Mike Murphy

While Boston Dynamics and its Atlas robot have dominated headlines on Alphabet’s robotics research, it’s not the only robotics company that it owns. Another Alphabet company, called Schaft, is working on a new robot, which its cofounder Auto Nakanishi, showed off at a conference in Tokyo today. This walking robot can overcome hurdles that many bipedal robots can’t when navigating through the world, IEEE Spectrum reported.

This post has been corrected.

A few months ago, Facebook got rid of the second inbox for unsolicited messages, called “Other Messages,” in its messaging services. It replaced it with “Message Requests,” a function allowing users to accept or ignore messages from people who aren’t Facebook friends. You get a notification when someone you don’t know pings you if you have Messenger, Facebook’s messaging app.

Just when you thought Star Wars mania was dying down. Today (April 7) Disney released the first teaser trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first of a few spin-offs from the main Star Wars saga.

Tesla fans who can’t afford to drop $75,000 and up on the company’s Model S electric car rejoiced last week at the unveiling of the $35,000 Model 3, Tesla’s most affordable vehicle to date, which is expected to hit the road in 2017. But with lines stretching out Tesla stores around the world just to reserve one, and CEO Elon Musk admitting that he’s having to rethink how the company plans to produce the quarter-million cars people have reserved, it might be a long while before they become available to the masses.

We’re getting to the point we’re 3D printing is slowly becoming useful. Earlier this week, Stratasys, the largest 3D printer manufacturer, showed off new technology that can print full objects in one go, without any assembly required.

If you’re out in the park and someone has a heart attack, what do you do? Dialing 911 would be the most sensible option, but there’s no guarantee help will arrive in time. A new patent from Google suggests it may have a solution.

My mom recently purchased an internet-connected doorbell, which sounded like a great idea: It has a camera in it so that when someone rings the doorbell, you can see who it is, wherever you are in the world.

If you’re reading this at an office desk or at home, look around, and pick up a few things.

You might want to wait before downloading the latest version of Apple’s operating system for iPhones.

We were promised sneakers and dinner at the push of a button, and instead we got tchotchkes.

Virtual reality is expected to have a breakout year, but one place you definitely shouldn’t use your brand new VR headset is the Boston subway. The Boston Globe reported Friday (April 1) that a rider was filmed playing on what appears to be a Samsung Gear VR headset as they rode the Green Line train in Boston.

On Mar. 31, Nintendo’s first mobile app, a strange question-and-answer social network called Miitomo, launched in the US. It’s been available in Japan for a few weeks, and according to Nintendo, it was downloaded over 1 million times in the first three days there.

Forty years ago today, two college dropouts decided to start selling cobbled-together computers out of a garage in California because they couldn’t afford the ones on the market. They had an intricate wood-cut logo, not much money or manpower, and their first computer only sold about 175 units. But in the years between then and now, Apple has become one of the most valuable companies in the world, spurring revolutions in how we communicate, use computers, listen to music, and to a lesser extent, tell the time.

If your company uses 3D printing for anything confidential or sensitive, it might be time to invest in some soundproofing.

Earlier today (March 31), Amazon announced that it was expanding its Dash button retail experiment, where customers who really love certain products can choose to order a $5 button to ensure they’re never without those products. The branded, wifi-enabled plastic buttons link to your Amazon account. When you’re running low on something, you push the button, and a new shipment of that product arrives on your doorstep in the next day or so.

Imagine if Michelangelo had been able to use drones—perhaps the Sistine Chapel wouldn’t have taken so long.

This week, Facebook started shipping the first of its long-awaited Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets, but it may well have more VR technology up its sleeve—or, on top of it.

On Monday, Mar. 28, Facebook’s Oculus started shipping its first virtual reality headset to consumers. But it may have a hard time convincing US users to try it out: The last time a large multinational company tried to bring virtual reality gaming to the world was 21 years ago, and it was a categorical failure.

In 2013, Snapchat reportedly turned down $3 billion to be acquired by Facebook. Now, the ephemeral messaging app startup, which has since been valued at $16 billion, and is aiming for $300 million in revenue this year, has announced updates to its service that position it to more directly take on Facebook’s apps.

Governing bodies of pretty much every sport in the world generally consider it an unfair advantage for athletes to ameliorate themselves in any way. But what if that was the whole fun of the sport? Researchers at ETH Zurich, a Swiss technical university, plan to host a “cyborg Olympics” in Zurich this October to find out.

Last month, Samsung announced its new flagship phones, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. I called them boring—in a good way—for how durable and reliable they were, suggesting that Samsung was going to have to look for other ways to differentiate itself in a market where quality phones are just the norm. But one thing I didn’t really appreciate at the time was the camera on Samsung’s new phones. If you can stomach all the additional software Samsung piles into its version of Android—including advertisements—and the $730 price of the phones, you will find yourself with what some are calling the best Android phone on the market, or even just the best phone.

Meet Tay. Like many other millennials, she spends most of her time on messaging services like Kik and social media, and loves to talk about lowkey celebs, horoscopes, and what she’d call her first album if she were a singer. Tay, however, is a bot made by Microsoft that lives in the cloud, rather than a sceney neighborhood in a major city.

Remember CDs? We used to buy entire albums of music on them, before they became coasters. Then Apple jammed 1,000 songs into our pockets, and blew up the concept of buying whole albums or paying for physical media.