When I attended the CEATAC consumer-electronics conference in Tokyo last October, my favorite bleeding-edge technology was ultra-super-high-resolution TV — sets with displays that are 4,000 or even 8,000 pixels across in pixel …
Innovation
Kickstart This: A Space Elevator on the Moon?
Gravity can be a grueling taskmaster. Anyone who’s walked up a dozen flights of stairs knows this. Getting into space is that much harder. It takes hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust and over half a million gallons of …
Still More Robot Company for Mars
Even before the Curiosity Mars rover fully gets to work, NASA is planning its newest mission to the Red Planet.
Wi-Fi Donkey Brings New Tech to an Old World
Have you been called an ass for spending too much time on the Internet during a summer vacation?
You can find more of your kind at an Israeli theme park where, for the past four days, a donkey carrying a Wi-Fi router has been …
Penny for Your Rockets: Microthrusters Powered by Ion Beams Could Propel Satellites Through Space
Imagine rockets so small you could fit them through a piggybank slot. Imagine those rockets jetting microscopic beams of ions drawn from a reservoir of liquid plasma. Now imagine — or don’t, because they’re not imaginary — that …
IRIS Camera Concept Could One Day Let You Take Photos by Blinking
Imagine a viewfinder that follows your eye, focuses wherever you look and then snaps a photo when you blink twice. That’s the idea behind IRIS, a new concept by Mimi Zou.
“I was thinking, ‘What’s the middle ground between …
Self-Driving Cars Available by 2019, Report Says
Forget flying cars. The next innovation will be vehicles you don’t even have to drive. But would we actually put our lives in the hands of a computer-controlled car?
Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Latest Investment: 3D-Printed Meat
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel doesn’t like to invest in normal things. First he backed a libertarian island paradise, then it was paying kids not to go to college, and now it’s 3D-printed meat.
According to CNET, the Thiel …
Disney Is ‘Face Cloning’ People to Create Terrifyingly Realistic Robots
The Hall of Presidents is about to get a whole lot creepier, at least if Disney’s researchers get their way. That’s because they’re “face cloning” people at a lab in Zurich in order to create the most realistic animatronic …
Double Robotics Lets You Turn Your iPad into a Telepresence Robot
Tired of having to go places? Do you secretly wish you were a robot? Then a telepresence robot might just be the thing for you.
Previously, telepresence robots were fairly expensive and mostly aimed at wealthy tech …
What’s Next for NASA? 10 Wild Newly Funded Projects
Scientists Finally Create a Creepy Robotic Earthworm
Ready to be creeped out? Then take a gander at Meshworm, the crawling, autonomous robot created by researchers from MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University.
It moves by peristalsis, the same squeezing and …