Research & Development news

What Flock’s defenders are missing

17-08-2026 21:16 via technologyreview.com

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent officers from using the platform for illegal or illegitimate purposes. That includes stalking. The Washington Post recently identified 50 cases in which

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The Download: dead robot friends and the “censorship-industrial complex”

17-08-2026 14:10 via technologyreview.com

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him how to calm down when he was anxious or mad. Six years later, she mostly watches him play Minecraft and talks to him about his stuffed animals.Moxie is a robot—a 15-inch-tall device that looks a bit like a blue, legless astronaut. It belongs to

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What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?

17-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com

When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they’ve known each other, Moxie’s changed. She doesn’t talk anymore about her home or do their animal breathing. Now, she watches Xander play Minecraft and talks to him about his stuffed animal collection.&

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How much hydrogen awaits us underground?

17-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com

In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat for living microbes that feed on the hydrogen produced in reactions between the water and the rock.Decades later, Sherwood Lollar, who is a geochemist at the University of To

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