Axios reports that venture capitalist Alex Davis is warning that a speculative rush to build data centers without committed tenants could trigger a financing crunch by 2027-2028. "This critique is coming from inside the AI optimist camp," notes Axios, as Davis' firm, Disruptive, "recently led a large investment in AI chipmaker Groq, which then signed a $20 billion licensing deal with Nvidia. It's also backed such unicorn startups as Reflection AI, Shield AI and Gecko Robotics." Here's what Davis had to say in his investor letter this morning: "While I continue to believe the ongoing advancements in AI technology present 'once in a lifetime' investment opportunities, I also continue to see risks and reason for caution and investment discipline. For example, we are seeing way too many business models (and valuation levels) with no realistic margin expansion story, extreme capex spend, lack of enterprise customer traction, or overdependence on 'round-trip' investments -- in some cases all with the same company. I am also deeply concerned about the 'speculative' data center market. The 'build it and they will come' strategy is a trap. If you are a hyperscaler, you will own your own data centers. We foresee a significant financing crisis in 2027-2028 for speculative landlords. We want to back theowner/users, not the speculative landlords, and we are quite concerned for their stress on the system." The full letter can be found here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is quietly mandating that chipmakers use at least 50% domestically made equipment when expanding capacity, "as Beijing pushes to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain," according to Reuters. From the report: The rule is not publicly documented, but chipmakers seeking state approval to build or expand their plants have been told by authorities in recent months that they must prove through procurement tenders that at least half their equipment will be Chinese-made, the people told Reuters. The mandate is one of the most significant measures Beijing has introduced to wean itself off reliance on foreign technology, a push that gathered pace after the U.S. tightened technology export restrictions in 2023, banning sales of advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China. While those U.S. export restrictions blocked the sale of some of the most advanced tools, the 50% rule is leading Chinese manufacturers to choose domestic suppliers even in areas where foreign equipment from the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Europe remain available. Applications failing the threshold are typically rejected, though authorities grant flexibility depending on supply constraints, the people said. The requirements are relaxed for advanced chip production lines, where domestically developed equipment is not yet fully available. "Authorities prefer if it is much higher than 50%," one source told Reuters. "Eventually they are aiming for the plants to use 100% domestic equipment."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mac Bauer is fast, but the city's trams, weighing more than 100,000lbs and traveling at a maximum speed of nearly 45mph, should be far faster than him. And yet as of late December, in head-to-head races against streetcars, the 32-year-old remains undefeated in his quest to highlight how sluggish the trams, used by 230,000 people daily, truly are. Some races have pushed him closer to his limits as a runner. On other occasions, the car has been so slow he's had time to nip into a McDonald's before it reaches the last station. "I don't like winning. I really don't. I really, really wish these streetcars were faster than me," he said. "But they're not. And this is the problem." Bauer's rise as a running celebrity and transit critic embodies the mounting frustration of a city beset by chronic delays, congested streets and decades of under-built transit. "Streetcars just shouldn't be stuck in traffic," he said, adding the system also needed more "signal priority" which gives the streetcars lengthened green lights and shortened red lights. Bauer started racing transit vehicles roughly a year ago after he and his wife realized how long it took them to traverse the city. He posted videos of those races to Instagram and quickly transformed into a minor celebrity. Bauer describes his runs as a form of social activism, and his ability to lay bare the absurdities of Toronto's beleaguered public transit system -- a person can outrun a streetcar! -- has struck a nerve with the tens of thousands of commuters who share his Instagram posts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two cybersecurity professionals who spent their careers defending organizations against ransomware attacks have pleaded guilty in a Florida federal court to using ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware to extort American businesses throughout 2023. Ryan Goldberg, a 40-year-old incident response manager from Georgia, and Kevin Martin, a 36-year-old ransomware negotiator from Texas, admitted to conspiring to obstruct commerce through extortion. Between April and December 2023, Goldberg, Martin, and a third unnamed co-conspirator deployed the ransomware against multiple U.S. victims and agreed to pay ALPHV BlackCat's operators a 20% cut of any ransoms received. They successfully extracted approximately $1.2 million in Bitcoin from one victim, splitting their 80% share three ways before laundering the proceeds. Both men face up to 20 years in prison and are scheduled for sentencing on March 12, 2026. The Justice Department noted that all three conspirators possessed specialized skills in securing computer systems against the very attacks they carried out. ALPHV BlackCat has targeted more than 1,000 victims globally and was the subject of an FBI disruption operation in December 2023 that saved victims an estimated $99 million through a custom decryption tool.