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Digital camera gives a bug's-eye view
Insects have a wide field of view and are acutely sensitive to motion, as anyone who has tried chasing a housefly knows. Researchers have now created a digital camera that mimics the curved, compound...
View ArticleRubbery robot snake is a slithering mimic
It's not your usual rubber snake: for the first time, a soft-bodied robot is able to slither around powered by air. It can reach a leisurely top speed of 19 millimetres per second. The muscles of the...
View ArticleHuman Brain Cells Developed in Lab, Grow in Mice
A key type of human brain cell developed in the laboratory grows seamlessly when transplanted into the brains of mice, UC San Francisco researchers have discovered, raising hope that these cells might...
View ArticleResearchers Put Sense of Touch in Reach for Robots
Finding and recognizing objects by touch in your pocket, in the dark or among items on a cluttered table top are distinctly human skills — ones that have been far beyond the ability of even the most...
View ArticleMore Than a Good Eye: Robot Uses Arms, Location and More to Discover Objects
A robot can struggle to discover objects in its surroundings when it relies on computer vision alone. But by taking advantage of all of the information available to it -- an object's location, size,...
View ArticleThe Coolest and Most Terrifying Biomimetic Robots
Building a better bot sometimes means looking outside the shop for inspiration. Borrowing from the characteristics and abilities of insects, birds, fish and mammals, scientists and engineers have...
View ArticleMillion-Neuron Artificial Brain Works In Real Time
This new computer model of a brain has one million neurons and works just as fast as a live brain does. There are other brain models, run on supercomputers, that are much bigger. IBM's SyNAPSE, for...
View ArticleNAO ROBOT HAS LEARNED TO WRITE
Maybe you’ve dreamt of being that man or woman who is so important as to compose speeches and letters simply by barking out declamations whilst an attentive assistant jots down your brilliant every...
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The 10 Things Technology Will Allow You To Do In The Next 50 Years
Singularity is near. The natural progression of human evolution with a just little twist — technology. In other words, super intelligence will soon become a part of our daily lives and man will be...
View ArticleThis Crawling Inchworm Robot Can Be Printed Out and Folds Itself
Building robots is difficult, expensive work. Wouldn’t it be great if robots could just somehow build themselves? We’ve seen robots that can be printed and robots that can be folded, but this little...
View ArticleWatch ISS Commander Chris Hadfield Cover David Bowie's 'Space Oddity'... In...
International Space Station Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield has taught us so much about space. He’s shown us how to make sandwiches in zero gravity (with tortillas, because bread crumbs--like...
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Finally: Robots Learn What 'Squishy' Really Means
Humans use all sorts of bizarre, abstract terms to describe how objects feel, and it’s endlessly frustrating to robots. Or at least, we imagine it must be. Take a word like "squishy," for example: how...
View ArticleScientists Are Developing Artificial Skin, Could Improve Prosthetic Limbs
A new study shows that scientists may actually be closer to creating artificial skin that is able to actually feel. Researchers say that a sense of touch is important for developing robots that can...
View ArticleGrammar Errors? The Brain Detects Them Even When You Are Unaware
Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed...
View ArticleBrain Rewires Itself After Damage or Injury, Life Scientists Discover
When the brain's primary "learning center" is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function, say life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions...
View ArticleGoogle Buys a Quantum Computer
Google and NASA are forming a laboratory to study artificial intelligence by means of computers that use the unusual properties of quantum physics. Their quantum computer, which performs complex...
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JPL BioSleeve Enables Precise Robot Control Through Hand and Arm Gestures
No matter how capable you make a robot, its effectiveness is limited by how well you can control it. And until we've got this whole general autonomy thing nailed down (better not hold your breath),...
View ArticleDifference Engine: The caring robot
WITH many of his friends and family getting on in years, Babbage has had perforce the chance to compare how the elderly are cared for professionally in America, Britain and Japan. In all three, the...
View ArticleVideo: MIT's Cheetah Robot Trots, Then Gallops
Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah robot may be the fastest, but MIT’s version of the DARPA-backed quadruped robot is proving to be the most efficient. In a newly released video, MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab...
View ArticleThis Bacterium Can Do Division, Compute Logarithms And Take Square Roots
A group of engineers from MIT have created analog calculators out of living cells, according to a paper published online in Nature yesterday. By tweaking the genes of bacterial cells, the researchers...
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