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When you bring your date home, you need to hit the lights and pour the wine, but you don't want to take your eyes or hands off the ravishing creature in front of you. Fortunately, this Rube Goldberg machine handles all of the practical stuff for you, leaving you free to snuggle with the one you're with. More »
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The robots are here, and they're winning your dogs' affections. Well, at least this one is. One dog owner, distraught over leaving his pup home alone every day, built a robot to keep him entertained. More »
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Fukushima may still be reeling from last year's nuclear disaster, but a global interest in nuclear power looks to be on the up and up — even here in the U.S. More »
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We've been hearing a lot about how the future of electronics will involve stretchy circuit boards, or circuits you can glue to your skin. In this video, you can see one crucial ingredient in bendy electronics — stretchable, electrically-conductive gold that can bend with the rubber it's printed on. University of Cambridge engineering researcher Ingrid Graz has been working on creating this type of gold, and here she shows us what this gold looks like on a microscopic level. It's both beautiful and fascinating. More »
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Yesterday, President Obama hosted over 100 students at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the second annual White House Science Fair. Young scientists of all ages showed off projects in subjects ranging from robots, to rocketry, to energy conservation. Fourteen-year-old Joey Hudy even brought an air cannon capable of launching marshmallows upwards of 175 feet. More »
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Greek fire. Damascus steel. These are two technological innovations whose secrets are said to be lost to time. Even the original schematics for the Apollo missions have disappeared into the mists of history, forever hidden inside hopelessly obsolete computers. How do we lose technologies that were once so important? Some say that they aren't really lost, and are working on rediscovering them. More »
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The quadrotors of the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Laboratory are all sorts of amazing (even when they're crashing). But this new footage of these futuristic bots hearkens back to something more retro — the pixelated shooters of arcades yore. More »
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There was a time when increasing the distance between yourself and a sharp shooter bent on your extermination would significantly improve your chances of survival. But that time is coming to an end. More »
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In this video, you'll see an amazing vision of the high-tech future: A series of videos taken under the microscope, documenting a new kind of pixel that could one day turn your tablet computer into a 3D display. University of Cambridge photonic engineer Tim Wilkinson is combining liquid crystals with nanotechnology in an effort to create realistic 3D displays you wouldn't need clunky glasses to appreciate. More »
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The flying machine featured here is called an ornithopter, and its conceptual origins date back at least as far as the late 15th century, when Leonardo Da Vinci first produced drawings of a bird-like machine capable of flight. More »
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This newly created X-ray laser is just unimaginably powerful. It's a billion times brighter than any previous X-ray source, and it can probe hot dense matter at nearly four million degrees. This laser could unlock the secrets of the Sun. More »
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If your car is a diesel, it will run. Liquid hydrogen, the fuel that powered the space shuttle's main engines, could work, says Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But keeping hydrogen liquid requires maintaining it at a temperature below about –432°F. Storing it in a garage would be tricky, as would keeping it from freezing the engine. More »
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How far can you stack a 'stairway' of books, outwards from the ledge of a table? This is the problem that consumed physicists for over two hundred years. The answer? Forever — if you have enough books. Find out how this paradox gave rise to many ancient structures, and some structures that we can still see today. More »
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Remember the picture of the Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne engines that looked an awful lot like a band of Daleks in disguise? That picture may have done a good job of making space shuttle engines look like a bunch of malevolent cyborgs, but there wasn't really anything in the photo to give you a sense of just how impressive these things really are. More »
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Whenever we hear about reconnaissance planes, descriptor such as "stealthy" and "slipping under the radar" are bandied around. But what actually goes into making stealth fighters undetectable, and what are the limits of this undetectability? More »
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The last decade of global conflict has seen the dawning of the age of the robot plane. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been around for decades, but today they're ubiquitous war machines with unmatched endurance and lethal combat capabilities. Find out more about these increasingly high-tech pilotless aircraft.