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The global airline industry is on track to post an all-time profit high of nearly $40 billion in 2025, according to trade group IATA, surpassing the pre-pandemic 2019 figure of $26 billion, but carriers are still managing a net margin of just 4% -- roughly $7.90 per passenger. Economist adds: Not everything has been in the ascent. European and North American airlines, which account for three-fifths of the industry's net profits, have had to contend with circuitous long-haul routes to avoid Russian airspace since the start of the war in Ukraine. This year parts of the Middle East became no-go zones after Israel's strike on Iran in June. America's airlines were hit by a government shutdown that stopped federal workers from travelling and kept unpaid air-traffic controllers at home, disrupting flights. What is more, despite a drop in fuel prices, which account for 25-30% of airlines' operating expenses, other costs have risen. Airlines flew 4.8 billion passengers in 2024, beating the 2019 peak, and that figure likely reached 5 billion in 2025 as combined revenues topped $1 trillion for the first time and load factors hit a record of nearly 84%. But the industry is flying older planes because Boeing and Airbus can't deliver enough new ones. The duopoly shipped under 1,400 aircraft in 2025, well below the 2018 record of just over 1,600. Boeing has struggled since two fatal 737 MAX crashes in late 2018 and early 2019 led to a 20-month grounding, and a fuselage panel blew off another 737 MAX mid-flight in early 2024. Airbus cut its 2025 delivery target from 820 to 790 in early December due to a supplier's production flaw, and Pratt & Whitney engine problems have grounded a third of the global A320neo fleet. IATA estimates the aircraft shortage won't resolve before 2031 at the earliest, and the global fleet's average age has climbed to 15 years from 13 in 2019. Annual fuel efficiency gains have slowed from about 2% to 0.3% in 2025, and an IATA and Oliver Wyman report pegs the cost of aging fleets -- extra fuel, repairs, spare parts -- at over $11 billion in 2025.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A study by a Singapore government agency has found that children exposed to high levels of screen time before age two showed brain development changes linked to slower decision-making and higher anxiety in adolescence, adding to concerns about early digital exposure. From a report: The study was conducted by a team within the country's Agency for Science, Technology and Research and the National University of Singapore, and published in The Lancet's eBioMedicine open access journal. It tracked 168 children for more than a decade, and conducted brain scans on them at three time points. Heavier screen exposure among very young children was associated with "accelerated maturation of brain networks" responsible for vision and cognitive control, the study found. The researchers suggested this may have been the result of "intense sensory stimulation that screens provide." They found that screen time measured at ages three and four, however, did not show the same effects. Those children with "altered brain networks" took longer to make decisions when they were 8.5, and also had higher anxiety symptoms at age 13, the study said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The French government on Dec 30 postponed a ban on plastic throwaway cups by four years to 2030 because of difficulties finding alternatives. The ban was meant to start on Jan 1. But the Ministry for Ecological Transition said the "technical feasibility of eliminating plastic from cups" following a review in 2025 justified pushing back the deadline. It said in an official decree that a new review would be carried out in 2028 of "progress made in replacing single-use plastic cups." It added that the ban would now start Jan 1, 2030, when companies would have 12 months to get rid of their stock. France has gradually rolled out bans on single-use plastic products over the past decade as environmental campaigners have stepped up warnings about the impact on rivers and oceans.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After more than three decades of service, New York City's iconic MetroCard is about to retire, as December 31, 2025 marks the final day commuters can purchase or refill the gold-hued plastic cards that replaced subway tokens back in 1994. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been transitioning to OMNY, a contactless payment system introduced in 2019 that lets riders tap a credit card, phone or smart device at turnstiles. More than 90% of subway and bus trips are now paid using the tap-and-go system, and the agency says the changeover saves at least $20 million annually in MetroCard-related costs. The new system also introduces automatic fare capping: riders get unlimited travel within a seven-day period after 12 paid rides, maxing out at $35 a week once fares rise to $3 in January. Riders who prefer not to link a credit card or phone can purchase reloadable OMNY cards. Existing MetroCards will continue to work into 2026, allowing riders time to use up remaining balances. The MetroCard's arrival in 1994 was itself a significant shift from the brass tokens that had been in use since 1953. London and Singapore have long operated similar contactless systems; San Francisco launched its own tap-to-pay system earlier this year, joining Chicago and other U.S. cities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The consulting firm CVL Economics estimated last year that AI would disrupt more than 200,000 entertainment-industry jobs in the United States by 2026, but writer Nick Geisler argues in The Atlantic that the most consequential casualties may be the humble entry-level positions where aspiring artists have traditionally paid dues and learned their craft. Geisler, a screenwriter and WGA member who started out writing copy for a how-to website in the mid-2010s, notes that ChatGPT can now handle the kind of articles he once produced. This pattern is visible today across creative industries: the AI software Eddie launched an update in September capable of producing first edits of films, and LinkedIn job listings increasingly seek people to train AI models rather than write original copy. The story adds: The problem is that entry-level creative jobs are much more than grunt work. Working within established formulas and routines is how young artists develop their skills. The historical record suggests those early rungs matter. Hunter S. Thompson began as a copy boy for Time magazine; Joan Didion was a research assistant at Vogue; directors Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola shot cheap B movies for Roger Corman before their breakthrough work. Geisler himself landed his first Netflix screenplay commission through a producer he met while making rough cuts for a YouTube channel. The story adds: Beyond the money, which is usually modest, low-level creative jobs offer practice time and pathways for mentorship that side gigs such as waiting tables and tending bar do not. Further reading: Hollow at the Base.