Editor’s Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident is traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to explore undersea volcanism in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the fourth blog post detailing this voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com Before any of the scientists aboard the RV Atlantis [...]

Anyone who’s tried to move through fine sand—whether running along the beach or driving through the desert—knows the difficulty that a loose, granular track presents to locomotion. Now with the aid of a six-legged robot, a team of researchers has determined how much the depth, orientation and direction of a foot, wheel or other means [...]

Last week, I and some 200 other attendees of the Global Trends 2030: U.S. Leadership in a Post-Western World conference got a thought-provoking look at the current “megatrends” leading to four possible futures for the world some 10 to 15 years from now. Cutting across all of them is the disruptive influence of emerging technologies—which [...]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Baxter stayed behind in the lobby of the M.I.T. Media Lab, diligently picking up miniature boxes of Junior Mints and teacup candles and putting them in a pumpkin-shaped plastic bucket, as most attendees of Technology Review‘s Emerging Technologies (EmTech) conference here filed into the main auditorium on Wednesday morning. Don’t feel bad for Baxter, [...]

A robot that can reproduce the dexterity of the human hand remains a dream of the bioengineering profession. One new approach to achieving this goal avoids trying to replicate the intricacy of the bones, joints and ligaments that produce our most basic gestures. A Sandia National Laboratories research team has adopted just such a strategy [...]

Late last year, Harvard University chemists and materials scientists introduced a robot whose rubbery appendages fly—or, more accurately, crawl—in the face of conventional automatons. These invertebrate-inspired albino bots relied on elastic polymers and pneumatic pumps to imitate the movements of worms, squid and starfish. Now these squishy quadrupeds can be pumped with a variety of [...]

The first boots on the ground in the explosives-rigged apartment of Aurora, Colo., shooting suspect James Holmes were actually robot tracks. Fortunately for police, military and emergency responders, bots are showing their mettle in this and other dangerous situations and helping keep their human handlers out of harm’s way. Holmes, a former Ph.D. neuroscience student [...]

In popular fiction, humanoid robots have no rhythm—look no further than the “robot dance” for evidence of this. Yet rhythm—or the neurophysiological processes that enable humans to produce patterns of recurring movement—is the key to creating bots that move more like people. So says a team of University of Arizona engineers who claim to have [...]

About the size of a beach ball, this flying sphere takes off vertically and hovers in place, but can zip along horizontally at speeds of up to 60 km/h (about 37 mph). It has gyroscopic control that keeps it stable even when the presenter smacks it on the side: Perhaps the most amazing aspect of [...]

For more than 150 years New York City’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (more commonly called The Cooper Union) has finished its school years with an annual event  showcasing student projects in the areas of art, architecture and engineering. Of the more than 300 projects on display this year were several [...]

After weeks on standby, robots have been called from the sidelines to help inspect reactor buildings at Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Tokyo Electric Power Company sent a remote-control robot into the No. 1 and No. 3 nuclear reactor buildings on Sunday and then into the No. 2 reactor the following day. The [...]

Legions of animal-inspired robots are being created to improve military missions and disaster response efforts—from crawling cockroach-like RHex bots to leaping Sand Flea robots and the speeding Cheetah machines. Now, a squishier source for smart robo-tech has joined the ranks: octopuses. Teams of researchers are already developing soft-bodied, octopus-esque robots for search and rescue. These [...]