On December 1, 2013, Americans watched a segment on 60 Minutes about Amazon’s plans to deliver packages by drone in just “four or five years.” Well, it’s officially been five years. And Amazon’s failure to make drone delivery a reality is a great reminder that PR promises from big tech companies are often not worth very much. And frankly, it’s also an opportunity to be thankful that Amazon isn’t yet buzzing drones over our heads like it owns the skies.

Scientists are developing flexible, thin-films that will be more resilient and have wider uses than current solar technology

Cash is disappearing in the country faster than anyone thought it would. Now, officials are trying to slow its demise as they determine the societal costs.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra sees smart loos in our future and is anxious to sell the chips they will need.

DeepMasterPrints created by a machine learning technique have error rate of only one in five

Michael Griffin, the undersecretary for research and engineering, expects future budgets to provide funds for lasers that the missile defense agency can more rapidly develop and field. Space-control needs to have megawatt-class lasers. Hypersonic weapons’ low signature in flight and high degree of maneuverability upon final approach to targets make the weapons difficult to defend against. The last time the US really invested in transformative capabilities that overwhelmed adversaries [in Desert Storm] was the Reagan era.

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

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.

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

Researchers say they have developed tiny readers that can detect information in light spirals

Predictive policing using data analytics is gaining acceptance among police forces, but at what cost?

First in AR was in your glasses, now now it's in your phone. Who knows where it'll end up next?

Life may exist elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, though try as they might, scientists have yet to detect any sign of it. Part of the problem has to do with the size of space; finding traces of organic substances or the waste signatures of alien megastructures isn’t easy at such cosmic distances. Fortunately, there’s the possibility that alien life will come to us in the form of interstellar objects.

Opinion: We worry about glitchy driverless tech, but we should be worried about the remote human minders.

A lump of metal in a building near Paris has long served as the global standard for the kilogram. That’s about to change…

Roger Brown still remembers the shocked looks people gave him the first time he rode a Segway through the halls of the company's New Hampshire headquarters.

Reality may get in the way of ambitions.

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