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The World Health Organization's latest annual malaria report paints a grim picture that's about to get grimmer, as the United States -- which has supplied 37% of global malaria funding since 2010 -- pulls back its international health commitments under President Donald Trump. Malaria cases have been climbing since 2015, when progress against the mosquito-borne disease stalled due to insecticide resistance and chronic underfunding. In 2024, the world recorded 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths, and African countries accounted for 95% of both figures. Children under 5 made up 75% of malaria-related deaths in Africa. Global spending on malaria reached $3.9 billion last year. Trump's decision to slash international public health funding and gut the US Agency for International Development has caused what the WHO calls "widespread disruption to health operations around the world." The burden of these setbacks, the organization adds, is expected to fall disproportionately on children. Seventeen countries now offer malaria vaccines to younger populations, up from three countries the year before, but funding constraints mean many countries still can't provide the shots.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A scheme to encourage climbers to bring their waste down from Mount Everest is being scrapped -- with Nepalese authorities telling the BBC it has been a failure. From the report: Climbers had been required to pay a deposit of $4,000, which they would only get back if they brought at least 8kg (18lbs) of waste back down with them. It was hoped it would begin to tackle the rubbish problem on the world's highest peak, which is estimated to be covered in some 50 tonnes of waste. But after 11 years -- and with the rubbish still piling up -- the scheme is being shelved because it "failed to show a tangible result."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The camera industry shipped 6.5 million interchangeable lens cameras last year -- a 50% decline from 2010's peak -- yet 2025 may have been the most creatively ambitious year in nearly two decades of digital photography. DPReview's Richard Butler argues that this year's releases displayed "invention, experimentation and niche-tickling lunacy" not seen since digital's earliest days. Interchangeable lens shipments rose 11% in the first ten months of 2025 compared to last year, and fixed lens cameras climbed roughly 26%. The practical cameras arrived as expected: Panasonic's S1 II, Canon's EOS R6 III, and Sony's a7 V all delivered performance that "can go toe-to-toe with the pro sports models of just a few years ago." But the stranger releases drew attention. Sony's RX1R III faced criticism for being a "lazy update," yet Butler found it "small, fun to use and the pictures look great." Leica launched the Q3 Monochrom, a $7,800 fixed-lens full-frame compact that cannot capture color. Fujifilm's X half targeted young buyers who might otherwise hunt for vintage compacts on eBay. The Sigma BF abandoned traditional camera design entirely -- no viewfinder, one dial, intentionally stylized. "Look at some of this year's releases through a pragmatic lens of whether they're the best tool for the job, and the conclusion you'd typically draw is 'no,'" Butler wrote. These cameras "aren't trying to be the best, the most flexible or the most practical. They're intentionally, knowingly niche."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a year when print book sales have slipped 1% to 679 million copies through early December, according to Circana BookScan, audiobooks continue to carve out territory that once belonged exclusively to hardcovers, and in several notable cases this year, the audio versions have outright outsold their physical counterparts. S.A. Cosby's southern crime novel "King of Ashes" moved more copies as an audiobook than as a hardcover, according to publisher Macmillan Audio. The same is true for celebrity memoirs from Jeremy Renner, Alyson Stoner, and Brooke Shields -- all narrated by the authors themselves. Karin Slaughter's thriller "We Are All Guilty Here" and comedian Nate Bargatze's "Big Dumb Eyes" also saw their audio editions outpace hardcover sales. Digital audiobook revenue jumped nearly 24% in 2024 to $1.1 billion, per the Association of American Publishers, though growth has cooled to 1% through October this year, bringing in nearly $888 million. The format's strength has professional narrators watching AI developments nervously. Emily Lawrence, who has narrated more than 600 audiobooks, said there's "a lot of water cooler talk about people who haven't had work in months." Hachette Audio publisher Ana Maria Allessi said voice-cloning technology is becoming more sophisticated and could change how authors approach narration.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan's demographic transformation is no longer a distant forecast but an accelerating reality, and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research now estimates the country's population will fall to roughly 100 million by 2050 -- more than 20 million fewer people than today. The share of residents aged 65 and over stood at 29.4% as of September and is expected to reach 37.1% by midcentury. The dependency ratio -- children and older adults supported by every 100 working-age people -- is projected to rise from 68.0 to 89.0, meaning each working-age person will effectively support one dependent. Akita Prefecture is currently offering a preview of this future. Its population fell 1.93% year over year as of November 1, the steepest decline of any prefecture, and more than 40% of its residents are already 65 or older. By 2050, Akita's population is projected to drop to around 560,000, roughly 60% of its current size. Japan's total fertility rate fell for the ninth consecutive year in 2024, declining to 1.15 from 1.2. A health ministry survey found around 319,000 babies were born in the first half of 2025, more than 10,000 fewer than the same period last year -- a pace that could put the full-year total at a record low.