This week's Question: Google has been testing its autonomous cars on public roads. The search giant's fleet of robotic Toyota Priuses has now logged more than 190,000 miles, driving in city traffic, busy highways, and mountainous roads, with only occasional human intervention. The...

Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new nanomaterial that can “steer” electrical currents. The development could lead to a computer that can simply reconfigure its internal wiring and become an entirely different device, based on changing...

The ability to see through walls is no longer the stuff of science fiction, thanks to new radar technology developed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.The researchers’ device is an unassuming array of antenna arranged into two rows — eight receiving elements on top, 13 transmitting ones below —...

Rice University physicists have created a tiny “electron superhighway” that could one day be useful for building a quantum computer — a type of computer that uses quantum particles in place of the digital transistors found in today’s microchips. Quantum computers may...

For the first time, University of Illinois physicists have experimentally demonstrated how three-dimensional conduction is affected by the defects that plague materials. An understanding of these effects is important for many electronics applications, including ultrasonic waves in medical imaging, lasers for...

Using robot models could play a useful role in studying the origins of flight, particularly since fossil evidence is so limited, noted engineers at the University of California, Berkeley. Researchers outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to improve its mobility. Even though the wings...

This week's Question: Verizon, the U.S. largest wireless carrier, recently announced that it will "create business and marketing reports" and "make the mobile ads you see more relevant," based on the information the company collects pertaining to a user's Web...

A team led by Ki Chon, professor and head of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), has developed a smart phone application that can measure not only heart rate, but also heart rhythm, respiration rate and blood oxygen saturation using the phone's built-in video camera....

An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Vanderbilt University, Cornell University and CFD Research Corporation, Inc., has demonstrated that a computer can analyze raw experimental data from a biological system and derive the basic mathematical equations that describe the way the system operates....

By combining two innovative algorithms developed at MIT, researchers in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) have built a new robotic motion-planning system that calculates much more efficient trajectories...

Developed by Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME), new thin-film silicon solar cells are designed to be made from cheaper, low-grade silicon. The nano-structured solar cells can produce a current of 34.3mA/cm2 – a world record for a silicon solar cell of its...

In a first-ever demonstration of a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body, two monkeys trained at the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering learned to employ brain activity alone to move an avatar hand and identify the texture of virtual objects.Without moving...

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a team from the University of Vienna have collaborated to cool a miniature mechanical object to its lowest possible energy state using laser light — paving the way for the development of exquisitely sensitive...