Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 29, 2017

Robotic Farm Completes 1st Fully Autonomous Harvest

It's harvest season in many parts of the world, but on one farm in the United Kingdom, robots — not humans — are doing all the heavy lifting. At Hands Free Hectare, an experimental farm run by researchers from Harper Adams University, in the village of Edgmond in the U.K.,...

Oct 10, 2017

Humanity's Sci-Fi Future: Are We Really Ready for Intelligent Robots?

NEW YORK — From transporters and lightsabers to spaceships that can travel faster than the speed of light, futuristic devices that lie beyond humanity's grasp — for now, at least — are a staple of science fiction. And yet over time, people have steadily advanced the boundaries of what technology...

Oct 17, 2017

Why You Shouldn't Expect to See 'Blade Runner' Replicants Anytime Soon

Fans of the 1982 sci-fi-noir thriller Blade Runner had to wait more than a quarter-century for the follow-up film Blade Runner 2049, which opened in U.S. theaters on Oct. 6. But they'll likely have to wait much, much longer to see any semblance of the films' human-mimicking androids — dubbed...

Oct 26, 2017

How Do You Make a Conscious Robot?

You've likely heard of conscious thought and subconscious thought, but humans may in fact possess three levels of consciousness, a new review suggests — and this concept could help scientists develop truly conscious artificial intelligence (AI) someday. Though AI technology has been advancing at a rapid clip, in many ways,...

Oct 30, 2017

Lifelike 'Sophia' Robot Granted Citizenship to Saudi Arabia

A robot with an uncannily human-like appearance recently advanced one step closer to human status, when it was granted citizenship to Saudi Arabia at the tech summit Future Investment Initiative (FII). Named Sophia, the robot, created by Hanson Robotics (HR), has a pale-skinned face with features that are capable of...

Oct 30, 2017

Totally Adorable Bee-Bot Can Do It All

A new robotic bee can fly, dive, swim and leap out of the water, and it's totally adorable to boot. RoboBee is an aerial-to-aquatic robot that weighs just six-thousandths of an ounce (175 milligrams). These bots were first reported in 2014 in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, when — after...

Nov 1, 2017

Robot Cracks Those Curvy Captchas in Minutes

In just minutes, an artificially intelligent machine cracked those jumbled text sequences called captchas that are used to distinguish human web users from spam-spreading robots. So much for that. The AI startup, Vicarious, that built the captcha-cracking bot says its approach could point the way to more general, human-like artificial...

Nov 6, 2017

'Robutt' Simulates 10 Years of Butts on Car Seats

While crash-test dummies and other assembly-line machines seem to get the raw end of the deal, a different robot has a much cushier job: It tests car seats. Meet Robutt, which makes sure the seats of your new car stay nice and comfy by simulating about 10 years' worth of...

Nov 17, 2017

New Video Shows a Creepily Human-Like Robot Doing a Backflip

A new video shows a robot performing amazing acrobatic feats, from backflips to half-turn jumps. The eerily humanoid robot, called Atlas, is 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) tall and weighs 165 pounds (75 kilograms), and uses Lidar and stereovision to navigate in its surroundings, according to Boston Dynamics, which makes the...

Nov 20, 2017

Chemistry of 'Wine Legs' Inspires Surface-Skimming Minibots

Miniature robots hold great promise — tiny bots could help with tasks such as environmental cleanups in the future. But finding a way to power these tiny robotic helpers is a challenge because clean, lightweight and compact fuel sources are hard to develop. Now, a team of engineers from the...

Dec 18, 2017

Best Robot Kits for Kids

Help Children Learn to Build and Code (Image credit: Dmytro Zinkevych / Shutterstock)To get ahead in the 21st century, children not only need to be able to use technology but to develop it. That's why so many parents want their kids to learn how to code, and there's no better...

Jan 21, 2018

24 Underwater Drones – The Boom in Robotics Beneath the Waves

Robotics Beneath the Waves (Image credit: Festo)Aerial drones have buzzed their way into almost every aspect of the modern world, from photography and television news coverage, to environmental monitoring and archaeology. And many of the concepts developed for aerial drones are being adopted and adapted to work in a very...

Jan 30, 2018

Meet Erica, Japan's Next Robot News Anchor

At a mere 23 years old, Japan's latest news anchor would make her parents proud — if she had any. Erica, a lifelike android designed to look like a 23-year-old woman, may soon become a TV news anchor in Japan, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to Hiroshi Ishiguro, director...

Feb 13, 2018

This Electronic Skin May Help Prevent Robots from Crushing Us

A metallic robot hand with Terminator-like power sounds good for the movies. But what about a real-life future where that android is now cradling your baby or just shaking your hand? That's when attributes like gentle and sensitive might be more warranted to avoid a human-crushing outcome. Electronic skin may...

Feb 14, 2018

There's a Reason Roaches Love Banging Their Heads Into Walls

Small roaches with robust exoskeletons use their heads like an automobile bumper, scientists reported in a new study. When a scurrying roach's head hits a wall, its body rebounds upward at an angle, enabling the insect to scale the vertical surface more quickly than if it had applied the brakes....