Hasta La Gadget!

You no longer need to live in the US to use Affirm’s buy-now-pay-later services for much of your online shopping. Affirm is expanding to Canada through a partnership with Amazon. Spend $50 or more at Amazon.ca and you can choose Affirm’s pay-over-time option at checkout to split the bill into monthly payments. As in the States, there aren’t any late fees or surprise charges.

The payment option will be available within a month. The Canadian rollout comes roughly two years after Affirm bought local equivalent PayBright — this is effectively a rebranding. Affirm serves Australia as well, but only for people buying Peloton exercise equipment.

This won’t help if you prefer to shop beyond Amazon, and might prove expensive if your purchase amount and pay schedule involve significant interest rates (they range from zero to 30 percent, Affirm says). As with a car or house, you’re paying more overall to make the price easier to swallow. Still, this could be useful if you can’t afford to buy a computer or TV outright and need to spread the costs.

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It’s long been possible to make extremely small robots, but they usually need some form of direct external control just to operate. Cornell scientists may have solved that problem on a basic level, however. They’ve created microrobots (no more than 250 micrometers across) with basic electronic “brains” that let them walk autonomously. Two- and six-legged robots move relatively simply, while a four-legged “dogbot” changes speed when an operator sends laser pulses.

The trick was to build a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (or CMOS, as computer enthusiasts know it) clock circuit whose signal produces phase-shifted square wave frequencies that set the gait of the robot’s platinum-based legs. Photovoltaics control both the legs and the circuit. The design is far from complex at just 1,000 transistors (for context, a GeForce RTX 4090 has 76.3 billion), and it’s still large enough that it effectively serves as the robot’s body. However, even that is an achievement — the exceptionally low power demands saved Cornell from having to use relatively gigantic photovoltaics.

These inventions are a far cry from the more sophisticated large-scale autonomous robots you see today. They can move forward, but not much else. The researchers see this as just a beginning, though. They believe future microrobots could be crucial to healthcare, where they could perform internal surgery and clean your arteries. Elsewhere, they could detect chemicals and eliminate pollutants. Any such bots are likely years away, but this project suggests they’re technically possible.