A new “study of studies” suggests that a small amount of video gaming can help children’s psychosocial adjustment. But it’s not an effect strong enough to outweigh other developmental factors. Dr Andrew Przbylski of Oxford University collated the results of several surveys covering around 5,000 British children aged 10 to 15. He filtered the results […]
Researchers have developed a robot that can figure out in just a couple of minutes how to get around despite one limb being incapacitated. It could make it more viable to use robots in remote locations. The project involved staff in universities in Paris and Wyoming who’ve just published a research paper. They wanted to […]
The Tor Project says an attack on the network earlier this year may have left user identities exposed for up to five months. At the moment those behind Tor say they are uncertain exactly what the consequences of the attack, which ran from January 30 to July 4, are for users. The Tor Project says […]
Dating site OKCupid has admitted it experimented by deliberately “matching” incompatible partners to see how much weight its recommendations carry. The revelation has caused some controversy, following shortly after it emerged that Facebook deliberately emphasized negative posts in some users’ news feeds to see if it changed the tone of their own posts. It’s certainly […]
Stanford researchers have created a stable pure lithium anode. It’s a huge step towards a dramatic increase in battery capacity. We currently refer to rechargable batteries in portable devices as being “lithium ion” rather than simply lithium because today’s models only use lithium in the electrolyte and not the anode, which is usually silicon or […]
An IP address at the House of Representatives has received a 10-day ban from anonymous edits on Wikipedia. It follows malicious edits receiving unwanted publicity. A Twitter account, @congressedits, automatically posts a message whenever a computer using any IP address assigned to Congress makes an edit. While it may be that some representatives and their […]
Verizon is to upgrade all of its FiOS customers to increase their upload speeds to match their download speeds. There’ll be no extra charge, though some users will have to wait. Right back to the days when nerdier folk showed off about knowing what the A in ADSL stood for, most broadband users have come […]
After 14 attempts over 31 years, Weird Al Yankovic has finally reached number one in the Billboard album charts. Mandatory Fun will debut at number one on the Billboard 200 based on sales from last week. Yankovic had previously said it’s likely to be his last album and he’ll now concentrate on singles and music […]
Facebook has added a “Save” feature that acts like a bookmark tool for linked content on your news feed. Unlike tools such as Instapaper, it doesn’t allow offline viewing. The feature will be available on both the desktop website version of the site and on the official Android/iOS apps. On posts which contain a link, […]
Microsoft is ditching Android from its smartphone range. It’s part of a strategy on streamlining its phone operations, which will be a key part of the company’s biggest ever round of job cuts. When Microsoft took over Nokia’s handset division, it certainly appeared that continuing to produce both Windows Phone and Android handsets was an […]