Author: Brett Venter

Rolls-Royce might seem like it’s all about luxury vehicles for people who have too much money to bother thinking about driving themselves around, but what the company has historically been all about is engines. Loads and loads of really amazing engines. So when the company, which is best known for making the kind of motors that forged aluminium silicon alloys want to be when they grow up, starts mucking around with electric motors, you know that something great is on the way. Truly, the Rolls-Royce of electric aircraft https://vimeo.com/605839135 And, for the moment, that greatness takes the form of the…

Automaker Hyundai recently bought a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics, the robotics company with a flair for making entertaining, yet disquieting, videos of its robots in action. On the heels of Spot learning to take just a little more autonomy for itself, its newest parent company has announced a brand-new version of the robotic quadruped. Called the ‘Factory Safety Service Robot’, this roaming Spot-a-like has a brand new job — patrolling Hyundai’s factories. Hyundai the impression this is a good thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTAJDICCll8 Boston Dynamics’ little workhorse work… er… canine has been tweaked and upgraded with a brand new set of…

Apple’s iPhone hardware has long been powerful. We don’t really hear as much as we should, because Android fans don’t like to talk about it, but the iPhone 13 — according to the first benchmark results turning up online — continues the trend of walloping the best processor hardware Android can field. Ah, well, there’s always next year. Taking on the iPhone 13 At present, the top score-holder for Android performance on Geekbench 5 (the cross-platform software we use when benchmarking… pretty much everything here at Stuff) is anything with a Snapdragon 888 processor. We’ve picked on the OnePlus 9…

Wipeout is one of the game series that made the PlayStation platform what it is today, but actual games have been sparse of late. Wipeout Rush is the latest entry into the storied series but the mobile game, developed by a company called Rogue, is a far cry from anything like the iconic futuristic high-speed racer. Actually, Wipeout Rush sounds appropriate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qmulgPZ2cg On the surface, it looks as though Rogue has nailed everything. The music (it’s not The Chemical Brothers, but very little is), the robotic voice that will tell you what your weapon pickups are, the visuals… it should…

Boston Dynamics Spot robotic dog is, depending on who you ask, either an existential threat to humanity or an essential tool that has a load of potential as a robotic companion. However you feel about that (and those are just opinions, yeah?), it’s a fact that Spot the robo-dog is now much less reliant on human control than it was previously. Spot just wants to be a good doggo https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/1220392791408177152?lang=en Boston Dynamics’ robotic canine has just received a new update (called Release 3.0) that enables all sorts of new behaviours for the yellow quadruped. Perhaps the most exciting is the…

The universe is a large place. So large that we can’t see all the way to the other side of it (yet). The solution? A simulated universe, of course. That’s just what scientists from around the world have created: Uchuu (which is Japanese for ‘outer space’), an artificial universe that you could totally download — if you had enough storage space available. Making a simulated universe Uchuu is a 2.1 trillion particle simulation that is 9.83 billion light-years from side to side, created using a dedicated astronomy supercomputer called ATERUI II. Even using a supercomputer, the simulation took years to…

We’ve been following the SpaceX-powered Inspiration4 mission ever since it was announced that someone could go to space by donating money to St Jude children’s hospital and now, the mission has finally taken place. If you, like us, weren’t able to stay awake long enough to catch the launch live, you have to know that everything has, so far, gone according to plan. Inspiration4 goes well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pv01sSq44w If you haven’t checked the video out yet, you can catch the archived stream at the embed above. If you’re mostly concerned with the launch and orbital insertion of the all private-citizen mission…

You’re not using a good camera unless it costs about as much as a second-hand car, apparently, and Canon’s new EOS R3 certainly fulfils that particular role. If you want one of these 24MP shooters when they drop in November this year, you can expect to pay at least R100,000 for the body-only configuration. Make it quick with the EOS R3 But why would you splurge a solid R100k on a ‘mere’ 24MP camera when you can spend less (or far more) on cameras with a much higher megapixel count? Well, the EOS R3 is all about speed, according to…

Are you ready to see history happen this week? SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission is perhaps the strangest mission into space we’ve ever seen. It consists of four people who are — technically — not really qualified to be there. They’re not astronauts, though they have received some training, and they’re going to spend three days in orbit before the SpaceX capsule they’re travelling in brings them back to Earth. Inspiration4 the future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pv01sSq44w The mission kicks off on 15 September (hey, that’s today!) at around 20h02 Eastern Time (oh, that’s 02h02 on 16 September, here in SA), with a little leeway…

Apple may have announced a pair of iPhone 13 models but that just means that the well-heeled (and obsessed) also have the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max to look forward to. These are typically the camera powerhouses, which is saying something when stacked against the photography improvements to the stock iPhone 13s, but there’s also loads of power to look forward to. Here’s what you need to know about Apple’s 2021 pair of Pro smartphones. Paging the iPhone 13 Pro Apple’s new Pro phones are, obviously, more powerful than last year’s models. But, as with the last few years,…