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The world's smallest ear doesn't belong to any animal. Instead, it's a tiny piece of gold suspended in a laser beam. It can hear sounds a million times fainter than any human ear can, making it a powerful acoustic microscope. More »
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Few people can resist the urge to doodle in the margins when confronted with a long-drawn presentation, lecture, or meeting — but few of us can make a page of scientific instruction look as stunning as Paula Swisher, the artist behind the captivating pieces seen here. More »
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The turbines that propel jets through the air can be traced back to an idea originated by Hero of Alexandria in the first century AD. Find out what you do with an engine that pre-dates steam power and manned air flight by roughly two thousand years. More »
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Reality inched closer to Sim City (or Starcraft, pump out those barracks!) last month when China's Broad Corporation built a 30-story hotel prototype using prefabricated materials in 360 hours. Watch a time-lapse video of the construction site above. More »
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Remember the infamous scene in Speed where a bus jumps a fifty foot gap in an elevated freeway? Of course you do, because every physics teacher from that day on illustrated that moment as something that could never, ever happen. Although the freeway was elevated, the bus was careening down a flat section. It would have fallen down from the edge of the freeway the same way a ball rolling off the edge of a table would. Gravity doesn't care if you're going very fast. What's more, since the front section of the bus moved off the freeway first, it would have started falling while the back section of the bus was still being supported. This would have sent the bus into a spin, and if the fall were long enough it would have tumbled end over end into the ground. More »
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Being outside gives us a sense of freedom and spaciousness, and as far as some German engineers are concerned, that means increased work efficiency. That's why they've invented a "dynamic luminous ceiling" that simulates working outside during a clouding day. More »
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In a robot uprising, humanity still should have one slim hope: if we flee to the beaches, our robot overlords might fall over on the soft, shifting sand dunes. Now roboticists have solved that one robotic flaw. Gee, thanks, guys. More »
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Passenger planes capable of hypersonic speeds, or five times the speed of sound, have been a dream of engineers for decades. Now, there's a real plan in place to build one. It's just going to take a long time. More »
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From law-violating subatomic particles to entirely new, earth-like worlds, 2011 was an incredible year for scientific discovery. In the past 12 months, scientific breakthroughs in fields ranging from archaeology to structural biochemistry have allowed humanity to rewrite history, and enabled us to open to brand new chapters in our development as a species. More »
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Plans are afoot to build a gigantic, state-of-the-art neutrino detector beneath the Mediterranean Sea. This particle-hunting behemoth would be taller than the Burj Khalifa and the second biggest structure ever built, second only to the Great Wall of China. More »
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This video documents an unplanned experiment in engineering and human nature. Workers at a construction site contemplate how to arrest a machine that will not stop spinning. Then more workers join in the contemplation… More »
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Comets rush through the solar system at up to 150,000 miles per hour, making it extremely difficult to actually land a space probe on one of them. The solution? NASA is working on something new, awesomely called a "comet harpoon." More »
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You may remember French puppeteering group Royal De Luxe's mechanical elephant, but here's an even more deliciously absurd contrivance. This is the piano catapult, a musical siege weapon that was recently shown off in the city of Nantes. It's not particularly effective, but at least we'll know what to expect if Billy Joel ever tries to conquer the globe. More »
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Imagine boarding a tram in Manhattan, which then leaves the city to connect with a high-speed train. You leave the tram for the train, and next thing you know you're in downtown San Francisco...all without ever stopping at a station. More »
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Antonio Stradivari made over a thousand violins in his long lifetime. They're considered the most perfect violins ever made, and the 650 surviving instruments are incredibly valuable. Now, thanks to modern technology, every budding violinist could soon own an authentic Stradivarius. More or less. More »
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This is the lab of legendary analog circuit designer Barrie Gilbert, a fellow with Analog Devices who tinkers with circuits in Beaverton, Oregon. To say "tinkers" is an understatement. Gilbert revolutionized many aspects of the technology required to record, broadcast, and manipulate signals. More »
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Thanks to the advent of smart phone technologies, many of us already carry the internet with us everywhere we go. But now, scientists have created the world's first wirelessly powered, computerized contact lens with an integrated LED display. That's right — the same access to information afforded us by the technology in our pockets could soon come to us via devices that rest directly on our corneas. More »
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Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons. There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories. More »
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Cheese on crackers, would it be fun to work at the eatART robotics collective in Vancouver. In addition to building awesomely biomimetic vehicles like Mondo Spider, they're currently working on Titanoboa, a mechanical recreation of the 50-foot-long, one-ton prehistoric snake of the same name. More »
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If you've ever sat in a sound "dead zone" in a movie theater or concert, you know what it's like to be at a loud event where everything sounds muffled and distorted. Luckily, lasers may soon put an end to these dead zones. The UK's National Physical Laboratory has figured out how to use lasers to see sound waves in a room - as well as acoustic dead zones. More »
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The ranks of wall-climbing robots are increasing in number. A team of Canadian engineers from Simon Fraser University have combined what they describe as gecko-inspired "fibrillar dry adhesives" with track wheels, to create a modular, tank-like robot that can scale walls and even transfer from horizontal to vertical surfaces with ease. More »
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We've talked before about this floating robot from the Japanese Ministry of Defense, but now there's new video of this floating, gyroscopic drone. And, against all odds, this video is even more awesome than the last one. More »
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When you or I ask for a flying car, we get "Terrafugia's Transition," a roadable aircraft. When DARPA asks for a flying car, they get a Hummer like the one pictured up top — a Hummer that is capable of taking off and landing vertically; traversing off-road terrain with ease; and withstanding small-arms fire, all while accommodating up to four passengers. More »
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