Techmoan already owned an 18-inch Hughes Wave Motion Machine that set him back about $500. He wanted something longer, so he paid $300 for the biggest model waveshop listed, a 25-inch unit shipped from India.

Website images appeared to be quite polished until he realized they were AI-generated. Prices sat in rupees. PayPal stayed unavailable on the main site, forcing a bank transfer unless you switched to the nearly identical waveshowcase.com page that accepted cards. A scam-checking site scored the operation at 50%. He ordered anyway and used PayPal through the dollar site for some protection.

Sale

Dreamegg Portable Noise Machine for Baby Adult, Features Powerful Battery, 21 Soothing Sound, Noise…

• 【COMPACT BUT POWERFUL】- D11 Max has more skills. Designed for all things sleep, this sound machine comes with favorable features: rechargeable…
• 【HUGE BATTERY, WORRY-FREE ON THE GO】- Everything D11 max has, PLUS a LONG-LASTING battery. The portable sound machine is built with…
• 【HELPS SETTLE-IN & STAY ASLEEP】- Moms know how precious sleep can be. Turn it on to create peaceful sleep environment to help crying baby calm…

UPS delivered the box faster than expected after a short email exchange. Everything he bought was in the box, including the acrylic chamber, motorized base, funnel, a bare-bones set of instructions, and three little Minute Maid-style bottles holding transparent mineral oil. One of the thin plastic end caps shattered when he attempted to open the box to begin using it, and for some reason, the distilled water he had ordered did not arrive in the delivery.

Filling the reservoir is a two-step process: first, mix 1 1/2 liters of distilled water with the supplied blue dye until it reaches the designated 45% line, shake it well, and then gently add mineral oil through the air trap hole until it is full. The instructions are a little vague about which brands or ratios to use, but once that’s done, all you have to do is run the motor for twenty minutes, turn it off for another twenty to allow the bubbles to collect in the side reservoir, then turn it back on and let it go.

A small motor within moves a wheel, causing the entire chamber to rock back and forth in a gradual, soothing seesaw motion. Two liquids of differing densities collide and eventually mix to generate these continuous waves. The motion is quiet and even, and for the most part it remains that way. Unlike some of the older 1980s machines he used to witness, these waves do not crash or break apart in a spectacular manner, as one of his buddies, Techmoan, must have experienced. Bubbles still clung to the acrylic after the settling cycle, and a seam leaked slightly, which he fixed with tape. After a few hours of use, the blue layer began to emit a faint mist and form small floaters.

It’s evident that the budget materials match the price tag on this device. The base appears to have been 3D printed and is just weighted to provide stability. The end caps feel fragile and fit loosely. To be honest, the device lacks a power switch, so you must either unplug it or add a remote on/off socket to your own power strip, which is inconvenient. He tried adding some shims beneath the base to give it more stability, as well as altering the voltage to see if he could make it to rock quicker, but neither of these methods provided any further drama. The Hughes 18-inch unit may appear thicker and more polished, but it is actually not much different, having the same leaking concerns and edge blobs as this one. Both of these contemporary equipment are noticeably quieter than the old machines you used to see in the shop decades ago. This Indian version essentially uses the same process but scales it down to make it cheaper.

Pollen Robotics has unveiled a bipedal robot called Microduck, at an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping. The Bordeaux company is owned by the AI platform Hugging Face. Its new machine has one eye and 15 motors, stands 25cm tall, and weighs under 800g. Preorders opened on Thursday. Pollen is targeting first deliveries before Christmas 2026 in North America, Europe and the UK.

The robot walks, crouches, rights itself when it falls, and picks small objects up with its beak. Videos on the launch post show it collecting socks and a marker pen. An optional accessory pack adds wheeled feet so it can roller skate, along with a ball, an NFC chip and tags, and a laser pointer it follows with its camera.

Microduck runs on a Rockchip RK3566 with an AI accelerator, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage, a part number first reported by The Verge. It sees through a front camera and judges distance with a compact LiDAR, an 8×8 time-of-flight matrix. One inertial measurement unit sits in the body and a second in the head. A 50Hz policy loop connects the onboard model to those sensors and decides what the robot does next, The Register reported.

It runs on a removable NP-F550 camera battery, a 2600mAh cell common in video kit, giving around an hour of runtime.

