Category Technology/Electronics

In recent weeks, a range of large “software-as-a-service” companies, including Salesforce, ServiceNow and Oracle, have seen their share prices tumble.

Even if you’ve never used these companies’ software tools, there’s a good chance your employer has. These tools manage key data about customers, employees, suppliers and products, supporting everything from payroll and purchasing to customer service.

Now new “agentic” artificial intelligence (AI) tools for business are expected to reduce reliance on traditional software for everyday work. These include Anthropic’s Cowork, OpenAI’s Frontier and open-source agent platforms such as OpenClaw.

But just how important are these software-as-a-service companies now? How fast could AI replace them—and are the jobs of people who use the s...

Concordia researchers have developed a new 3D-printing technique that uses sound waves to directly print tiny structures onto soft polymers like silicone with far greater precision than before. The approach, called proximal sound printing, opens new possibilities for manufacturing microscale devices used in health care, environmental monitoring and advanced sensors. It is described in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

The technique relies on focused ultrasound to trigger chemical reactions that solidify liquid polymers exactly where printing is needed...

Robots and self-driving cars could soon benefit from a new kind of brain-inspired hardware that can allegedly detect movement and react faster than a human. A new study published in the journal Nature Communications details how an international team built their neuromorphic temporal-attention hardware system to speed up automated driving decisions.

The problem with current robotic vision and self-driving vehicles is a significant delay in processing what they see. While today’s top AI programs can recognize objects accurately, the calculations are so complex that they can take up to half a second to complete...

A team of US researchers has unveiled a device that can conduct electricity along its fractionally charged edges without losing energy to heat. Described in Nature Physics, the work, led by Xiaodong Xu at the University of Washington, marks the first demonstration of a “dissipationless fractional Chern insulator,” a long-sought state of matter with promising implications for future quantum technologies.

From quantum Hall to fractional phases
The quantum Hall effect emerges when electrons are confined to a two-dimensional material, cooled to extremely loow temperatures, and exposed to strong magnetic fields...