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Cats Eric and Ernie with some of the items they have stolen from their neighbours’ homes [MARTIN ROSE/EAST NEWS] Black and white moggies Eric and Ernie left their owner red-faced after stealing dozens of items from their neighbours’ homes. The cats work as a pair and have come home with shoes, slippers, T-shirts, children’s wells and even tried to snatch ...

The important thing about Caenorhabditis elegans, also called a roundworm or nematode, is how simple it is. A mouse may be small, but it’s still a mammal, and composed of many billions of cells. Even a fruit fly is a relatively complex organism, and as scientists manipulate its genes they see all kinds of emergent properties arising from the incredible ...

Simple tasks, like plucking the stem off a cherry, are still monumental challenges for artificial hands. With a bill of materials perhaps a few hundred components long, it is not surprising that their functionality is low compared with one assembled from trillions of components. A new prosthetic bionic hand, designed and built by researchers at Case Western University is now ...

It’s a good thing we have SpaceX, or Google’s “moonshots” would almost certainly be more literal than those we see today. The company, which has recently set itself to fixing such problems as the global energy crisis and death, could never turn away from such a placid, mocking challenge as the moon, were a suitably trendy genius not already concerned ...

The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One may not offer an enormous jump over last-generation graphics out of the gate, but the SoCs inside the consoles — semi-custom APUs made by AMD — are a huge leap forward in terms of integration and capability. Both consoles integrate functionality that was previously broken out into multiple chips, using the most advanced 28nm ...