A Carnegie Mellon startup aims to manage traffic at intersections by harnessing the radios in tomorrow’s cars

What happens when a new technology is so precise that it operates on a scale beyond our characterization capabilities? For example, the lasers used at INRS produce ultrashort pulses in the femtosecond range (10-15 s), which is far too short to visualize. Although some measurements are possible, nothing beats a clear image, says INRS professor and ultrafast imaging specialist Jinyang Liang. He and his colleagues, led by Caltech's Lihong Wang, have developed what they call T-CUP: the world's fastest camera, capable of capturing 10 trillion (1013) frames per second.

In the next few years, it doesn’t appear that technology will replace many jobs. But that could change 10 years from now.

The team tested their device by recording themselves singing

Just how tiny is the world's smallest computer? According to a team of University of Michigan electrical and computer engineering professors, the new device they created is dwarfed by a grain of rice. It could even be described as the size of a speck of dust.

A US study has tested out a suspicious object detection system based on ordinary wi-fi.

When a police officer begins to raise a hand in traffic, human drivers realize that the officer is about to signal them to stop. But computers find it harder to work out people's next likely actions based on their current behavior. Now, a team of A*STAR researchers and colleagues has developed a detector that can successfully pick out where human actions will occur in videos, in almost real-time.

In launching its own online service, the Berkeley-based upstart Rigetti aspires to be the Amazon of cloud-based quantum computing.

3D-printed construction is portable and inexpensive, and could help build a safe barracks in a shorter time. With this in mind, the US Marine Corps Systems Command recently constructed a prototype concrete barracks in under two days with what it says is the world's largest 3D printer.

A lot of military technology manages to be both awe-inspiring and vaguely terrifying, and so it is with the Molar Mic – this little microphone and speaker combination actually clips on to the wearer's back teeth.

We all know how easy it is to end up with a cracked phone screen, but thanks to new technology your next cellphone is likely to self repair.

A robotic, fully automated machine is being developed in Perth, Australia, that can raise the brick shell of a new home within two days: a world's first.

Government officials of Foshan City in Guangdong Province have announced on July 10, Friday, plans to open a 20,000-square-meter-plus "robot supermarket" in the city's Shunde District, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Should we treat robots sort of like animals, or strictly as tools? Researcher Kate Darling says the time has come to take these questions seriously.

You know what they say: Two heads are better than one, and three heads are better than two. But now, it’s more than an idiomatic expression. In a new report published in Nature, scientists detail how they successfully linked the brains of multiple rats and monkeys, creating an “organic computer” or a “brainet” that can do some pretty incredible things. As Miguel Nicolelis, the study’s lead author, told The Guardian, “Essentially, we created a super-brain...

Over the past five years, American politics has become obsessed with robots. President Obama has warned that ATMs and airport check-in kiosks are contributing to high unemployment. Sen. Marco Rubio said that the central challenge of our times is "to ensure that the rise of the machines is not the fall of the worker." A cover story in the Atlantic asked us to ponder the problems of a world without work.

Car manufacturer Daimler is hoping to test self-driving trucks on German motorways this year, according to a company executive. Speaking to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Wolfgang Bernhard said he was "positive" the firm would get certification within weeks.

It's been nearly a decade since the earliest whispers suggested iRobot, makers of the Roomba, were building a lawn mower. But we seem to be a bit closer to the future we were promised: the FCC has granted approval to iRobot to build a hands-free mowing-bot, Reuters reports. Although we don't know all of the specifics, the mower, according to Reuters, would operate through stakes in the ground that wirelessly connect to a mower and map out where it should cut.

Computer scientists have discovered that robots evolve faster and more efficiently after a mass extinction. The team at the University of Texas, Austin used a simulated mass extinction modelled on real-life disasters, and found that it hastens evolution in artificial intelligence. The simulation involved connecting neural networks to simulated robot legs with the aim to make a robot evolve to the point it was walking stably.

In the 1800s it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days retail staff worry about automatic checkouts. Sooner or later taxi drivers will be fretting over self-driving cars. The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. Are they taking our jobs? Or are they merely easing our workload?

Since New York raised its minimum wage for fast food workers in July, there’s been a lot of talk about how the Fight for 15 would hurt low-income workers by destroying jobs and ruining lives. But in 2015 there’s a new angle to this that’s different than every other wage hike in American history that could be even more ruinous for fast-food workers: The possibility that restaurants can entirely replace them with a robot staff.

Intel plans to introduce its RealSense technology into more devices and platforms in the near future.

I wish to emphasise before I begin that robots taking jobs is not the problem, the issue is the current government policies that are not ready to handle this disruption. I am not against automation, far from it, I want as much automation as possible but it would be naive to not consider any potential side effects with the way policies currently are and how slow government and culture can change regarding attitudes towards the most vulnerable in our society. The way the unemployed are treated...

I have been a huge science fiction fan as long as I can remember, and a recurring theme in both science fiction literature and movies is the creation of artificial intelligence. However, the subject is becoming increasingly more science and less fiction.

Aeronautic engineers say long-term cryogenic sleep could be the key to humans travelling long distances through space. A NASA-funded study has found spaceships would be able to cover much longer distances if they didn't have to support human activity, and the technology to make this possible could be available within the next three decades.

Engineers have developed a robotic system that can evolve and improve its performance. A robot arm builds "babies" that get progressively better at moving without any human intervention. The ultimate aim of the research project is to develop robots that adapt to their surroundings. The work by teams in Cambridge and Zurich has been published in the journal PLOS One.

A Technologists Perspective

Really, genuinely chilling

An autonomous starfish-killing robot is close to being ready for trials on the Great Barrier Reef, researchers say. Crown-of-thorns starfish have have been described as a significant threat to coral. The Cotsbot robot, which has a vision system, is designed to seek out starfish and give them a lethal injection. After it eradicates the bulk of starfish in a given area, human divers can move in and mop up the survivors.

“BECAUSE of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society,” says Sebastian Thrun. This is what you might expect to hear from the man who suggested Google’s controversial Street View project to photograph the world’s roadsides, who developed the company’s eerie self-driving cars and who founded the secretive Google “skunk-works” project responsible for...

In 2013, two San Francisco-based entrepreneurs, Chris Bruce and Mathew Spolin, contacted a local product designer called Gadi Amit with the idea of making a wearable device. "They had some core sensors and a general idea for the branding," Amit says. "But, as is usually the case with wearables, most of the sensors brought to us were raw inventions from a medical lab. The end users are not medical professionals." In fact, in the case of Bruce's and Spolin's device, the Sproutling...

What would you do if money were no object? You've probably been asked that question at least once in your life, whether it was a high school guidance counselor or a friend trying to sort out why you hate your day job. But really: Would you finally record that album, write that novel, go on tour? Would you focus on your family and relationships? Would you travel, volunteer or write essays? Teach yourself new skills like cooking, coding or woodworking? Or all of the above?

They clean our floors, build our cars and serve our drinks. But you won’t find robots here

Elon Musk has long been a vocal proponent for the quest to send humans to Mars, regularly suggesting that humanity must become interplanetary if it is to survive. In the past, Musk has claimed that the human race has the potential to evolve to an almost god-like level, but has also argued that if we limit ourselves to just one planetary realm, we may not survive long enough to reach our potential.