Science fiction tends to project the present into the future, and so its predictions are often suspect. That’s why we’ll see people send faxes in future worlds imagined years ago, instead of beaming ...

Motors are not overly complex, but this one is downright simple. Carl Bujega has been working on a motor design that heavily relies on the capabilities of the printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication ...

The robots can even split in half to send each piece off on its own job, before bringing them back to merge together again. In more practical use cases, two small robots push an LED into place in an ...

Building electric circuits has been a science-class staple for decades. Using copper wire, a 9-volt battery and a light bulb, students learn about the flow of electricity. That classic lesson is ...

Building a robot is hard. Teaching a robot is even harder. But teaching a robot to do your teaching for you might just be within the realm of possibility. If you're building a robot to perform a ...

Researchers at Harvard University have just created the first autonomous, entirely soft robot: the "octobot." Developed through a combination of 3-D printing, molding, and soft lithography, the ...

This light-weight metallic backbone is at least three times lighter than conventional materials used to fabricate origami robots. It is also more power-efficient, enabling origami robots to work ...

A Czech playwright introduced the word to English in the 1920s. But back then, it wasn't analogous to machinery. New ...