Passerine's fixed-wing drones can take off (and land) using a pair of legs.

Ten times brighter than an LED, but won’t blind oncoming traffic.

Several companies are diversifying their businesses, from biofuels to electric vehicles

The Internet of Things promises to connect billions of otherwise ordinary devices to the internet, but when each one needs to have its own battery, there’s a limit to how small or cheap they can become. A new paper-thin Bluetooth chip that’s able to operate entirely without a battery could be about to solve this problem. The postage stamp-sized chip from Wiliot is able to harvest energy from the ambient radio frequencies around us, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular signals, and use them to power a Bluetooth-equipped ARM processor that can be connected to a variety of sensors.

Like many, I’ve been watching the developments in Boca Chica, Texas, with great interest. SpaceX, one of Elon Musk’s companies, is building the “Starship Hopper,” a shorter and simpler version of a spacecraft that could revolutionize space travel. Seeing images of the mostly complete test vehicle, clad in shiny stainless steel, makes me feel like a kid again. These are exciting times to be alive. We are at the beginning stages of the electric car revolution. We have access to much of the knowledge of our species at our fingertips. Rockets are being launched, and they mostly return to the ground for the next adventure.

Is this the start of ‘orbital entertainment’?

People say we’re about to enter the “Asian century.” That would be true if the world still did centuries. But it doesn’t; change driven by technological advancements now comes so rapidly and with such force that it’s challenging to know what the next year of geopolitics will look like, let alone the next 50.

Manufacturing errors, undetected by inexpert consumers, may be more dangerous than other threats from 3D-printed guns.

There was an announcement made last year that a Chinese scientist called Dr He Jiankui had used the gene-editing technique Crispr and managed to the world’s first genetically modified babies. At the same time, Elon Musk announced the true purpose of Neuralink. Read on to find out what his vision of Neuralink holds for us.

This month, we are all tentatively dipping our toes into the New Year, wondering what horrors and highlights might await us in 2019 — the year that served as a setting, you may remember, for Blade Runner, Akira, and Running Man, three of the most iconic future-casting movies ever made and now divergent choose-your-own-dystopia visions of the years ahead (perhaps some more plausible than others).

Think your New Year's resolution to hit the gym is daunting? Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wants to change an entire nation's energy policy in 2019.

Back in 2018, Foldimate was one of two laundry-folding machines exhibiting at CES that promised to make folding clothes a thing of the past. It was up against Laundroid, a $16,000 AI-powered machine that was supposed to analyze each clothing item and figure out the best way to fold it using AI. Neither machine worked at the time— Foldimate’s model was a non-working prototype, and I accidentally broke the Laundroid when I confused the machine’s AI with a black T-shirt. This year, Foldimate is the sole laundry-folding machine at CES, returning for the third time with a fully working prototype.

Solid-state technology could help speed the demise of the combustion-engine car.

Humans can do a lot with a little context. If you see a picture of a toilet, you’ll know it’s probably flanked by a bathtub and sink. The picture didn’t include any of that stuff, but the human brain has a knack for filling in missing pieces. And now thanks to Google DeepMind computer scientists, so does artificial intelligence. In a paper published in Science Magazine in June, the company described how it created a Generative Query Network (GQN) that can see and imagine almost like a human.

The commercial space business has blossomed over the past decade. Two companies, though, have grabbed the spotlight, emerging as the most ambitious of them all: Blue Origin and SpaceX. At first glance, these two companies look a lot alike. They are both led by billionaires who became wealthy from the Internet: Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin earned his fortune from Amazon.com, and Elon Musk of SpaceX got rich initially from Web-based businesses, notably PayPal.

Landing a spot on Mars One's planned rocket to the red planet isn't easy. The selection process has been going on for five years already. After three rounds, 4,200 applicants -- "from architect to janitor," Politico points out -- have been whittled down to an even 100. No more than 24 Earthlings ultimately will be chosen to transform themselves into Martians.

Waymo One is the world’s first self-driving taxi service. Just two rides in, and we’re already bored of the future.

Bill Gates visited a Harvard University lab and saw some incredible creations that are powerful examples of the exciting innovation underway in the field of robotics.

For the past several years, giant tech companies have rapidly ramped up investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. They’ve competed intensely to hire more AI researchers and used that talent to rush out smarter virtual assistants and more powerful facial recognition. In 2018, some of those companies moved to put some guardrails around AI technology. The most prominent example is Google, which announced constraints on its use of AI after two projects triggered public pushback and an employee revolt.

