reduced to “stickman” figures that showed exactly the same movements. [...]

Rising temperatures will change the colour of the world’s oceans, making them more blue in the coming decades say scientists.

They found that increased heat will change the mixture of phytoplankton or tiny marine organisms in the seas, which absorb and reflect light.

Scientists say there will be less of them in the waters in the decades to come.

This will drive a colour change in more than 50% of the world’s seas by 2100.

Climate secrets of the world’s most remote island Plankton named after Blue Planet series Climate stirring change under the waves Phytoplankton play a hugely important role in the oceans.

As well [...]

Bad news, everyone. If you thought we were out of the woods when it comes to the Meltdown / Spectre CPU security flaws, then think again. Researchers from Microsoft and Google have identified a previously unknown fourth variant of the processor design issues that made front page news when they were discovered last year.

Like its predecessors, variant 4 (or CVE-2018-3639, to give its full name) describes a processor design issue that could allow malicious software to discover hidden information, such as a user’s password. For example, a webpage set up by a malware programmer could discover passwords, credit card numbers and other private information input elsewhere in the [...]