A Microsoft patent filed in May (and published yesterday) describes a �topography-changing� display in which shape-memory polymers would react to light signals to change the texture of a display surface, a technology that may be used to develop tactile touchscreens or other controls.

German robotics company Festo offers a postfuturist menagerie: autonomous kites, silver air-jellyfish and flying robo-penguins.

The history of the attention span is very distracting.

Kinect hacks are emerging at a rapid pace; it�s hard to recall a mass-market gadget so quickly adapted to new uses. As Bruce Sterling points out, �Microsoft accidentally invented a primo piece of art-installation hardware.� It's this kind of DIY innovation that keeps tech feral.

Pluto's loss of planetary status seemed to have been sealed by the 2006 discovery of a batch of similarly-sized planet-like objects in the same orbital neighborhood�one of which, later named Eris, was thought to be larger than erstwhile ninth planet. According to new findings, however, Pluto's diameter is larger than that of its more massive neigbhor. For now, Pluto gains in status as the largest of these so-called dwarf planets. Whether this will be enough to secure a record contract remains to be seen.

LumiNet takes the conventions of a central processing unit, such as an Arduino, handling most of the workload and spreads the responsibility across a series of parallel ‘LumiNet modules’ which only depend on the four modules directly connected to it. This way, if one module goes bad, the rest of the wearable network will stay up and running. It’s programming ...

At McGill University Health Centre, prostate surgery was quickly becoming just a tad too routine. So they decided to mix it up a bit. Paging, Dr. DaVinci and Dr. McSleepy! DaVinci, a widely used surgery bot which allows doctors to operate from a remote location, and McSleepy, the anesthesiologist bot, joined forces to perform the world’s first fully robotic surgery. ...

You’d figure that if LEGO released a Wii Remote they’d do it right and let you build the whole thing from scratch. But seeing as there are small kids and even smaller geriatrics who regularly use the Wii, LEGO saw that it was more fitting to introduce a branded Wiimote with a little less need for technical know-how. So we ...

Hands down, the most convenient way to build a robot in your own home is LEGO’s Mindstorm NXT set, which fuses robotics and LEGO bricks in a combination of geeky and nostalgic joy. LEGO just released MindDroid, an Android app which lets you remotely control your Mindstorm creations from your Android device. MindDroid uses Bluetooth to wirelessly connect to the ...

Geminoid F might not be ready to give Meryl Streep a run for her money, but the female humanoid robot was designed for the stage. Created by ART Intelligent Robotics and Communications Laboratories under the direction of Professor Ishiguro Hiroshi, Geminoid was designed to replicate the appearance of a twenty-something woman, with the exception that she is controlled via remote ...