The software is open, the hardware is not

The whole software stack ships open source, and it is out already. The SDK and robot software sit in one GitHub repository, the reinforcement learning and sim-to-real tools in another, months before the first robot arrives. A developer can teach a skill in simulation, then push it onto the machine. European robotics firms increasingly work this way, and NEURA Robotics is building robot gyms.

The hardware is a different matter, and Pollen is unusually direct about it. Its press kit tells journalists that the open-source statement covers the software stack only. The mechanical and electronic design files are not open, and it asks reporters not to describe the robot as open-source hardware. A Pollen representative separately told The Register the company has no plans to open source it.

Buyers get an open stack on a closed chassis. Pollen already uses that arrangement for Reachy Mini, which it says has sold more than 10,000 units since launching last year.

Clement Delangue, Hugging Face’s chief executive, called it “a tiny $399 open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning”. His post on X has drawn 4.4 million views. He has spent the past year arguing that open models are winning. “Welcome to the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI and world models,” he wrote.

It cannot lift much

Santiago Pavon of Pollen Robotics put the robot’s lifting capacity at roughly 100 grams. That is about the weight of a bar of soap. The beak articulates and the camera can find an object, but Pavon accepts that grasping will stay limited on a machine this size. TechCrunch published a correction to its launch story after misstating how much the beak could carry.

Pollen is not selling a household helper. The Register called Microduck a cheap testbed for teaching people about hardware AI, machine learning and modern robotics. It is not an in-home butler or a cleaner. The framing matters in a year when robot demonstrations have outrun the machines. The humanoid that beat Usain Bolt’s record in Beijing left roboticists unimpressed.

Autonomy is left to the community

What Microduck does not have is any purpose of its own. Pollen wants owners to build voice recognition, navigation and grasping on top of the platform. It also wants simultaneous localisation and mapping. The company is asking for help rather than promising a roadmap, which makes this a bet on a user base that does not exist yet.

“Adding purpose and autonomy to the robot is something we are still working on, and we expect the community to pick up and contribute,” Pavon said. He described autonomous behaviour as a community objective, and called the idea exciting. Anyone can train new behaviours in simulation using reinforcement learning, he said.

Pollen’s own answer to what people should build is more ducks. It says the robot is about ten times more fun in groups. Races, football and robots reacting to each other are what made it feel alive internally. For developers it is a cheap way into multi-robot behaviour, without a room full of hardware.

Pollen is not the only firm trying to standardise how AI models reach real hardware. Anthropic published a standard for lab hardware on the same day Microduck went up for preorder.

Every robot gets its own voice

Microduck sings, and no two sound alike. Pollen says it “communicates through weird little sounds, closer to a creature than an assistant”, and that each robot generates its own audio identity the first time it wakes up. That voice stays with the unit for life. It comes in cream, graphite, lavender and sky.

The launch lands in the middle of a $12.9bn deal

Hugging Face bought Pollen Robotics in April 2025 to build cheap open hardware. The two launched Reachy Mini a couple of months later. That desktop robot now sells in two versions. A $499 model runs on a Raspberry Pi, and a $399 Lite runs off a Mac or a PC.

Microduck arrives in the middle of a takeover. The Information reported that Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn. That followed reports days earlier that put the two in talks over a sale. Business Insider put the figure above $13bn, citing a person familiar with the matter, and said the two sides had not finalised an agreement.

Nobody involved is discussing it. Pavon answered questions about Microduck but not about the Nvidia deal. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face replied to The Register, and both have stayed quiet since the Business Insider story broke. Nobody has said what the deal would mean for a small French robotics subsidiary.

A camera in the bedroom

Microduck carries a camera and a microphone, and Pollen expects people to put it in their homes. There is at least a light: the robot has a dedicated camera-use indicator, which Pollen says is modelled on the REC lights of old camcorders.

That is the fix Meta reached for on its smart glasses this month, after people worked out how to cover the LED. Delangue has argued before that robots running open models beat “a black box system” controlled by a handful of organisations, “especially if these organizations’ CEO is not the most stable person in the world,” he told TechCrunch.

Open source gives developers auditability, TechCrunch noted, but it does not guarantee that data stays private. Owners install applications on top of the model, and those apps can reach the camera and the microphone. What they do with it depends on how a developer builds them.

Some numbers are still soft. Pollen says camera resolution, LiDAR range, radio versions, SDK languages and any age recommendation are provisional.

Two things will show whether the pitch holds. The first is whether units ship before Christmas 2026, the date Pollen has given. The second is whether anyone outside the company publishes a behaviour worth installing, because the autonomy Pollen is promising is work it has asked other people to do.

The researchers discovered Fire Ant’s new tactic after finding an active GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) tunnel interface on a Cisco IOS XR router that could not be explained by a running configuration or commit history.

According to incident response company Sygnia, the threat actor switched from targeting VMware hypervisors to compromising Cisco routers, TACACS authentication servers, and Linux management hosts.

The researchers discovered Fire Ant’s new tactic after finding on a Cisco IOS XR router an active GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) tunnel interface that could not be explained by a running configuration or commit history.

Further analysis revealed that Fire Ant had deployed custom malware on the devices, enabling persistence through a fake system service that ran the implant only during alternating hours.

The malware selectively suppressed syslog messages to hide tunnel-related information from legitimate administrators, established outbound Telnet connections to Fire Ant infrastructure, and supported interactive shell access with no logging.

The attackers also used their administrative access to capture traffic from multiple routers and upload the resulting PCAP files to external FTP servers.

These captures could expose internal topology, administrative connections, authentication flows, routing relationships, and traffic exchanged with connected networks.

“This behavior shifts the router’s role from a transit device to a collection platform,” Sygnia explains.

“Once the actor controlled the router, the device became a vantage point for observing traffic moving through trusted network paths.”

The concealed GRE tunnel connected one compromised router to a legacy Linux server, which Fire Ant used as a staging and reconnaissance system.

From there, the attackers probed systems in connected high-value environments, including systems associated with critical infrastructure, over ports commonly used for SSH, web services, SMB/RPC, and RDP.

Sygnia believes that Fire Ant’s operation aimed to compromise trusted infrastructure at an initial victim and use it as a covert bridge to explore access paths into connected high-value networks, a tactic which they dub “target behind the target.”

The researchers also discovered a previously undocumented backdoor called ‘BridgeAgent,’ which Fire Ant disguised as a legitimate Zabbix monitoring agent.

The backdoor persists as a root-level systemd service and supports TLS reverse shells and the execution of additional payloads on the compromised host.

Sygnia says Fire Ant activity strongly overlaps with UNC3886, a Chinese espionage group previously documented by Google. However, the researchers say that there are differences in filenames, paths, and implementation details.

The researchers warned that Fire Ant systematically tampers with system logs and records, even changing file timestamps to obscure evidence that would benefit investigators, noting that logs retrieved from compromised infrastructure should be validated against other data.

Sygnia’s report shares an extensive list of indicators of compromise (IoCs), along with hunting and YARA rules to detect Fire Ant activity.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

Get the report

What we know so far: Apple is widely expected to introduce its first foldable smartphone in September, joining Samsung and a host of other companies in the emerging market for ultra-premium handsets. It’s too early to know if Apple’s foldable will be the must-have gadget of the 2026 holiday season, or if a prototyped accessory will even make it to market.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has internally prototyped and tested a version of the Apple Pencil for its forthcoming foldable. The accessory is said to be stubbier than the version for the iPad due to the phone’s height, and attaches using magnets for storage and charging.

A stylus for what is essentially a small tablet doesn’t sound like a terrible idea, but there are drawbacks. Gurman said stowing the Pencil could get tricky when not actively using it. Perhaps even more concerning is the delicate nature of foldable displays. Most are manufactured using plastics, which can scratch just by dragging your fingernail across it. The last thing you want with something that fragile is a stylus with a pointy tip.

Then there’s the principal of the matter. When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone in 2007, he famously said that “nobody wants a stylus.” And thus, the iPhone has relied on touch inputs from the very beginning. Bringing in a stylus nearly two decades later would be a surprise, but Apple will be under new leadership by the time the iPhone Fold ships so it’s not an entirely impossible outcome.

To be clear, Gurman doesn’t think Apple will actually launch the accessory as a consumer product when the foldable debuts in a couple of weeks and neither do I. While it could be helpful to a certain subset of buyers, it’s simply a bridge too far at this point. Foldable displays need to be much more robust to withstand the daily stresses introduced by a stylus, and the technology simply isn’t there yet.

Apple is set to announce its folding iPhone at an event scheduled for September 9.

MapQuest stood up to President Donald Trump, and now its app is reaping the rewards.

The “OG of online mapping,” as the company calls itself, announced on Thursday that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps to Lake America, despite Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. As a result, MapQuest’s mobile app downloads soared, sending the iOS app to the No. 4 position on the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts for apps (not including games) as of Monday morning on the U.S. east coast.

MapQuest also reached the No. 8 position overall in the U.S. App Store across both apps and games, and it became the No. 1 Navigation app in the United States.

In Canada’s App Store, the app reached No. 2 overall as of Sunday evening.

A hot potato: Spot, the robotic quadruped from Boston Dynamics, has been used in numerous professions over the years, but its most controversial application could be on the way. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is set to spend $2 million on the robot dogs, which could support officers by remotely assessing environments before they enter.

A new Department of Homeland Security procurement notice describes the possible purchase of Boston Dynamics SPOT robots and accessories valued at between $1 million and $2 million.

The document lists the robots’ potential uses as inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment in environments that may pose risks to personnel.

It adds that these capabilities helps improve officer safety, supports informed operational decision-making, and enhances DHS’s ability to respond to incidents involving dangerous, confined, unstable, or difficult-to-access areas.

Also read: Hyundai wants to sell humanoid and robot dogs through its car dealerships

There’s no mention of the robots being used to apprehend people or make arrests, which was later confirmed by a senior DHS official speaking to NBC News, though that’s unlikely to make their use by ICE any less controversial.

This won’t be the first time Spot has been used by a government agency. In 2019, the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad leased one of the robots for use as a “mobile remote observation device.” It was sent to inspect suspicious objects and dangerous locations, taking part in at least two incidents.

The NYPD later deployed a heavily modified Spot known as Digidog. The robot was used for reconnaissance during a 2020 incident in which a gunman barricaded himself inside a basement, and again the following year to investigate a house during a reported home invasion before officers entered.

Digidog reportedly completed around six missions without harming civilians, but footage of the robot in action prompted a backlash over surveillance and the increasingly Black Mirror-like appearance of modern policing. The NYPD terminated its $94,000 lease in 2021, only to bring Digidog back two years later. The department acquired two of the robots for $750,000, saying they would only be deployed in life-threatening situations such as bomb threats.

Spot also has a history with the US military. An early version was tested by the Marines as a potential load-carrying and ground-reconnaissance platform. While it was much quieter than Boston Dynamics’ gas-powered AlphaDog, Spot had to be monitored continuously and could carry only around 40 pounds of equipment. Those limitations meant the military ultimately shelved the project.

Boston Dynamics prohibits customers from using Spot to harm or intimidate people, warning that it will take “appropriate measures to mitigate that misuse.” Even if it believes this doesn’t apply to ICE, the company will have to decide whether up to $2 million in sales will be worth the bad publicity.

In a display case on the lower level of the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution in London, there’s an unassuming stack of gray metal discs and blotting paper. It’s not at all obvious that this humble object is the starting point of today’s multibillion-dollar global battery industry. The object’s invention in 1799 grew out of a disagreement that Alessandro Volta—the Italian physicist for whom the unit of measurement for electrical potential is named—had with his friend Luigi Galvani over a dead frog.

The Debate Over Animal Electricity

Galvani was a well-respected Italian physician. In the 1770s, he began investigating the use of electricity to stimulate the muscles of dissected frogs. Armed with an electrostatic generator and an early type of capacitor called a Leyden jar, he was able to create a charge, store it, and then zap his animal specimens at will. He was intrigued when the frog legs twitched as if they were still alive. He spent the last three decades of the 18th century studying the phenomenon, and in 1791, he published De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius (Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion).

Luigi Galvani spent decades investigating what he believed to be a natural electric force emanating from animals. Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Galvani saw the frog as embodying an “animal electricity,” an innate vital force that activated nerves and muscles, similar to what had been observed in (living) electric eels and torpedo rays. For Galvani, the frog was an electrical machine analogous to a Leyden jar. The brain was the source of the electrical charge; the nerves conducted the electrical fluid; and the muscles stored opposite charges. The illustrations in his 1791 book are fabulous—frog legs spread all over his laboratory table!

Galvani was wrong in thinking that his frogs were electrical machines, but he was right that the muscle contractions were caused by electric signals.SSPL/Getty Images

At first, Volta, chair of physics at the University of Pavia, concurred with his friend. But after beginning his own experiments, he concluded that Galvani was wrong and that the frog generated no electricity at all. He thought of the frog as nothing more than an electroscope, an instrument to indicate the presence of an electrical charge. Volta posited that the source of the charge Galvani observed came from two different metals in contact with the frog. He termed this “metallic electricity.”

Alessandro Volta came to disagree with Galvani’s theory of animal electricity.Apic/Getty Images

To prove his point, Volta created an “artificial electric organ.” He stacked alternating discs of copper and zinc, separated by cardboard, blotting paper, or cloth soaked in brine or acid. When the top and bottom plates were connected, an electric current flowed through the stack. As opposed to a Leyden jar, which is essentially a capacitor that can store an electric charge and release it in a brief powerful discharge, his stack of discs generated its own electricity through a chemical reaction and delivered a sustained low-current output.

Volta didn’t publicly demonstrate or announce his artificial electric organ until after Galvani died in 1798. But when he finally did, in 1799, it immediately began upending science. Just six weeks after Volta wrote to the Royal Society about his invention, the English scientists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used a voltaic pile to run a current through water to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. They had discovered chemical electrolysis. Humphry Davy later used a large voltaic pile to isolate a number of elements, including potassium, sodium, calcium, strontium, and barium. Early piles petered out after a few hours. Users who stacked up more metal discs to make more powerful piles found the weight of the discs squeezed out the moisture in the paper or cloth.

Invented in 1799, Volta’s “artificial electric organ” (later known as the voltaic pile) was the first battery. Volta presented this one to Michael Faraday in 1814.Royal Institution of Great Britain/Science Source

One of the most enthusiastic users of the voltaic pile was Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who spent much of his career defending his uncle’s ideas. Aldini created spectacles across Europe in which he used voltaic piles to shock the carcasses of livestock and, occasionally, the bodies of recently executed convicts. Vivid descriptions in the popular press, as well as Aldini’s own writings, raised the question of whether electricity could bring the dead back to life. Mary Shelley provided her answer in her 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In an introduction to an 1831 edition, Shelley cites galvanism as one of her inspirations for the monster’s reanimation process.

Beyond Winners and Losers in Scientific Debates

Scientists and historians share a common trait: They like stories with clear winners and losers. The narrative of competition helps drive a narrative of progress that makes it look like humanity is always moving forward. In the case of Galvani and Volta, Volta is usually depicted as the clear winner in the debate over animal versus metallic electricity. The Encyclopedia Britannica goes as far as to write that “with his announcement of the first electric battery in 1800, victory was assured for Volta.”

But both science and history are more nuanced than that. In fact, Galvani and Volta were both partially right and partially wrong. There was no universal force of animal electricity, but Galvani was correct that electrical signals caused muscle contractions, which he discussed in his anonymous 1794 publication Dell’uso e dell’attività dell’arco conduttore nella contrazione dei muscoli (On the Use and Activity of the Conductive Arch in the Contraction of Muscles). Volta was right to push back on Galvani’s animal electricity theory, but he was wrong that electrophysiological effects require two different types of metal, or any metal at all; the circuit in the voltaic pile was closed by the wet paper or cloth.

It seems a little presumptuous for the Encyclopedia Britannica to declare Volta the winner and Galvani the loser. Volta definitely thought his friend was wrong, but he waited until after Galvani’s death to make his views public. It’s closer to the truth to say they were both genuinely curious to understand the nature of electricity. In the process, they unknowingly helped develop different fields of inquiry: electrophysiology for Galvani and electrochemistry and battery science for Volta.

RELATED: Who Really Invented the Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery?

Such an outcome is actually quite common in scientific disagreements. For example, Isaac Newton’s dispute with Christiaan Huygens over the nature of light—did light consist of particles, or corpuscles, as Newton termed them, or waves, as Huygens contested—breaks down today into quantum optics and classical optics. Similarly, Louis Pasteur’s and Justus von Liebig’s debate over fermentation (microorganisms versus chemical decomposition) led to two complementary fields: microbiology and biochemistry.

Maybe instead of looking for winners and losers, we would be better off expanding our horizons and considering the multiple paths of inquiry and discovery. Writing in 1816, toward the end of his career, Volta graciously acknowledged Galvani’s pioneering work, saying “it contains one of the most beautiful and surprising discoveries and the germ of many others.” What new revelations are waiting to develop out of today’s scientific debates?

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the September 2026 print issue as “The First Battery.”