Nerval's Lobster writes: Amazon relies quite a bit on human labor, most notably in its warehouses. The company wants to change that via machine learning and robotics, which is why earlier this year it invited 30 teams to a "Picking Contest." In order to win the contest, a team needed to build a robot that can outpace other robots in detecting and identifying an object on a shelf, gripping said object without breaking it, and delivering it into a waiting receptacle. Team RBO, composed of researchers from the Technical University of Berlin, won last month's competition by a healthy margin. Their winning design combined a WAM arm (complete with a suction cup for lifting objects) and an XR4000 mobile base into a single unit capable of picking up 12 objects in 20 minutes—not exactly blinding speed, but enough to demonstrate significant promise. If Amazon's contest demonstrated anything, it's that it could be quite a long time before robots are capable of identifying and sorting through objects at speeds even remotely approaching human (and thus taking over those jobs). Chances seem good that Amazon will ask future teams to build machines that are even smarter and faster.

sciencehabit writes: Of the handful of startup companies trying to achieve fusion energy via nontraditional methods, Tri Alpha Energy Inc. has always been the enigma. Publishing little and with no website, but apparently sitting on a cash pile in the hundreds of millions, the Foothill Ranch, California-based company has been the subject of intense curiosity and speculation. But last month Tri Alpha lifted the veil slightly with two papers, revealing that its device, dubbed the colliding beam fusion reactor, has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs. 'They've improved things greatly and are moving in a direction that is quite promising,' says plasma physicist John Santarius of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Lucas123 writes: Nantero, the company that invented carbon nanotube-based non-volatile memory in 2001 and has been developing it since, has announced that seven chip fabrication plants are now manufacturing its Nano-RAM (NRAM) wafers and test chips. The company also announced aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and Schlumberger Ltd., the world's largest gas and oil exploration and drilling company, as customers seeking to use its chip technology. The memory, which can withstand 300 degrees Celsius temperatures for years without losing data, is natively thousands of times faster than NAND flash and has virtually infinite read/write resilience. Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs using DDR4 interfaces. NRAM has the potential to create memory that is vastly more dense that NAND flash, as its transistors can shrink to below 5 nanometers in size, three times more dense than today's densest NAND flash. At the same time, NRAM is up against a robust field of new memory technologies that are expected to challenge NAND flash in speed, endurance and capacity, such as Phase-Change Memory and Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM).

An anonymous reader writes: Another Slashdotter recently asked what kind of things someone can power with an external USB battery. I have a followup along those lines: what kind of modifications have you made to your gadgets to do things that they were never meant to do? Consider old routers, cell phones, monitors, etc. that have absolutely no use or value anymore in their intended form. What can you do with them?

MojoKid writes: The high speed Thunderbolt interface standard, which is used for everything from hyper-fast external storage solutions to external graphics cards, has been slow to take off. You can blame the high-priced Thunderbolt peripherals and the uber-expensive cables (at least when compared to your garden-variety USB cables). For most people, USB 3.0 is "good enough" and making a huge investment into the Thunderbolt ecosystem has been reserved for those in the professional video editing arena. However, Intel is looking to change all of that with Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 once again doubles the maximum bandwidth, this time jumping from 20Gbps to a whopping 40Gbps. While that is impressive in its own right, the truly big news is that Thunderbolt 3 is moving away from the Mini DisplayPort connector and is instead adopting the USB-C connector. As a result Thunderbolt will also support USB 3.1 (which is currently spec'd at 10Gbps) and can optionally provide up to 100W of power (in compliance with the USB Power Delivery spec) to charge devices via USB-C (like the recently introduced 12-inch Apple MacBook).

cartechboy writes: It's like a game of follow the leader. First, Tesla announced its Powerwall Batteries, and now Mercedes-Benz plans to follow suit by entering the energy-storage business as well. A division of parent company Daimler has been testing battery packs that can power houses, and plans to launch commercially in September. Supposedly a battery pack for "light industrial, commercial, and private" use is being tested with sizes ranging from 2.5 kWh to 5.9 kWh. While Tesla's building a massive Gigafactory to make all its batteries for its Powerwall and electric cars, it's unclear exactly how Daimler plans to produce its batteries in a larger-scale energy-storage operation.

New submitter juniorkindergarten writes: Blackberry and Typo have reached a final settlement that effectively ends Typo selling its iPhone keyboard accessory. Blackberry took Typo to court for twice for patent infringement over the copying of Blackberry's keyboard design. Blackberry and Typo first battled it out in court, with Typo losing for copying the Blackberry Q10 keyboard design. Typo redesigned its keyboard, and again Blackberry sued them for patent infringement. The final result is that Typo cannot sell keyboards for screens less than 7.9", but can still sell keyboards for the iPad and iPad air. Exact terms were not disclosed.

Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a very cool new tool that will excite anyone interested in understanding the per kilowatt cost of nuclear energy. Developed over the last two years in a partnership between the Bulletin and the University of Chicago, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator estimates the cost of electricity produced by three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle:

1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.
2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor.
3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to 'breed' plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.

This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.

szczys writes: Retro games just aren't the same since the display technology resolution has exploded. I went the opposite direction and chose a display with less resolution than the original. This reinvention of Pac-Man uses a 32x32 RGB LED module which are made for LED billboards. This makes the player just one pixel. Add in an Atari joystick and we have a winner.This is a great programming challenge. If you've never looked at Pac-Man AI before, it's fascinating and worth your time!

ideonexus sends a report from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) saying Uber has poached 40 researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in an attempt to jump-start development of autonomous vehicle technology. In February, Uber and CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center announced a partnership to work together on the technology. But according to the WSJ, Uber quickly offered massive bonuses and salary increases to simply bring many of the researchers in-house. The NREC's new director made a presentation a few weeks ago about strategies for rebuilding and recovering. The presentation said NREC’s funding from contracts to develop technology with the U.S. Department of Defense and other organizations was expected to sink as low as $17 million from the $30 million originally projected for this year. Some contracts scientists were working on disappeared when the researchers left, accounting for the drop in funding. And it appeared the center would have to raise salaries significantly to prevent more exits. A few scientists left NREC for other companies in Pittsburgh because of concerns the center might be shut down, said two people familiar with the departures.

An anonymous reader writes: Today Intel purchased chipmaker Altera for $16.7 billion. This follows another huge purchase in the semiconductor industry last week, when Avago snapped up Broadcom for $37 billion. This has been a record year for consolidation within the industry, as companies struggle to deal with slowing growth and stagnating stock prices. Altera had already rejected an offer from Intel, but shareholders pressured them to reconsider. "Acquiring Altera may help Intel defend and extend its most profitable business: supplying server chips used in data centers. While sales of semiconductors for PCs are declining as more consumers rely on tablets and smartphones to get online, the data centers needed to churn out information and services for those mobile devices are driving orders for higher-end Intel processors and shoring up profitability."

Bismillah writes that a new vulnerability in recent Macs — and potentially older ones — can be used to plant code such as rootkits into areas of EFI memory that shouldn't be writeable, but become unlocked after the computer wakes up from sleep mode. The article explains that [The vulnerability] appears to be due to a bug in Apple's sleep-mode energy conservation implementation that can leave areas of memory in the extensible firmware interface (EFI) (which provides low-level hardware control and access) writeable from user accounts on the computer. Memory areas are normally locked as read-only to protect them. However, putting some late-model Macs to sleep for around 20 seconds and then waking them up unlocks the EFI memory for writing.

Deathspawner writes: In advance of the rumored pending launch of AMD's next-generation Radeon graphics cards, NVIDIA has decided to pull no punches and release a seriously tempting GTX 980 Ti at $649. It's tempting both because the extra $150 it costs over the GTX 980 more than makes up for it in performance gained, and despite it coming really close to the performance of TITAN X, it costs $350 less. AMD's job might just have become a bit harder. Vigile adds The GTX 980 Ti has 6GB of memory (versus 12GB for the GTX Titan X) but PC Perspective's review shows no negative side effects of the drop. This implementation of the GM200 GPU uses 2,816 CUDA cores rather than the 3,072 cores of the Titan X, but thanks to higher average Boost clocks, performance between the two cards is identical. And at Hot Hardware, another equally positive, benchmark-laden review.

An anonymous reader links to an article at IB Times according to which: China has unveiled the world's first facial recognition ATM, which will not allow users to withdraw cash unless their face matches their IDs. The machine was created by Tsinghua University and Hangzhou-based technology company Tzekwan. It has a camera installed in it that captures the facial features of the user then compares it with a database of identification photos.

Dave Knott writes: A recycling centre in the Silicon Valley is looking for a woman who dropped off an old computer for recycling. The computer was apparently inside boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her garage after her husband died. This would be nothing unusual, except that the recycled computer was an Apple I. The recycling firm eventually sold the Apple I for $200,000 to a private collection, and because the company gives 50 per cent of the proceeds from sold items back to the original owner, they wish to split the proceeds with the mystery donor.