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Have you checked all the power strips in your home or office to make sure they're not spying on you? Pwnie Express have an upcoming product called the Power Pwn that could sit unnoticed in a home or work environment and yet be spying on an entire network

Since his diagnosis with Alzheimer's in 2007, beloved fantasy author Terry Pratchett has kept up his rigorous writing and touring schedule, despite his growing health difficulties. These days, he writes entirely with the help of voice-activated software and his assistant Rob Wilkins. Now he's done an extensive interview with New Statesman's Laurie Penny, where he reveals what his life is like now, and what's coming next for Discworld.

"It is a wonder that we have yet to officially write about probability theory on this blog. Probability theory underlies a huge portion of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, and a number of our future posts will rely on the ideas and terminology we lay out in this post. Our first formal theory of machine learning will be deeply ingrained in probability theory, we will derive and analyze probabilistic learning algorithms, and our entire treatment of mathematical finance will be framed in terms of random variables."

Heated political rhetoric is everywhere. It sets us apart from one another and erodes what's left of civil discourse. It grinds the worthy concept of "logic" into dust. Not any more. Not when we fight back with an open source game I'm calling Logic Shrink. I'm not selling a thing. You don't need an app, a console, even a board. It's entirely your game. Play a solitary version. Play it during a get-together with your extended family. Play it with kids, especially teens. Bring it to the classroom, community center, or secret Super PAC meeting. It will entertain. Afterwards, when the lively score-keeping has ended there will be something new in the room. It may be unfamiliar at first. It's a state of being that requires no name calling, no slippery slope. It's logical thinking.

Alpha One Labs co-founder Sean Auriti and a group of like-minded hackers have launched a campaign to build Hackert0wn, a Brooklyn hackerspace the likes of which the world has never seen. As planned, Hackert0wn will be an  entire hacker ecosystem complete with retail shops stocked with spare parts, sleeping pods, a gym that feeds power back into the building, a co-working space, private offices, a cafe with a coffee dispensing robot, a dumpling shop, an aquaponic farm that raises fish and produce for nearby residents and restaurants, and a state-of-the art CNC machine shop. Oh, and all the buildings will be built out of recycled shipping containers.

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere - the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Can robots work as scientists? At first, this seems like a silly question. Computers are pervasive in science, and if you walk into a large university lab today, there's a good chance you'll find a fully fledged robot working alongside the lab-coat-wearing humans. Robots fill test tubes, make DNA microarrays, participate in archaeological digs, and survey the oceans. There are entire branches of science-climate modeling and genomics, for example-that wouldn't exist without powerful microprocessors. Machines even play an integral part in abstract fields of discovery. In experimental mathematics, humans rely on computers to inspire new lines of thinking and investigate hypotheses. In 1976, mathematicians used computers to prove the four-color theorem, and machines have since been used in several other proofs.

Last Thursday, tech website Xconomy hosted a forum on "The Future of Robotics in Silicon Valley and Beyond." We were there, of course, and so were a lot of other famous robotics people, including Aaron Edsinger of Meka Robotics, who had an announcement to make: an entirely new company called Redwood Robotics, a joint venture between Meka Robotics, Willow Garage, and SRI International.

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in California and the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology - have developed a "biological computer" made entirely from biomolecules that is capable of deciphering images encrypted on DNA chips.

Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard. Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It's more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.  For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements. This isn't a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.  The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market - at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter. This is like day one of the mouse.  Except, no one needs an instruction manual for their hands.

This is an army of 'Chef Cui' noodle-shaving robots designed and manufactured by Cui Runquan. The robots were designed to cut noodles from a block of dough cheaper and more efficiently than humans can. Plus today's youth don't want to work as noodle cutters. Kids! I spent two summers as a teen peeling potatoes at summer camp, and do you hear me complaining? Hell no, I got that out of my system a long time ago. It really did suck though.

I am a bit odd. I will rarely if ever answer a question on StackOverflow (SO). If I do its because I didn't have any other easy way of answering the question. This is entirely by design.

Our personal data is among today's most valuable information currency. It's often hard to determine what part companies own, what part the government owns, and what part, if any, is entirely our own - provided a third party hasn't already sold it to someone else.

I went to the GLUE conference to get in over my head. That was my entire goal. I wanted to learn about the technology that helps to stitch together the various parts of the Internet, but I also wanted to spend some time getting to know the people who made that technology do what it does. Over the course of 2 days I met people who made me feel dumb, saw thousands of lines of code and left with a new appreciation for how technology works.