RugOne, the outdoor arm of rugged-phone maker Ulefone, showed the Xsnap 7 Pro at IFA in Berlin on September 5 and opened Kickstarter orders two days later. Early backers can still claim a limited run at €799. Full retail follows this month at $999 in the US and €1,099.99 in Europe, in Sand Dune or Black. A small cube sits flush in a recess on the back, and that cube is meant to leave the phone when the shot needs a helmet, a handlebar, or a chest strap.
Boston Dynamics spent this morning showing Atlas a new pair of hands, and the first thing that stands out is a missing digit. There is no pinky. Four fingers sit on a palm a little larger than an average human hand, and the assembly is a little stronger than the gripper it replaces. Engineers reached that count with a blunt test: they taped a pinky to a ring finger and spent a day trying to work. The missing finger never blocked the jobs they cared about. Chief technology officer Zack Jackowski put the lesson in plain shop language. The best part is no part.
Four small propellers sit over a single spring leg, and the pair turns a quadcopter into a machine that travels the way a pogo stick does. Researchers at the University of Toronto’s CLIMB Lab send it up with rotor thrust, then let a passive telescopic leg take the landing and hand that energy back as the next hop. Early copies ended in a sharp metal spike. On a clean floor the spike was enough. On anything softer or slicker it skated, punched in, or left the robot tipped and finished.
Cosmic rays have been running a slow version of this experiment for as long as air has been thick enough to hit. A fast proton from space strikes a molecule high overhead, the collision throws off short-lived fragments, and some of those fragments decay into muons. A muon behaves a lot like an electron, except it carries about 200 times the mass. Extra mass means the particle sheds energy slowly, so it can cross meters of rock or metal that would stop an X-ray in a thin sheet. Archaeologists already use that natural drizzle to hunt hollow rooms inside pyramids, and engineers use it to look for gaps in ground that drills have not reached. Nature only supplies about one muon per square centimeter each second, which is why a careful scan can take months.
Earlier today, Figure posted a short film called F.02 Decommission and treated fleet retirement like a closing shot from Terminator 2. A humanoid hangs from a chain over a glowing electric arc furnace, gets lowered toward liquid steel, and holds a thumbs-up as the heat takes the frame. Viewers waiting for Figure CEO Brett Adcock or a newer robot under a mask instead get Arnold Schwarzenegger, who later signed off the whole affair with four words: “Hasta la vista, F.02.”
Parents who grew up walking to a friend’s house without a tracker in their pocket now face a different first-phone problem. Most options for ages 7 to 13 either open the full internet or function mainly as a way to watch a child from a distance. Freckle, revealed today by Freckle Mobile and founder Sam Terris, tries a third path. Terris, who describes his own childhood as free-range, calls the usual tracking products leashes. His answer is a small square phone meant to go outside with the kid, not sit in a bedroom feeding a scroll.
Photo credit: TU Delft
Forest monitoring usually means a small quadcopter hanging in place while its motors chew through a battery in a few dozen minutes. Noise follows the same schedule. A machine that can grab a branch and cut power would last far longer and bother far fewer animals, yet the last few inches of that landing have wrecked plenty of earlier designs.
VITURE Pro 2 ships as a $298.99 (was $380) pair of XR/AR display glasses that treat a private cinema as the whole job. Sony micro-OLED panels sit behind birdbath optics and throw a 1920 by 1080 image to each eye at up to 120Hz, with a 50-degree field of view that the company sells as a 146-inch screen viewed from about four meters. Peak perceived brightness climbs to 1,600 nits from the 1,000 nits on the first Pro, with nine brightness steps and contrast rated at 100,000:1 or higher. Color covers 108 percent of sRGB, and VITURE tunes that color at the panel itself rather than through an extra management chip.
Rolling down a hallway with a shirt slung over its neck, Goose looks less like a factory demo and more like a small appliance that decided to grow a personality. Prototype 1 from San Francisco’s The Robot Works is a white, low, rounded base with a long articulated neck, camera eyes set in a bonnet so you can see where it is looking, and a bright orange beak that doubles as a gripper. A blue polka-dot wrap gives the machine a costume instead of a chassis. Founders posted the first public clip this week with a simple brief: tidy, play, live.
