Lego for Halloween.

LEGO has assembled a gaming PC inside a large horror castle with over 20,000 building blocks ahead of Halloween. To create a computer, we used a powerful RTX 3090 graphics card, an Intel i9 12900KF processor and a customized water cooling system.

BMW cars will notify you of scratches on the body themselves.

BMW has filed a patent application for a scratch detection system that will notify the car owner of any damage to the bodywork. The technology is based on the piezoelectric effect: the control unit captures the electric charge that occurs when the film is deformed and transmits the information to the on-board system of the machine or to the cloud platform. Whether the technology will become serial is still unclear. If a scratch appears while the car is moving, it will report this with audible and visual signals. If this happens while the owner is out of the car, an alert can be sent to the smartphone.

The English police have hired a sniffer dog trained to smell the seminal fluid.

The Cheshire County Police have hired a sniffer dog trained to smell semen. Labrador named April will help investigate rape and other sexual crimes. A dog can smell 0.016 milliliters of seminal fluid even if it was left at the crime scene years ago. April's training lasted six weeks. The dog has already started his first case - he was called to the scene of another crime 36 hours after being hired.

A plastic-filtering robo fish has won a nature-inspired robot competition.

The robot floats by flapping its tail while keeping its mouth wide open to collect water and microplastics into its internal cavity. When the cavity fills, the robot closes its mouth, opens the gill flaps, and pushes the water out, lifting the bottom of the cavity. A fine mesh attached to the gill covers allows water to pass through but retains plastic particles. The 50 cm long Gillbert robot collects particles up to 2 millimeters in size. It also has built-in sensors to monitor turbidity and light levels underwater, and uses an IMU to track its movements in the water. The developer plans to improve the robot and increase its size.

Scientists have discovered the "Marshmallow Planet" 580 light years from Earth.

A giant gas planet, similar in density to a marshmallow, was found orbiting a cold red dwarf. The diameter of TOI-3757 b is slightly larger than Jupiter, and the weight is 2 times less than Saturn. The planet makes a revolution around a star 25 times faster than Mercury.

Tesla investor has invested in a flying car startup.

Startup Alef Aeronautics hopes to revolutionize the market with its flying cars. The company has already shown a prototype of the first flying car and was able to attract at least one well-known venture capitalist who backed electric car manufacturer Tesla. According to Reuters, the ambitious Alef flying car project has caught the attention of Tim Draper, a well-known American venture capitalist and one of the first investors in Tesla and SpaceX. His fund Draper Associates Fund V supported Alef by investing $3 million in the startup at the start.

Denmark has created an optical fiber capable of transmitting 1.84 Petabits of data per second.

This is more than all the Internet traffic in the world per second. And all this - in one cable. The 1.84 petabits per second throughput was not easy to test and verify because no single computer can send or receive, let alone store, such a huge amount of data. The research team used dummy data on individual channels to test what the total throughput would be.

Helmet from KFC.

KFC invented the Brainwave Bucket helmet, which analyzes brain activity. All for the sake of a promotion - to prove to customers that while eating chicken, the stress level is reduced. Participants are offered to watch an ASMR video with chicken cooking, and if the subject's brain activity does not change, the chicken will be given out for free. By the way, in the future such buckets will be sold to everyone.

Engineers taught a neural network to kill cockroaches with a laser.

The YOLOv4 neural network was trained to distinguish cockroaches in the frame. Then she was connected to cameras that broadcast live video. When a cockroach enters the lens, the device calculates its location and sends a command to the laser and mirror. The insect detection accuracy is one centimeter at a distance of ten meters. The laser beam destroys the cockroach in a second. But sometimes it can get into the limbs - then the insect has a chance to escape.

LEGO has unveiled the Marvel Hulkbuster set.

This is an armor model from The Avengers. The Hulkbuster is a powerful suit of armor designed by Tony Stark. The armor can be seen in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The height of the assembled robot is 52 cm. The set consists of 4049 parts. Includes information plate and Tony Stark minifigure. LEGO said the armor model has many movie-accurate features, such as glowing "reactors" in the arms and chest.