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The six-decade flow of highly skilled Indian immigrants to the United States -- a migration pattern that produced some of the country's highest-earning households, several Nobel laureates, and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi -- appears to be grinding to a halt amid rising anti-Indian rhetoric from Republican officials and chaos in the visa system, according to New York Times. Indian student arrivals at American universities fell 44% this year, even as Indians had just become the largest contingent of foreign students the previous year. The decline comes as top Trump administration officials have publicly accused Indian immigrants of gaming the system. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president's immigration crackdown, declared on Fox News that Indians "engage in a lot of cheating on immigration policies that is very harmful to American workers." Governor Ron DeSantis called the H-1B visa program "chain migration run amok." The hostility extends beyond policy circles. At a Hindu temple in Sugar Land, Texas, conservative Christian protesters gathered during the dedication of a 90-foot Hanuman statue, calling the deity "a demon god." A U.S. Senate candidate wrote on social media: "Why are we allowing a false statue of a false Hindu God to be here in Texas? We are a CHRISTIAN nation." Indian Americans' median household income significantly outstrips that of white Americans, and about three-quarters hold at least a college degree. Foreign students have earned more engineering and computer science doctorates than American citizens and permanent residents for over two decades, according to the National Science Foundation. American tech giants have announced $67.5 billion in new investments in India in just the past few months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Insurance giant Aflac is notifying roughly 22.65 million people that their personal information was stolen from its systems in June 2025. The company disclosed the intrusion on June 20, saying it had identified suspicious activity on its network in the US on June 12 and blaming it on a sophisticated cybercrime group. The company said it immediately contained the attack and engaged with third-party cybersecurity experts to help with incident response. Aflac's operations were not affected, as file-encrypting ransomware was not deployed. [...] The compromised information, the insurance giant says, includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, government ID numbers, medical and health insurance information, and other data. "The review of the potentially impacted files determined personal information associated with customers, beneficiaries, employees, agents, and other individuals related to Aflac was involved," Aflac said in a notification (PDF) on its website. The company is providing the affected individuals with 24 months of free credit monitoring, identity theft protection, and medical fraud protection services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, "a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral," reports TechCrunch. "The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research." From the report: By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board. Per Chinese media outlets, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) via an earlier $10 million round. Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a membership service still in a testing phase,") the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That's when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says Meta is paying $2 billion -- the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next funding round. For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta's future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that's actually making money (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending spree). Meta says it'll keep Manus running independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Boston's once-booming biotech sector has hit a sharp downturn, leaving newly minted Ph.D.s struggling to find work as venture funding dries up, lab space sits empty, and companies downsize or relocate amid rising costs and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reports: Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks in venture capital and government funding have taken a toll, leading to layoffs and struggles for job seekers. For workers who thought they would easily launch into a well-paying science career, the downturn has been especially harsh. Massachusetts experienced a slight decline in its roughly 65,000 biotech research-and-development jobs in 2024 after years of mostly strong increases, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to federal data. The numbers indicate that job losses continued through at least June, while hiring remains sluggish. By the end of September, nearly 28% of greater Boston's laboratory space sat empty, according to the latest estimates from real-estate firm CBRE. "Every stage of the life cycle has been impacted by policy or regulatory uncertainty this year," said Kendalle Burlin O'Connell, chief executive of MassBio, an industry trade group. The impact has hit startups especially hard, she said. A continued downturn poses risks for a region where workers will put up with sky-high real-estate costs if they can land high-paying jobs. Massachusetts faces competition from other states and China, which are eager to peel away talent and investment. "There are states and countries chasing us every single day," Gov. Maura Healey said in an interview. In late October, the Democrat testified before the Massachusetts legislature in support of a $400 million "competitiveness agenda" that she is seeking to spur new investment and supplement research funding lost this year. Lawmakers are reviewing the bill, a House spokesman said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may have heard the advice "join a union", but nobody meant it like this. Original. --Remy.

