With relevance to homegrown, lone operator terrorist threats highlighted by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a series of initiatives Wednesday aimed at defending the U.S. against increasingly ambiguous threats. Whereas its core mission will remain the same—researching new types of technology for the military—the cutting-edge agency [...]

“It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” writes Gordon Crovitz in an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Most histories cite the Pentagon-backed ARPANet as the Internet’s immediate predecessor, but that view undersells the importance of research conducted at Xerox PARC labs in the 1970s, claims Crovitz. In fact, Crovitz implies that, [...]

Robots inspired by nature are nothing new—in addition to all the humanoid bots out there, roboticists have mimicked numerous other animal species, for instance with the uncannily canine BigDog robot. So why not take inspiration from the humble caterpillar? After all, not only can lepidopteran larvae pass through narrow spaces, but some species also have [...]

It’s far from easy to design a robot with one controllable joint, so imagine the difficulty of creating an artificial hand and its numerous knuckles. A team of researchers from the University of Chicago, Cornell University, iRobot Corp. and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) may have found a way around this challenge by [...]