3D printer for printing meat.

Israeli company Redefine Meat has created a 3D printer that can print tons of meat. Ultimately, the company plans to print 15 tons of products per day. The printer allows you to make steaks of different hardness and with different percentages of fat. The machine creates plant-based counterparts of the three components of meat - muscle, fat and blood - and then combines them to produce different products. The main ingredients for printing are chickpeas, soybeans, peas, beets, nutritional yeast and coconut milk. The company continues research to bring the taste and texture of the printed product closer to the original. Redefine Meat has created eight of these printers, six of which went to the Netherlands, where another company plant will soon start operating.

Minecraft built a giant life-size city.

More than 500 players worked on the city for 11 years. All built houses on the map have their own unique and different interiors that you can enter. Despite the work done, according to the developers, the city is only 20 percent ready. Even if you don't have Minecraft installed, you can take a bird's-eye sightseeing tour by looking at the dynamic online map.

Erase and Replace tool.

Runway launched the Erase and Replace tool, powered by the Stable Diffusion neural network. With its help, you can easily and quickly replace image fragments with frames generated by artificial intelligence. You just need to select the fragment that needs to be replaced, and then describe what should appear in the marked place.

SpaceX will start selling Starlink in-flight Internet terminals in 2023.

According to the company, Internet speeds up to 350 Mbps are enough for video calls, online games, and "other high-speed data activities." During a test flight in September, Starlink Aviation was able to provide internet speeds of 100 Mbps on board. Airplanes now typically use terminals with speeds ranging from 30 Mbps to 100 Mbps, the speed of which may depend on the number of passengers using the Internet.

In Spain, they invented an exoskeleton that helps paralyzed children walk.

The Atlas-2030 exoskeleton allowed the test child to make a two-hour walk from home to the rehabilitation center without assistance.

American iguanas poison themselves with ant poison to survive.

Iguanas eat dead ants, receive a small dose of their poison and prepare their immunity for possible poisoning. This was proved by the experiment of biologists. They divided the lizards into two groups. For one to three weeks they were fed ants, and then they were allowed to sting. The second only suffered from bites. It turned out that in the blood of iguanas from the first group, the concentration of basophils increased and substances were produced that bind the poison molecules and prevent it from affecting the body. There were no such changes in the second group.

Scientists have found out why mosquitoes bite some people more often than others.

These conclusions were made by American scientists after experiments involving 64 people. The researchers placed nylon sleeves on volunteers' arms for six hours to collect volatile skin samples. Then these sleeves were placed in pairs in a chamber with mosquitoes - at the same time there were samples of two different people in it. The scientists observed which fabric would attract insects. It turned out - the one on which there are more carboxylic acids. Moreover, the leading sample was a hundred times more interesting for mosquitoes than the outsider of the list. The experiment was repeated a few months later. Some of the volunteers changed their skin care products during this time, but the attractiveness rating of their nylon sleeves for mosquitoes remained the same.

"Pillars of Creation"

The James Webb Telescope photographed the Pillars of Creation gas clusters, located at a distance of 7000 light years from Earth. Astronomers suggest that the cluster no longer exists due to a supernova explosion. However, on Earth, the first consequences of the explosion will be visible only after a thousand years.

Buddha Bot

Japanese scientists uploaded the sacred texts of Buddhism into the neural network and created the "Buddha Bot" - AI Buddha. He maintains a religious conversation with a person. You can turn to him with any question: in a difficult period of life or simply to achieve enlightenment. The application screen depicts the Buddha in the lotus position. With the help of augmented reality technology, it can be transferred to a real environment captured by a smartphone camera. You can communicate with AI Buddha by voice and text messages. The chatbot does not select answers based on the gender or age of the user.

Motorola showed the concept of a smartphone with a retractable display.

At the Lenovo Tech World event, Motorola showed off an interesting but not new concept. This is a smartphone with a screen that can be unfolded and collapsed - all you need to do is press a button. The smartphone has a retractable OLED display that can grow from 4" to 6.5" in height. So far, there are no details about the characteristics.