The end of the quarter was approaching, and dark clouds were gathering in the C-suite. While they were trying to be tight lipped about it, the scuttlebutt was flowing freely. Initech had missed major sales targets, and not just by a few percentage points, but by an order of magnitude.

Heads were going to roll.

Except there was a problem: the master report that had kicked off this tizzy didn't seem to align with the department specific reports. For the C-suite, it was that report that was the document of record; they had been using it for years, and had great confidence in it. But something was wrong.

Enter Jeff. Jeff had been hired to migrate their reports to a new system, and while this particular report had not yet been migrated, Jeff at least had familiarity, and was capable of answering the question: "what was going on?" Were the sales really that far off, and was everyone going to lose their jobs? Or could it possibly be that this ancient and well used report might be wrong?

The core of the query was basically a series of subqueries. Each subquery followed this basic pattern:

SELECT SUM(complex_subquery_A) as subtotal FROM complex_subquery_B

None of this was particularly readable, mind you, and it took some digging just to get the shape of the individual queries understood. But none of the individual queries were the problem; it was the way they got stitched together:

SELECT SUM(subtotal) FROM (SELECT SUM(complex_subquery_A) as subtotal FROM complex_subquery_B UNION SELECT SUM(complex_subquery_C) as subtotal FROM complex_subquery_D UNION SELECT SUM(complex_subquery_E) as subtotal FROM complex_subquery_F);

The full query was filled with a longer chain of unions, but it was easy to understand what went wrong, and demonstrate it to management.

The UNION operator does a set union- which means if there are any duplicate values, only one gets included in the output. So if "Department A" and "Department C" both have $1M in sales for the quarter, the total will just be $1M- not the expected $2M.

The correct version of the query would use UNION ALL, which preserves duplicates.

What stunned Jeff was that this report was old enough to be basically an antique, and this was the kind of business that would burn an entire forest down to find out why a single invoice was off by $0.15. It was sheer luck that this hadn't caused an explosion before- or maybe in the past it had, and someone had just written it off as a "minor glitch"?

Unfortunately for Jeff, because the report was so important it required a huge number of approvals before the "UNION ALL" change could be deployed, which meant he was called upon to manually run a "test" version of the report containing the fix every time a C-suite executive wanted one, until the end of the following quarter, when he could finally integrate the fix.

[Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated. While the system relies on a few decidedly not-neural features, it has the advantage that we have chips that can run neural networks using spiking signals, which would allow this system to integrate smoothly with some energy-efficient hardware to run AI-based control software. [...] There are four ways that these trains of spikes can convey information: the shape of an individual pulse, through their magnitude, through the length of the spike, and through the frequency of the spikes. Spike frequency is the most commonly used means of conveying information in biological systems, and the researchers use that to convey the pressure experienced by a sensor. The remaining forms of information are used to create something akin to a bar code that helps identify which sensor the reading came from. In addition to registering the pressure, the researchers had each sensor send a "I'm still here" signal at regular time intervals. Failure to receive this would be an indication that something has gone wrong with a sensor. The spiking signals allow the next layer of the system to identify any pressure being experienced by the skin, as well as where it originated. This layer can also do basic evaluation of the sensory input: "Pressure-initiated raw pulses from the pulse generator accumulated in the signal cache center until a predefined pain threshold is surpassed, activating a pain signal." This can allow the equivalent of basic reflex reactions that don't involve higher-level control systems. For example, the researchers set up a robotic arm covered with their artificial skin, and got it to move the arm whenever it experiences pressure that can cause damage. The second layer also combines and filters signals from the skin before sending the information on to the arm's controller, which is the equivalent of the brain in this situation. So, the same system caused a robotic face to change expressions based on how much pressure its arm was sensing. [...] The skin is designed to be assembled from a collection of segments that can snap together using magnetic interlocks. These automatically link up any necessary wiring, and each segment of skin broadcasts a unique identity code. So, if the system identifies damage, it's relatively easy for an operator to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware, and then update any data that links the new segment's ID with its location. The researchers call their development a neuromorphic robotic e-skin, or NRE-skin. "Neuromorphic" as a term is a bit vague, with some people using it to mean a technology that directly follows the principles used by the nervous system. That's definitely not this skin. Instead, it uses "neuromorphic" far more loosely, with the operation of the nervous system acting as an inspiration for the system.The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.