Defence & Security

How We Won the DARPA SubT Challenge: Urban Circuit Virtual Track

IEEE Spectrum: “Do you smell smoke?” It was three days before the qualification deadline for the Virtual Tunnel Circuit of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Virtual Track, and our team was barrelling through last-minute updates to our robot controllers in a small…

A Swarm of Cyborg Cockroaches That Lives in Your House

IEEE Spectrum: Digital Nature Group at the University of Tsukuba in Japan is working towards a “post ubiquitous computing era consisting of seamless combination of computational resources and non-computational resources.” By “non-computational resources,” they mean leveraging the natural world, which for…

Quantum-computing pioneer warns of complacency over Internet security

Nature: When physicists first thought up quantum computers in the 1980s, they sounded like a nice theoretical idea, but one probably destined to remain on paper. Then in 1995, 25 years ago this month, applied mathematician Peter Shor published a…

Not finding life on Venus would be disappointing. But it’s good science at work.

Technology Review: Last month’s report that there may be phosphine gas in the Venusian clouds came with a stunning implication: extraterrestrial life. On Earth, phosphine is a chemical produced by…