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Google has been awarded a United States patent for what, in legalese, is "transitioning a mixed-mode vehicle to autonomous mode" -- essentially a self-driving car. To be more precise, U.S. Patent 8,078,349 covers a car being driven by a human that transitions to being autonomously driven. This trans...
IBM's Watson supercomputer became famous when it beat the top "Jeopardy" champions on TV. What folks didn't know is that Watson did that with significant handicaps that wouldn't be applied were the same system actually deployed to answer real questions. What Watson is particularly good at is providi...
Well, it is December, when sugar plums fill children's heads and analysts look into their crystal balls to see what the new year will bring. Assuming the world doesn't end, 2012 should be a watershed year for personal technology, showcasing the beginning and end for a lot of companies, as well as ma...
The next generation of Microsoft's Kinect input device may be able to read users' lips and emotions. The forthcoming device, which is expected to come bundled with Xbox consoles, reportedly will not just sense motions the way the current Kinect generation does, but will also allow games to read lips...
Researchers at Stanford University have used nanoparticles of copper hexacyanoferrate to create electrodes that could lead to large batteries for storing excess power from the electrical grid for future use. These might be best used in wind and solar farms, the researchers stated in a paper publishe...
A team of researchers led by Tobias Schaedler of HRL Labs has developed an ultralight metallic microlattice that's 10,000 times lighter than ultralight aerogels and carbon nanotube foams. Ultralight cellular materials weigh less than 10 milligrams per cubic centimeter. "An ordered lattice is inheren...
Although computers have been called "thinking machines," their internal operations have very little to do with how the original thinking machine -- the human brain -- actually works. That's changing, however, as some researchers at MIT and the University of Texas Medical School have demonstrated in ...
Researchers at Northwestern University say they've made significant progress in research that could lead to longer life for the rechargeable batteries found in electronic gadgets. A team of engineers working on a lithium-ion battery said that by taking a chemical engineering approach, they've made a...
Google scientists are laboring away on futuristic projects in a top-secret lab somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, The New York Times claims. This lab, which is apparently so hush-hush that few Googlers even knew it existed prior to the report, is allegedly called "Google X." More than 100 futu...
Honda recently unveiled the latest version of its Asimo robot in Tokyo. The humanoid robot has been equipped with what Honda claims is the world's first autonomous behavior control technology. This lets the Asimo continue moving independently of an operator's control. The latest Asimo also has impro...
At universities and companies around the globe, there are people plugging away trying to solve the myriad technological challenges of quantum computers. But that doesn't mean practical applications of quantum computing are some futuristic fantasy. Already, quantum technology is trickling into the re...
Any science fiction fan or Trekkie knows what tractor beams are -- those beams that pull objects toward the device that generates them, sort of like an invisible fishing line and reel. NASA believes enough in the possibility of creating real tractor beams that it's provided a $100,000 grant to resea...
Comparing an atom to a coin is like comparing a human heart to a repeatedly clinching fist. The analogy is woefully simplistic in relation to what is actually going on. But someone with a layman's understanding of the human body is unlikely to grasp the nuances of the human heart. Similarly, someone...
Good luck finding a nice, clean entry point to discuss quantum computers. It should come as no surprise, of course, that something called "quantum computers" would be tricky to talk about. The inner workings of computers are plenty complex to begin with. When melded with a dizzying branch of physics...
Those tactical robots some police departments use to deal with dangerous situations are great, but they have one drawback -- they're specialized and so are limited to a few uses. What if a police or fire department could create a bunch of robots as needed for different uses? That's the idea the Univ...
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