Consumer News

"Feral" gossip spread via AI bots is likely to become more frequent and pervasive, causing reputational damage and shame, humiliation, anxiety, and distress, researchers have warned.... Read more

A single laundry load containing synthetic clothing can release thousands of plastic microfibers from nylon, acrylic and polyester materials. Lab testing of an SA-made washing machine filter at Flinders University shows it can be a useful new way to help protect waterways from polyester and other synthetic microparticles.... Read more

Meta's decision to end its professional fact-checking program sparked a wave of criticism in the tech and media world. Critics warned that dropping expert oversight could erode trust and reliability in the digital information landscape, especially when profit-driven platforms are mostly left to police themselves.... Read more

How safe are autonomous vehicles?... Read more

With the Christmas trading period peaking, traditional surveillance technologies like CCTV can help reduce job stress caused by customer aggression, but QUT research has found wearable devices may increase stress levels among frontline employees, especially those uncomfortable with technology.... Read more

"It makes me feel like I am right there on Country." This was the response of a student after they used a new virtual reality (VR) tool I codeveloped to help Indigenous people around Australia learn on Country.... Read more

Single-phase power factor correction (PFC) circuits—a kind of front-end AC/DC converters—are ubiquitous in a variety of consumer electronic devices, including laptop adapters, LED driver power supplies, and portable chargers. They enhance the current quality drawn from the source, delivering stable DC voltage with high efficiency.... Read more

Imagine a future where you board an American Airlines flight without a gate agent scanning a boarding pass.... Read more

Each year as Spotify Wrapped drops, social media timelines fill with neon slides declaring who we "really" are. We trade our top artists and most-played songs like postcards from a year already fading.... Read more

As platforms rush to verify users' ages, experts warn consumer-grade cameras lack the technology to reliably authenticate minors.... Read more

Once the domain of buttons and knobs, car dashboards are increasingly home to large touchscreens. While that makes following a mapping app easier, it also means drivers can't feel their way to a control; they have to look. But how does that visual component affect driving?... Read more

Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.... Read more

Digital concerns around privacy, online misinformation, and work-life boundaries are highest among highly educated, Western European millennials, finds a new study from researchers at UCL and the University of British Columbia.... Read more

What generative AI typically does best—recognize patterns and predict the next step in a sequence—can seem fundamentally at odds with the intangibility of human creativity and imagination. However, Cambridge researchers suggest that AI can be a useful creative partner, as long as there is clear guidance on how ideas should... Read more

Zohran Mamdani as a creepy trick-or-treater, Gavin Newsom body-slamming Donald Trump and Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero. This is not the setup to an elaborate joke. Instead, these are all examples of recent AI-generated political videos. New easy-to-use tools—and acceptance of those tools by politicians—means that these fake videos are... Read more