Author: Andrii Degeler

Yesterday evening, April 13, a swarm of drones descended upon Wembley Stadium in London. The pilots, who controlled their drones using first-person-view (FPV) headsets, were challenged with slaloms through the players’ tunnel, bank turns around the corner flags, and barrel rolls above the royal box.

Organised by EE, chip maker Qualcomm, and the European Rotor Sports Association (ERSA), the event was "a chance to celebrate the recent success of Europe’s leading pilots," EE wrote in a press release. Luke Bannister, the UK teen who recently won the $250K grand prize at the Dubai World Drone Prix, was at the event to show everyone how it's done.

The event, however, must have looked a bit strange, since the stadium was completely empty except for a bunch of journalists protected from drones flying at 75mph (120km/h) by a net. Presumably the safety measures could've been extended to squeeze more spectators in—but they wouldn't have been able to see much, anyway.

A computer-generated portrait using machine learning algorithms created by The Next Rembrandt project has been shown off by a team from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The computer analysed Dutch master Rembrandt's work, thoroughly tagged by humans.

"We examined the entire collection of Rembrandt’s work, studying the contents of his paintings pixel by pixel," the project team explained. "To get this data, we analysed a broad range of materials like high resolution 3D scans and digital files, which were upscaled by deep learning algorithms to maximise resolution and quality."

Since much of Rembrandt's work was portraiture, the team of researchers—supported by Microsoft, financial company ING, and Dutch museums Mauritshuis and Rembrandthuis—decided to focus on the great man's portraits for analysis and recreation.

It's been roughly a year since the first technical preview of the Vivaldi browser landed, and now version 1.0 has been released.

The new contender on the market—courtesy of Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner— takes pride in adding all kinds of tweaks and additional functionality, while other browsers on the market try their best at simplifying, and streamlining their products.

Catering first of all to power users, Vivaldi is based on Chromium, Google's open source browser project that relies on the Blink and V8 engines. It is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Unlike other browsers, however, Vivaldi is built using technologies that traditionally belong to the Web, such as CSS and JavaScript (namely React and Node.js).

Modern chemistry can sometimes produce the most unlikely things, including materials familiar to everyone but with totally new—and useful—properties. A recent example of such a material is "flexiramics," which is being developed by Dutch startup Eurekite at the University of Twente.

As the name suggests, flexiramics is a foldable, tissue-like material that is also fireproof and non-conducting, like most other ceramics. As Eurekite commercializes flexiramics and prepares to take it to market, we decided to pay the startup a visit.

The startup's founding team consists of three people: two international students coming from Spain and Azerbaijan and their academic supervisor. Eurekite CEO Gerard Cadafalch Gazquez, who came to the Netherlands from Barcelona in 2010 to pursue a Master's and then a PhD degree, showed his favorite trick with a sheet of flexiramics:

After all the teased products that didn't live up to their promises and the trouble caused by self-balancing scooters, ArcaBoard appears to be the closest we'll get to an actual hoverboard in 2015. Designed by the US-based Arca Space Corporation, the mattress-shaped vehicle packs 272 horsepower and is propelled by 36 ducted fans spinning at 45,000rpm. Buying one will set you back about £13,500 ($19,900).

Arca has begun taking pre-orders for ArcaBoard and promises to start shipping it to the customers in April 2016. The device's speed is limited to 20km/h (12mph) and its flying height to 30cm (1ft). It's powered by a set of Li-Po batteries that account for a significant part of its price: getting a new battery pack after the 1-year warranty has expired will cost you £4,600 ($6,840).

There are two versions of the device: one for riders that weigh up to 80kg (176lbs), and another for riders up to 110kg (242lbs). The lighter option can hover for six minutes, the heavier just three minutes. The lighter rider can theoretically travel up to 2km (1.2mi) on one charge.

The kickable "robotic mule", also known as AlphaDog or LS3, created by Alphabet-owned Boston Dynamics under a contract with DARPA, has proved too loud to fight alongside the US Marines. Following an extended test period during the "Rim of the Pacific" military exercise last year, the project has been suspended.

The Legged Squad Support System (LS3) was created to carry heavy equipment for the Marines during marches, bearing a load of up to 400 pounds (180kg). This would've provided much-needed relief for the fighters: the average soldier is supposed to carry no more than 72 pounds (32kg) when marching and 48 pounds (22kg) when fighting, but paratroopers fighting in Iraq in 2003 carried up to 101 pounds (46kg). In total, about $42 million (£28 million) was awarded to Boston Dynamics to develop the robodog.

Unfortunately for those over-laden soldiers, however, the military exercise clearly showed that LS3 in its current state is not suitable for real-life use by the US Marine Corps, Military.com reports.

Although the official Apple Store is yet to come to the capital of the Czech Republic, it has recently seen the launch of the Apple Museum, which claims to host the largest private exhibition of its kind.

Housed in three buildings in Prague's old town, the museum has an extensive list of 472 exhibits on display—from nearly every Apple product ever built to Steve Jobs' business cards from his times at NeXT and Pixar.

Local Reddit user eirunning85 has put together a gallery of what you can see at the new Apple Museum. Here are our favourite picks:

An employee of Russia's Internet giant Yandex, Dmitry Korobov, stole the source code of its search engine and tried to sell it on the black market to fund his own startup, according to a report by the Russian newspaper Kommersant. A Russian court has found Korobov guilty and handed down a suspended sentence of two years in jail.

The Kommersant investigation revealed that Korobov downloaded a piece of software codenamed Arcadia from Yandex's servers, which contained the source code and algorithms of the company's search engine. Later on, he tried to sell it to an electronics retailer called NIX, where a friend of his allegedly worked. Korobov also trawled the darknet in search of potential buyers.

Korobov put a surprisingly low price on the code and algorithms, asking for just $25,000 and 250,000 Russian rubles, or about £27,000 in total. There's no information on Korobov's position within the company, but it appears that he wasn't aware that the data he had in his possession could be worth much more.

Wireless chargers using standards like Qi have been on the market for a while; IKEA even includes them in some of its furniture these days. But if you think about it, there's not that much difference between wired and wireless charging of this kind. After all, the charger still needs to be plugged into a wall socket, and you still need to leave the phone in a designated place to charge.

What would be a significant improvement, however, is charging a smartphone just by hanging around in the same room as a wireless charger.

XE, a Ukrainian startup working in semi-stealth mode since 2014, claims to have found a safe and reliable way to transfer electricity to a device that's up to five meters (16ft) away. The commercial version of the technology will consist of a base charging station of about 15×15×40cm and a 3mm thick smartphone case.

The Australian government has repeatedly called for citizens to turn off two-factor authentication (2FA) at its main digital government portal, myGov. The portal's Twitter account has recently been updated several times with cute pictures encouraging holidaymakers to "turn off your myGov security codes" so that "you can spend more time doing the important things."

The portal is the place where Australian citizens can use and manage a number of governmental services, including health insurance, tax payments, and child support. In case of myGov, two-factor authentication is implemented by sending users text messages that contain one-time codes to complement their usual passwords.

A number of people on Twitter pointed out that, while downplaying security isn't a good idea in general, it could be even more dangerous when citizens go abroad: