The emphasis here is on "learns". Robots have been strutting their stuff for a while, with decreasing amounts of humour as they slowly manage not to fall over. What is new is that Cassie has taught itself to walk from scratch via reinforcement learning - no teacher needed.

Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our weekly book review. This week we also have a new addition to Programmer's Bookshelf, where we include the top picks of books by our reviewers. 

If you want inspiration for what you can do with an Arduino, take a look at the ten projects chosen as the winners of the Arduino Day Challenge.

Microsoft is releasing its own build of Java's OpenJDK, joining the likes of Azul, RedHat and Amazon. Why would Microsoft engage in that when there's so many choices already?

Climate change is the focus of this year's Code For Code a contest for developers from IBM, the David Clarke Cause,United Nations Human Rights, and the Linux Foundation.  Build and deploy an open source solution for the chance to win the $200K Grand Prize.

Zoom has released a video SDK that developers can use to create video-based applications and desktop experiences with native user interfaces. The Zoom video conferencing app has become more widely known and used during the coronavirus pandemic.

The two languages that are making headline news in the TIOBE Index for April 2021 are Objective-C which has left the top 20 and Fortran which is back there after more than 10 years.

Project Bergamot is an initiative to provide client-side machine spoken language translation in Firefox. Under development since 2019 this work-in-progress it is now available in Firefox Nightly. Currently, it is possible to translate Spanish and Estonian to English and vice versa, and English to German.

There's a new milestone release of Apache Isis, the framework for developing UIs for domain-driven apps in Java. It provides JPA persistence support as an alternative to JDO and includes support for Spring Data. 

JetBrains has released the initial version of Projector, an open source tool and framework for running JetBrains IDEs and Swing apps remotely over your network.

At long last the 10 year case between Oracle and Google over the copyright or otherwise of the APIs used in Android is settled, the SCOTUS verdict is in.

In a recent Lex Fridman podcast, Brendan Eich, the creator 25 years ago of JavaScript and currently of the Brave browser, provided his views on early programming languages, outlined how JavaScript came to be, problems faced by Firefox and explains how his new browser  takes a different approach.

A new video from Festo shows its flock of five BionicSwifts moving gracefully in a coordinated and autonomous manner. Thanks to the way their wings are modelled on the plumage of real birds, these BionicSwifts have an even more convincing flight profile than previously.

Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our weekly book review. This week's first featured article comes from Harry Fairhead's recently published Raspberry Pi IoT in C Using Linux Drivers. The second is a history article about the computer designed by Alan Turing.

For 2021 the Imagine Cup became an all-digital challenge and is now entering it's final phase with four teams selected to compete in the World Championship for a top prize of USD $75,000 and mentorship with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella.   

Pluralsight is again giving free, unlimited access to its entire library of more than 7,000 video courses for the entire month of April. New users have to sign up with an email address but don't need to provide credit card details.

A new April Fools joke is no joke as it reveals what others think of us. In particular Stack Overflow should know better than to bring its own programming methodology into disrepute...

JetBrains DataGrip has been updated with support for Azure MFA and the ability to edit data in MongoDB via its UI. This is the first of DataGrip's regular updates in 2021, hence the version number of 2021.1.