the_newsbeagle writes: Making micro-machines that work inside the body is tricky, because hard silicon and metal devices can cause problems. So bioengineers are working on soft and squishy gadgets that can be implanted and do useful work. Here’s a soft biobot that’s modeled on a Swiss watch mechanism called a Geneva drive. With every tick forward, the tiny gizmo releases a dose of drugs. Getting the material properties just right was a challenge. “If your material is collapsing like jello, it’s hard to make robots out of it, ” says inventor Samuel Sia. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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A Squishy Clockwork BioBot Releases Doses of Drugs Inside the Body
IBM wants to put the patent war in perspective. Big Blue said that it is poised to get the most U.S. patents of any tech company for the 24th year in a row. From a report on VentureBeat: In 2015, IBM received more than 7, 355 patents, down slightly from 7, 534 in 2014. A spokesperson for IBM said the company is on track to receive well over 7, 000 patents in 2016. In 2016, IBM is also hitting another interesting milestone, with more than 1, 000 patents for artificial intelligence and cognitive computing. IBM has been at it for more than a century, and it is seeking patents in key strategic areas — such as AI and cognitive computing. In fact, one-third of IBM’s researchers are dedicated to cognitive computing. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said during the World of Watson conference in October that the company expects to reach more than 1 billion consumers via Watson by the end of 2017. (Watson is the supercomputer that beat the world’s best Jeopardy player in 2011.) Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
If you live in California, you may soon start to see self-driving cars on the road with no operators to be seen. California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on Thursday a bill that allows a self-driving vehicle with no operator inside to test on a public road. Currently, companies are legally able to test self-driving cars in California as long as the operators are located inside the vehicles when they are being tested. Fortune reports: The bill introduced by Democratic Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla allows testing in Contra Costa County northeast of San Francisco of the first full-autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel, brakes, accelerator or operator. New legislation was necessary because although driverless vehicles can be tested on private land like the office park, the shuttle will cross a public road on its loop through the campus. The new law means that two cube-like Easymile shuttles that travel no faster than 25 mph (40 kph) will be tested for a period of up to six months before being deployed and used by people. In an interview with Reuters in March, Bonilla said the “natural tension” between regulators concerned about safety and lawmakers trying to encourage innovation in their state necessitated a new bill. “They’re risk averse and we’re saying we need to open the door here and take steps (to innovate), ” Bonilla said, calling the driverless shuttle project “a very wise first out-of-the-gate opportunity” to show how the technology could work safely. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court in California on Monday dismissed a U.S. government lawsuit that accused ATT Inc of deception for reducing internet speeds for customers with unlimited mobile data plans once their use exceeded certain levels. The company, however, could still face a fine from the Federal Communications Commission regarding the slowdowns, also called “data throttling.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said it ordered a lower court to dismiss the data-throttling lawsuit, which was filed in 2014 by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC sued ATT on the grounds that the No. 2 U.S. wireless carrier failed to inform consumers it would slow the speeds of heavy data users on unlimited plans. In some cases, data speeds were slowed by nearly 90 percent, the lawsuit said. The FTC said the practice was deceptive and, as a result, barred under the Federal Trade Commission Act. ATT argued that there was an exception for common carriers, and the appeals court agreed. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader quotes an article from the Washington Times: Hackers on Friday successfully pulled off cyberattacks against Vietnam’s two largest airports and the nation’s flag carrier, Vietnam Airlines. The attacks — attributed to a Chinese hacking group known as 1937CN — ultimately failed to cause any significant security issues or air traffic control problems, Vice Minister of Transport Nguyen Nhat told local media. Nonetheless, the individuals briefly hijacked flight information screens and sound systems inside Noi Bai and Tan Son Nhat airports in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, respectively… Instead of departure and arrival details, the airports’ flight screens and speakers broadcast what local media described as anti-Vietnamese and Philippines slogans, in turn prompting authorities to shut down both systems… Vietnam Airlineâ(TM)s website, meanwhile, “was seized control and transferred to a malicious website abroad” and… passenger data pertaining to an undisclosed number of its frequent flyers was published online as well, the airline said in a statement. Local media on Friday said about 100 MB of data concerning roughly 40, 000 VMA passengers had been dumped online. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Kristen V. Brown, reporting for Fusion:It is well-trod territory at this point that biases against women’s technological abilities hold women in technology back. Study after study has shown bias persists at every point of the employment process. So the start-up interviewing.io decided to try and do something about it. It masked women’s voices to sound like men’s and vice versa during online interviews to see if interviewers would like them better. It was inspired to do the experiment because it was seeing some alarming data. Interviewing.io is a platform that allows people to practice technical interviewing anonymously and, hopefully, get a job in the process. After amassing data from thousands of technical interviews, the company noticed a troubling trend, writes founder Aline Lerner in a blog post: “Men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader shares an article on Fox Business: As fast-food workers across the country vie for $15 per hour wages, many business owners have already begun to take humans out of the picture. “I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry — it’s cheaper to buy a $35, 000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour (warning: autoplaying video) bagging French fries — it’s nonsense and it’s very destructive and it’s inflationary and it’s going to cause a job loss across this country like you’re not going to believe, ” said former McDonald’s USA CEO Ed Rensi during an interview on the FOX Business Network’s Mornings with Maria. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million people earned the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour with about 1.7 million having wages below the federal minimum in 2014. These three million workers combined made up 3.9 percent of all hourly paid workers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.