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Norton Anti-Theft Plugin: Major Letdown December 02, 2011 
Believe it or not, antivirus software makers are now pitching solutions for our smartphones. Do you believe the hype? Statistics floating around the sea of press releases from antivirus merchants proclaim the end of innocence for our lovable little Android. He's grown up.
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Asimo Robot Learns Some Smooth New Moves November 08, 2011 
Honda recently unveiled the latest version of its Asimo robot in Tokyo. The humanoid robot has been equipped with what Honda claims is the world's first autonomous behavior control technology. This lets the Asimo continue moving independently of an operator's control. The latest Asimo also has improved intelligence.
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FoamBot Builds Baby Bots for Any Occasion October 24, 2011
Those tactical robots some police departments use to deal with dangerous situations are great, but they have one drawback -- they're specialized and so are limited to a few uses. What if a police or fire department could create a bunch of robots as needed for different uses? That's the idea the University of Pennsylvania's ModLab goes after with its FoamBot.
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AMD, Google, Oracle, Harry Potter and Robopocalypse June 27, 2011 
OK, last week was a really interesting week. We had AMD basically divorcing itself from Intel's model after living under Intel's shadow from inception; we had Google repeating yet another of Microsoft's greatest mistakes; we had IBM repeat a famous political debate by basically saying Oracle wasn't an enterprise vendor anymore; and we had Harry Potter's author begin to kill off publishers and book stores.
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The Law and Your Robot Chauffeur November 02, 2010 
Google's wow factor is still at large -- this time in a self-driving car that's tootling about California in a series of test runs. It's easy to get carried away with the dream of a personal (albeit automated) chauffeur and the implied robotic "get out of jail free card." The inebriated and textholics among us -- and possibly speeders, light runners and the accident prone too -- are relishing the thought.
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Mac Lion: The King of the OS X Jungle? October 16, 2010 
Apple has this way of making its more devoted fans feel as though the company is giving them some sort of gift whenever it rolls out a new product. It plans a party, makes special invitations, and trots out the new inventions like it's paying tribute to a visiting dignitary. Nobody's giving anyone anything, of course; it's total salesmanship. Not a bad way to go about it, though.
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Hit Me, Baby, One More Time - for Science October 15, 2010 
A researcher in a robotics lab in Slovenia has reportedly been using humans as punching bags to find out the limits on how hard and fast a robot can move if it collides with people. Borut Povse persuaded six male colleagues to let a modified production-line robot hit their arms up to 18 times with different amounts of force using either a sharp or blunt tool, New Scientist magazine reported.
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Google Dabbles in Robotics With Self-Driving Cars October 12, 2010 
While it has been rumored for some time, Google announced Sunday is has been testing self-driving cars. The company equipped six Toyota Priuses and an Audi TT with technology that enabled a vehicle to drive from Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus to its Santa Monica office. It then moved on to Hollywood Boulevard. In all, Google has sent its auto-cars more than 140,000 miles.
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E-Skin for Robots Could Lead to Touchy-Feely Prosthetics for Humans September 14, 2010 
Robots can be made made strong, robots can be made tireless, but a big problem with robots so far is that they can't be made to have a sense of touch as humans do. The same issue challenges designers of prosthetic limbs. Imitating the motor movements of joints and muscles is one thing, but imitating human skin with all its myriad ways of detecting sensation is quite another.
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Where Are the Robots Taking Us? Part 2 April 28, 2010 
Is it abnormal to love robots? Do people who love robots, adopt them as friends or members of the family, give then names and bring them along on family vacations have an unnatural fixation on robots? What about soldiers who are prepared to give their lives for their units' bomb detector robots? Is that a symptom of battle fatigue? Of loneliness? Of traumatic stress disorder? Or are all these people just being human?
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2013: The Year Tech as We Know It Changes April 26, 2010 
The market is in a planning cycle, and analysts are being asked to take a look in their crystal balls and describe what 2013 will look like. Clearly, we will have more bandwidth, 3-D TV will be ramping, and most of us will either be using tablet devices for something or moving to the next big thing.
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Where Are the Robots Taking Us? Part 1 April 21, 2010 
Robots haunt our art and our dreams. Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a whole series of novels around the idea of robotics -- the "Robot" series, one of which was made into the movie "I, Robot." The "Terminator" movies were all big hits, and science-fiction series such as Britain's "Dr. Who" and America's own "Caprica" and "Battlestar Galactica" all have robots, more or less humanoid, in their casts.
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Researchers Achieve Breakthrough With Towel-Folding Robot April 07, 2010
People can easily fold towels, but getting robots to do that has been a real challenge.
That's because the robot requires a complex combination of artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning in order to make an orderly stack from a jumbled pile of towels.
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Two Can Play at the Wired War Game March 09, 2010 
As the United States military increases the use of robots like unmanned drones in battle, it increases the danger that our enemies will take and adapt the technology to use against us, according to Peter Warren Singer, senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
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Roxxxy Sexbot: It's Not Her Looks, It's Her Personalities January 11, 2010 
The real world has finally caught up with the concept of a sex robot, something that's been immortalized in films ranging from "Westworld" to "A.I." and the fembots of "Austin Powers." And where else but the 2010 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas would that vision be realized in the five-foot-seven, 120-pound, lingerie-clad form of Roxxxy?
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Movable Prosthetics: The Biomechanical Interface August 24, 2009 
Thanks to research that will culminate this year in a major set of new designs, procedures and prototypes for artificial limbs, highly advanced prosthetics might eventually become commonplace, perhaps in another generation. However, much more research must be done in the ways human tissue interacts with mechanical parts.
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