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by Sally Thompson, Anneliese Sytsma, Dana Ariel Lapides and Mary H. Nichols, The Conversation Credit: Shutterstock Protecting people from floods requires many technical professionals to make good predictions and decisions.…

Ed Sheeran scored another legal win.According to Variety, the English singer-songwriter was awarded seven figures in his years-long copyright lawsuit over “Shape of You,” his Grammy-winning single that debuted in 2017. Though Sheeran won the case earlier this year—and was effectively cleared of wrongdoing—a British judge ruled the 31-year-old artist was entitled to $1.1 million to cover his legal fees.“The starting point is to identify the winners and losers in the action because the general rule is that the unsuccessful…

Humans aren't the only ones working with Play-Doh. MIT CSAIL researchers have created a system, RoboCraft, that teaches robots how to work with the kid-friendly goo. The platform first takes the image of a shape (in this case, a letter of the alphabet) and reinterprets it as a cluster of interlocking particles. The bot then uses a physics-oriented neural network to predict how its two "fingers" can manipulate those spheres to match the desired outcome. A predictive algorithm helps the machine plan its actions.…

The tech industry has not been kind to worker organizing. While federal law grants American employees the right to unionize without retaliation, tech giants and video game studios have established a norm in recent years of fighting back hard—often illegally, federal labor investigators allege—against workers who have attempted to collectivize their workplaces.That helps explain why even Microsoft is calling its own decision to adopt a “neutral” stance toward a potential unionization effort “ground-breaking.” And while…

Scientists have published a map showing the Southern Ocean floor in unprecedented detail.The new images, generated from sonar data that took years to collect, show canyons, ridges, and mountains deep under the water.  The map was published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Data on Tuesday. It is part of the Nippon Foundation General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) Seabed 2030 project, which aims to map the entire ocean floor by 2030.About 21 percent of the world's seabeds have been precisely mapped so far,…

The Ethereum team is working on developing a superior chain, the ETH 2.0. Key Insights: Ethereum upgrades are about to start spreading the effects to the project and affect price growthEthereum merge is coming this augustBitgert is still considered one of the biggest threats to Ethereum The Ethereum upgrades that started in 2021 are now being felt in the project. The recent Ethereum price upward growth had a lot to do with these upgrades that the team is undertaking. Ethereum has also posted growth in its…

The smallest-ever remote-controlled walking robot has been built by Northwestern University engineers, and it comes in the guise of a tiny, charming peekytoe crab. These tiny crabs, which are only a half-millimetre long, can bend, twist, crawl, walk, turn, and even jump. The researchers also created millimetre-sized robots that resemble inchworms, crickets, and beetles. Though the research is still in its early stages, the researchers hope their technology will help them get closer to developing micro-sized robots that…

Is your tiny robot really all that small if it's bigger than the width of a coin? A team of scientists has built what is now the smallest-ever remote-controlled walking robot, coming in at a mere half a millimeter (less than a fiftieth of an inch) wide.  Exceedingly tiny robots have a whole host of potential uses, from helping out with surgical procedures to repairing machinery in spaces where a wrench can't fit. The smaller they get, the more scenarios they could be used in.This bot, while not ready to start going out…

Strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure, or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square. This film, on the other hand, congratulates itself deafeningly on being against the cruelty of the global super-rich, against the trite culture of fashion, against the vapidity of social media influencers. It uses a howitzer to shoot drugged…

Utilitarianism would have us direct our efforts to boost global vaccine coverage. Credit: Shutterstock It's difficult to ask, but how many fatalities should Australia accept from COVID in 2022? …