Tokyo – Toyota Motor will introduce robots which can work as well or better than humans at all 12 of its factories in Japan to cut costs and deal with a looming labour shortage as the country ages, a report said on Thursday. The robots would be able to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously with their two arms, achieving efficiency unseen in human workers and matching the cheap wages of Chinese labourers, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said. Japan’s top automaker currently uses 3 000 to 4 000 less advanced robots at its domestic factories but their use has been confined mostly to welding,...

CNN has just released a list of 24 of the top 25 innovations of the past 25 years. They will release the number 1 innovation tomorrow, Sunday 16 January, at 8 p.m. ET. Here’s the list: 1. ????? 2. Cell phone 3. Personal computers 4. Fiber optics 5. E-mail 6. Commercialized GPS 7. Portable computers 8. Memory storage discs 9. Consumer level digital camera 10. Radio frequency ID tags 11. MEMS 12. DNA fingerprinting 13. Air bags 14. ATM 15. Advanced batteries 16. Hybrid car 17. OLEDs 18. Display panels 19. HDTV 20. Space shuttle 21. Nanotechnology 22. Flash memory 23. Voice mail 24. Modern hearing...

​​​​​ Stuck for ideas of what to do with those gigabytes of empty space on your iPod? Wonder no more. Fresh from CES is a prototype of a gadget which hooks up to everybody’s favourite music player, to offer mobile playback on a 3.5″ screen – ideal for catching up with your favourites on the move. The prototype MoviePlayer has apparently been produced by the little-known manufacturer Nyko, with the firm slating its gadget for a potential spring launch on the market. It includes its own, colour screen...

First it was spyware – now Microsoft is heading for the lucrative anti-virus market. CNN reports the software giant is to release “a free security program” which will tackle the most dangerous of infections. The “Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool” is expected to be made available next week as part of the Windows update cycle. The new program won’t tackle all infections – however, a full anti-virus suite is believed to be part of Microsoft’s plans. It bought out GeCAD Software Srl, a Romanian anti-virus firm, two years ago, and it’s...

Working with the basic material of computer chips, Intel Corp. researchers have constructed an all-silicon laser that could lead to computers one day harnessing light waves rather than electrical currents to shuttle data swiftly. Today, lasers that power fast optical networks require exotic — and expensive — materials and are mainly used in vast communications networks. With everyday silicon, the capacity and efficiency of light waves could be used cheaply in much smaller environments. As a result, the movement of data within computers would keep up with the ever-increasing speed of...

“TiVo is throwing in the towel on cable. According to CEO Mike Ramsay, ‘offering service through one of the primary cable platforms is not the best way to grow our business at this time, because the economics are not very attractive, instead, we have decided to embrace the PC as our friend.’ This may add to the complexity of an already convoluted message that TiVo has been criticized for being unable to articulate to the masses. In the same article TiVo says it plans to introduce a new line of recorders that will accept CableCards. The company has declined to say when new machines...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Engineers at Penn State University said on Wednesday they had found a way for power lines to transmit data to homes at rates far faster than high-speed Internet connections from cable and telephone companies. Broadband service over power lines has been highly touted by equipment makers and federal regulators as a possible competitor to cable and telephone services that handle nearly all of the 30 million U.S. residential broadband connections. But despite dozens of trials, few electric utilities have attempted to sell the service to customers, citing cost and technical...

“The New Scientist has an article about TinyP2P, the world’s smallest P2P app. It’s 15 lines of Python code brought to us by Edward Felten, CS Professor at Princeton and outspoken supporter of the digital rights the Slashdot community holds so dear. He wrote the program as a proof-of-concept that P2P apps are really easy to write, don’t have to be complicated, and thus banning them (a la the INDUCE Act) is pointless and silly.” Slashdot