Technologies

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Bomb Squad Robot This robot, or one like it, was recently used to snatch a gun from a suspect. In life and death situations, a robot gives police options. Last week, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, in a standoff with an attempted murder suspect, did something unusual: they waited him out, and then sent in a robot to disarm the suspect. With the man’s gun gone, the standoff ended peacefully.

Internet devices powered by Wi-Fi and other telecommunications signals will make small computers and sensors more pervasive. ven the smallest Internet-connected devices typically need a battery or power cord. Not for much longer. Technology that lets gadgets work and communicate using only energy harvested from nearby TV, radio, cell-phone, or Wi-Fi signals is headed toward commercialization. The University of Washington researchers who developed the technique have demonstrated Internet-connected temperature and motion sensors, and even a camera, powered that way.

What if robots could figure out more things on their own and share that knowledge among themselves? any of the jobs humans would like robots to perform, such as packing items in warehouses, assisting bedridden patients, or aiding soldiers on the front lines, aren’t yet possible because robots still don’t recognize and easily handle common objects. People generally have no trouble folding socks or picking up water glasses, because we’ve gone through “a big data collection process” called childhood, says Stefanie Tellex, a computer science professor at Brown University. For robots to do the same types of routine tasks, they also need access to reams of data on how to grasp and manipulate objects. Where does that data come from? Typically it has come from painstaking programming. But ideally, robots could get some information from each other.

Rockets typically are destroyed on their maiden voyage. But now they can make an upright landing and be refueled for another trip, setting the stage for a new era in spaceflight.

An age of wonders and mischief Perpetual motion stirs Philadelphia The first debunking Perpetual motion moves to New York The "impossibility" of perpetual motion

In early July at the Boreal Mountain Resort, temperatures reached 91 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius), which is not uncharacteristically hot in California at the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The real surprise was that the ski area near Lake Tahoe was making snow.

A 3D-printed minigripper, consisting of shape-memory hinges and adaptive touching tips, grasps a cap screw. Credit: Qi (Kevin) Ge Bendable 3D-printed structures that, when heated, quickly snap back to their original shapes could help make sophisticated drug-delivery devices or origami robots, researchers said

Just over two years ago, the Rosetta space probe successfully entered orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (hereafter abbreviated as 67P). Rosetta’s mission has been a tremendous success — it’s the first probe to orbit a cometary nucleus and the first to accompany a comet as it traveled towards the sun. One notable failure early in the mission limited the information we could gather from 67P, however. The Philae lander, which launched on November 12 2014, failed to land in its target location. Now, with the Rosetta mission drawing to a close, the satellite “mothership” finally spied its errant daughter lodged in a crevice.

The flying car is the holy grail of futurism. For decades, the cover of Popular Mechanics  has claimed we'd one day be able to leave traffic jams and potholes behind and soar through the skies in our own personal conveyances. But so far, marrying car and aircraft hasn't gone well despite the best efforts of companies like  Terrafugia .

A new study published in the  Proceedings of the National Academies of Science   claims to have found  alarmingly high levels of pollution-derived magnetic nanoparticles in the brains of urban study participants, leading to renewed worry about the effects of smog on billions of people around the world. The study is not the final word on the origin or effects of these particles, and its results probably need to be replicated at a larger scale, but they’re serious enough to warrant major attention.