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Robot maker Knightscope has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. Its K5 security robot took a look at the harsh world and chose to throw itself into a fountain. And a different K5 robot was attacked and knocked over by a drunk guy. But...

According to the Financial Times (Warning: source paywalled), Amazon is working on building a pair of smart glasses to house its Alexa voice assistant. The report also mentions a home security camera that is in the works, capable of linking up to Amazon's existing Echo connected devices. TechCrunch reports: According to the FT, the smart glasses are intended to be purely an earbuds-free housing for Amazon's Alexa AI -- with a bone-conduction audio system that would enable the wearer to hear Alexa without the need to be wired in. The FT reports the glasses would wirelessly tether to a user's smartphone for connectivity. They are also apparently being designed to look like a regular pair of spectacles, so they could be worn comfortably and unobtrusively. The paper notes that Amazon hired Babak Parviz, founder of Google Glass, in 2014, and says he's been closely involved in the project. It also points to several other Glass researchers, engineers and designers having moved to Amazon's labs -- per analysis of their LinkedIn profiles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Up and coming social media stars posting sponsored content may want to take a careful look at today's #Influencers101 Twitter chat from the FTC. The agency tried to clarify a number of issues cropping up around promotional material posted to social m...

Our expert Scott Stein gives us the real scoop on Apple's latest products.

The company's investigation follows similar incidents involving Facebook and Google using automated algorithms that brought on problems.

CNET fans, never fear: our 4-star apps are only a tap away.

America's "rocket man" revised his plan for a metropolis on Mars and is set to unveil version 2 in Australia later this month.

Saudi Arabia will lift a ban on internet calls at 8PM ET today that had stood since 2013. Services that follow rules set by the country's Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) will be allowed to operate, according to a spokesman...

New submitter fstack writes: Phoronix has carried out tests comparing AMD's high-end EPYC 7601 CPU to AMD Opteron CPUs from about ten years ago, looking at the EPYC/Opteron Linux performance and power efficiency. Both on the raw performance and performance-per-Watt, the numbers are quite staggering though the single-threaded performance hasn't evolved quite as much. The EPYC 7601 is a $4,200 USD processor with 32 cores / 64 threads. The first of many tests was with NAS Parallel Benchmarks: "For a heavily threaded test like this, going from a single Opteron 2300 series to the EPYC 7601 yielded around a 40x increase in performance," reports Phoronix. "Not bad when also considering it was only a 16x increase in the thread count (4 physical cores to 32 cores / 64 threads). The EPYC 7601 has a lower base clock frequency than the Opteron 2300 CPUs tested but has a turbo/boost frequency higher, among many architectural advantages over these K10 Opterons. With the NASA test's Lower-Upper Gauss-Seidel solver, going from the dual Opteron 2384 processors to a single EPYC 7601 yields around a 25x improvement in performance over the past decade of AMD server CPUs. Or in looking at the performance-per-Watt with the LU.C test, it's also around a 25x improvement over these older Opterons."

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Commentary: James Damore, ousted after posting what some saw as an antidiversity memo, allows that the title "Grand Wizard" might in some way be charming.

Final Fantasy creator Hironubu Sakaguchi has had some good success with his action-RPG-puzzle mobile game, Terra Battle. The free-to-play sequel — Terra Battle 2 — is out on both iOS and Android, but if you want to play it, you'll need to...

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says she was disgusted her company's systems had allowed that type of targeted advertising.

Epic Games' Fortnite has been out for a while in paid Early Access, but hasn't quite taken off in the same way that, say, Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) has. The hot new indie "battle royale" title has a massive, rabid user base and an impressiv...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The second major earthquake to strike Mexico in less than two weeks has caused catastrophic damage in the country's capital. The magnitude 7.1 temblor started at around 1:15PM -- cracking highways, collapsing buildings, and, so far, killing more than 200 people. Less than two weeks ago on September 7th (local time), a magnitude 8.1 quake struck roughly 400 miles southeast from today's. It's not common to hear of such strong earthquakes happening back-to-back so close to one another, says John Bellini, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "Usually you don't have large ones in the same general region right away," Bellini says. "But in highly [seismically] active regions of the world, it can happen." Mexico qualifies as highly active. The country sits at the boundary of three pieces of the Earth's crust that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle -- called tectonic plates. Today's quake originated on a fault within the Cocos plate, which is on Mexico's western edge. "Whether or not faults rupture depends on the kind of stress that builds up," Bellini says. The Cocos plate scoots rapidly under the continental crust of the North American plate, which "builds up the stress and strain at a faster rate," Bellini says. "So you're liable to have more frequent earthquakes because of that." Mexico City is especially prone to severe damage because of the ground it sits on -- an ancient lakebed that quivers like jello, Bellini says. When earthquake waves pass through it, it jiggles, magnifying the vibrations. "So the reason that Mexico City seems susceptible to more damage is because of this amplification effect of the lake bed," Bellini says.

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In May, Hulu ordered a straight-to-series show called The First. Set in the not too distant future, the series depicts the first human mission to Mars and humankind's first attempts at colonizing another planet. Today, Variety reports that Sean Penn...

Last week, modders released a tool that enabled folks to play the classic game Super Mario 64 online in massive multiplayer batches with up to 23 of their friends. To be clear, this was just a plugin that allowed folks who were already playing emulat...

Users have been asking for more affordable devices that work with Project Fi. The Android One Moto x4 is Google's answer.

Kate Lunau, writing for Motherboard: A new paper in Science Advances finds that a mass extinction period mirroring ones from our planet's ancient past could be triggered when humanity adds a certain amount of carbon to the oceans, which are home to the majority of all plants and animals on our planet. The paper pegs that amount at 310 gigatons. According to lead author Daniel Rothman of MIT, based on projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we're on course to hit that number by 2100. After that, we enter "unknown territory." [...] Previous mass extinctions have happened over the course of thousands or millions of years, but the period of change we're in right now has lasted centuries at best, making it hard to compare them. Although plenty of experts say Earth is already experiencing a sixth mass extinction, that remains "a scientific question," Rothman, who is professor of geophysics in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, told me. Once our planet hits the threshold he identified in this paper, he explained, it will kickstart changes that will "amplify" everything that came before. These same changes, to reiterate, have been associated with all previous mass extinctions on Earth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The long-running bidding war over Toshiba's flash memory business has effectively come to an end... and the winner probably isn't who you expected. Toshiba has agreed to sell its NAND division to a group led by the private equity firm Bain Capital f...

Google's efforts to disrupt the mobile carrier network have certainly proven popular for people who can feasibly use it, but it's no secret that the rollout of Project Fi has been restricted by the narrow choice of handsets available. Now, the search...