That holiday trip over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house could turn into nice little gift for automakers as they increasingly collect oodles and oodles of data about the driver. Automakers are collecting valuable pieces of information thanks to the internet connections, cameras and sensors built into most vehicles in recent years. The online access makes it possible for cars to be unlocked remotely if the keys are lost.

In the past few years, artificial intelligence has advanced so quickly that it now seems hardly a month goes by without a newsworthy AI breakthrough. In areas as wide-ranging as speech translation, medical diagnosis, and gameplay, we have seen computers outperform humans in startling ways. This has sparked a discussion about how AI will impact employment. Some fear that as AI improves, it will supplant workers, creating an ever-growing pool of unemployable humans who cannot compete economically with machines.

Kroger is headed for the driverless delivery express lane, announcing Tuesday that it is now ready to begin deliveries

Earlier this month, Ed Felten — a Princeton professor and former adviser to President Obama — chided an international audience of artificial intelligence experts packing a cavernous Montreal convention center. What he's saying: For too long, AI hands have been hiding in their basements, in effect playing God by deciding which technology is ultimately released to the masses, Felten said. Stop assuming that you know what's best for people, he admonished his listeners...

To pick a single pepper takes about 24 seconds, though the researchers say they purposefully slowed down the robot's movements for safety reasons. Sweeper is also equipped with LED lights so that it can work regardless of the time of day, for about 20 hours/day. Still, the robot is far from perfect, with only 61 percent accuracy in picking ripe fruit.

“Nations will revert to their natural tendency of hiding behind their borders, of moving towards protectionism, of listening to vested interests, and they’ll forget about transcending those national priorities,” said Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund back in 2013.

No other country on Earth has bet as big on electric vehicles as Norway, and it’s finally paying off. Half of all new cars sold to Norwegians are either fully electric or hybrid, making the country of 5.3 million the biggest per-capita market for EVs. Norway’s EV success is owed to both the carrot and the stick.

Robots that grill meat, slice tomatoes, stir-fry vegetables and stretch pizza dough are making fast food even faster, but can you trust a chef who's never tasted the food it creates? There is a distinct lack of chopping, smoke, sweating or swearing in the kitchen at Creator, a new burger restaurant in San Francisco. Instead, there is faint whirring and, if you really listen, the muffled sound of grinding and distant sizzling. It’s because the chefs here are not human.

The two pilots on board Virgin Galactic's spacecraft Unity became the company's first astronauts. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson was on hand to watch the historic moment. Virgin Galactic said the test flight reached an altitude of 51.4 miles, or nearly 83 kilometers. The U.S. military and NASA consider pilots who have flown above 80 kilometers to be astronauts. Test pilots in 2004 were awarded a commercial astronaut badge by the Federal Aviation Administration for flying a previous, experimental iteration of Virgin Galactic's spacecraft design.

Some say bigger is better, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will tell you that when it comes to tech, smaller things are far more impressive. This month, MIT researchers announced they invented a way to shrink objects to nanoscale -- smaller than what you can see with a microscope -- using a laser. That means they can take any simple structure and reduce it to one 1,000th of its original size.

The new National Quantum Initiative Act will give America a national masterplan for advancing quantum technologies. The news: The US president just signed into law a bill that commits the government to providing $1.2 billion to fund activities promoting quantum information science over an initial five-year period. The new law, which was signed just as a partial US government shutdown began, will provide a significant boost to research, and to efforts to develop a future quantum workforce in the country.

Physics is an important scientific field—it is a fundamental science with principles that impacts other branches of natural sciences. It explains the nature and properties of matter, energy, motion and force. The laws of physics have real-world relevance, and are deployed into products and services used in everyday modern living. Ranging from cars, airplanes, smartphones, headphones, to see-saws in a playground, the laws of physics impact the way we live.

From an economic perspective, the core challenge of climate change is that the standard way of doing things — the dirty, carbon-intensive way — is typically cheaper than newer, lower-carbon alternatives. Solving the problem means driving down the cost of those alternatives. Simple, right? But in practice, it’s not so simple. In fact, we still don’t have a very good grasp on exactly what drives technological innovation and improvement. Is it basic scientific research? Early-stage R&D? Learning by doing? Economies of scale?

A neuroscientist’s research into the mysteries of motion helps a paralyzed woman escape her body.

Eviation’s Alice is an all-electric, nine-person aircraft that may help replace fossil fuel-burning commuter planes.

See-through solar materials that can be applied to windows represent a massive source of untapped energy and could harvest as much power as bigger, bulkier rooftop solar units, scientists report today in Nature Energy. Led by engineering researchers at Michigan State University, the authors argue that widespread use of such highly transparent solar applications, together with the rooftop units, could nearly meet U.S. electricity demand and drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels.