From nuclear environments to construction sites to manufacturing facilities, Boston Robotic's Spot quadruped robot is proving that agile mobile robots can have a useful role in a wide range of applications across many industries. Spot has recently had hardware upgrades, including a new tablet, and two new additions to its range of payloads.

Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This digest gives a summary of the latest content, which this week includes an extract from Raspberry Pi IoT in C on using the DS18B20 temperature sensor and a chapter from Financial Functions with a Spreadsheet that explores what makes a good investment.

Google has launched the ARCore Geospatial API in ARCore SDKs for Android and iOS across all compatible ARCore-enabled devices. ARCore is Google's AR developer platform that provides developer tools for creating augmented reality applications that blend the digital and physical worlds.

Raluca Ada Popa, an associate professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, is the recipient of the 2021 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for the design of secure distributed systems. These systems protect confidentiality against attackers with full access to servers while maintaining full functionality.

Apache Kafka, the distributed streaming platform that can be used for building real-time streaming data pipelines between systems or applications, has been updated with improvements including a KRaft-based authorizer and a proposal for marking KRaft mode as production ready in Apache Kafka 3.3.

A new service that offers Google Cloud customers real-time streaming data integration and analytics has been launched by Striim. Striim Cloud on Google Cloud is claimed to be the fastest way for customers to deliver real-time data and insights to power business intelligence and decision-making.

DeepMind has set the cat among the pigeons - again. Gato is a transformer model trained on a range of different subject areas that claims to be a "multi-modal" solution, i.e. it's an AI that can do more than one thing well. This isn't in dispute, but the idea that this is the solution to Artificial General Intelligence is...

This week is Scratch Week, a global, virtual celebration of the block programming language for kids from MIT that this year celebrates its 15th anniversary.

What Kalix Platform-as-a-Service promises is massive - a way to write cloud applications based on Kubernetes under a unified API abstracting the lower layers away.

Meta Open Source is transferring Jest, its open source JavaScript testing framework, to the OpenJS Foundation. Jest is the most used testing framework measured by weekly downloads (17 million a week) and by GitHub stars -  over 38,000.

Dash Dash is a new website that aims to prettify the ugly that is the Man Pages. What once felt like a maze of weird symbols and hyper intense colors, now are visually subdued and easier to understand.

The Docker team has announced two major improvements at DockerCon; Docker Extensions and Docker Desktop for Linux.

Today is the 25th Anniversary of IBM's chess playing supercomputer Deep Blue beating the reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov at his own game, marking a milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence. Or was it just a bug?

If you've not visited I Programmer before, this Weekly Digest gives you a taster. It has links to the latest feature articles and to our wide ranging news with its mix of analysis and comment. It also lists the week's addition to Book Watch Archive and our Book Review of the Week.

Updates and new features in Google Meet which will bring welcome improvements to virtual meetings were announced this week at Google I/O.

Flutter 3 has been released and is now stable for macOS and Linux, in addition to Windows. The developers say the new release also offers significant performance improvements as well as mobile and web updates.

Google has announced a preview of AlloyDB for PostgreSQL at Google I/O. The announcement describes the fully-managed, PostgreSQL-compatible database service as providing a powerful option for modernizing the most demanding enterprise database workloads.

The Azure Toolkit is a plugin for IntelliJ that provides templates and functionality with which you easily create, develop, test, and deploy Azure applications. The newest version 3.64.0 was recently released.