Author: News Room

Penguin Colony caught my eye for A) being the next game by the makers of Umarangi Generation, and B) penguins – lots and lots of penguins. After booting up the demo and being greeted with a title sequence directly ripped from The Thing, I knew I was in for something very strange. I still don’t completely understand what I experienced, but there’s enough intrigue in this slice to inspire a deeper look. This bizarre adventure unfolds in Antarctica circa 1939. You control, you guessed it, a penguin. Several, in fact, as you can hop between many of them at will, from…

Forget stickers and GIFs, a new app called Pixi Garden wants you to send interactive augmented reality characters through iMessage instead. Pixi Platforms launched the messaging native app today, letting you create and send a “pixi” — an intelligent AR character that comes alive through your friend’s phone camera and reacts to whatever is actually happening around them. What makes a Pixi different from a sticker or filter? A pixi is not a static sticker or filter. It runs on an onboard AI brain that lets it behave, react, and stay aware of context. Machine learning sensors watch the environment…

Waymo has recalled its entire fleet of nearly 4,000 robotaxis to prevent them from driving on highways after identifying at least 13 instances where its vehicles drove straight into highway sections closed for construction.  This is the company’s sixth recall in under a year, and follows separate incidents involving flooded roads, telephone poles, chains and gates, towed trucks, and school buses. So what actually happened out there on the highway? The incidents happened in two waves. Six robotaxis drove past ramp-closure signs and directly into active construction zones in Phoenix, Arizona, in April 2026. The software failed to recognize the…

UC Berkeley researchers have built an electric nose that can detect gases tied to spoiled food and common allergens more consistently than a human sniff test. The device uses a 16-sensor gas sensor chip that turns reactions with food-related gases into electrical signals. Kitchen judgment can get messy because food doesn’t always look or smell risky before it becomes a problem. Milk, eggs, chicken, fruit, and nuts release different chemical signatures, and people usually have to decide with whatever their nose catches in the moment. The work is still in the lab, but the destination is obvious enough. Smart fridges…

It’s not a new gameplay trailer, but Rockstar Games has released a new promotional video for Grand Theft Auto VI, announcing the game’s pre-order date and revealing its official cover art.Pre-orders for the game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S open on June 25, which is one week from today. The cover art is fashioned in traditional Grand Theft Auto fashion, with a collage of panels depicting the two main characters, Lucia and Jason, along with bank robber Raul Batista and music mogul/entrepreneur Boobie Ike. Because the game is set in a fictionalized Florida, it’s fitting to see the…

Honor has officially launched the Honor Watch 6 globally, with a headline feature that deals with the daily charging annoyance of most smartwatches. As the name suggests, it is the successor to the Watch 5 series. The company claims the Watch 6 can last up to 35 days in long-endurance usage, or up to 17 days with more regular use. Even with GPS enabled for outdoor sports, Honor says it can last up to 42 hours. This separates it from mainstream smartwatches like the Apple Watch and many Wear OS rivals, where charging every day or two is still very…

KAIST researchers have developed an AI vision method built for a problem phone makers can’t ignore forever. Upsample Anything rebuilds high-resolution visual features from compressed image data, aiming to make on-device AI sharper without demanding a much bigger memory budget. Phones already lean on compression to keep camera-based intelligence moving quickly. The tradeoff is that small objects, thin edges, and subtle defects can get stripped away before a vision system has enough detail to work with. The KAIST-led team’s headline number is hard to miss. It says Upsample Anything can restore visual information close to the original image while improving…

Robots may be the new best friend for forgetful humans. MIT researchers have developed a long-term memory framework for robots that can help them build a detailed mental model of large, complicated spaces. The system is called DAAAM, short for Describe Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, at Any Moment, and the goal is to let robots remember objects, locations, and details over time. This might not sound headline-grabbing, though robots are still surprisingly bad at something humans do casually. You may remember that your keys were on the kitchen counter last night, or that a half-finished part was left in a factory…

A harmless-looking ChatGPT prompt pushed the latest public version of ChatGPT into generating sexualized and violent images, AI security researchers told the BBC. The finding puts new pressure on OpenAI’s image safety systems, since the request wasn’t described as plainly graphic. Mindgard, a British AI security startup, said it reached the results by altering a widely shared instruction that had been used for comedy. OpenAI added safeguards after the BBC contacted it, but the researchers said small wording changes still produced concerning images. Image generators are becoming everyday software, not specialist tools tucked away for experts. When their guardrails fail,…

Fitness trackers and smartphone apps may be doing more than just tracking you from your wrist. A new review published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that people with cardiovascular disease who used smartphone apps, fitness trackers, or wearable devices were more active than those who did not use digital tools. The review looked at 14 clinical trials involving 1,057 participants with diagnosed cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart disease, heart failure, heart attack, or stroke history. Compared to people who did not use these tools, participants using apps or wearable tech walked nearly 1,100 more steps per…