An unmanned aerial surveillance drone is only as good as its power source, and as such many technologies are being considered that could drastically extend the duration of drone missions - for instance, DARPA's Vulture program has helped develop a giant solar plane
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Most of us keep our music on our computers and our computers are increasingly mobile, but there's a disconnect between the ability to store large amounts of music on a laptop and the portability of said laptop: laptop speakers aren't worth playing music on. But a clever
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An accidental chemistry discovery could lead to a new method for making antifreeze, moisturizer and plastic bottles out of biomass rather than petroleum, according to researchers at Iowa
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Never mind that twisty compact fluorescent. The new energy-efficient way to light your home is with LEDs. An upcoming crop of bulbs draw 12 watts or less, edging out a typical fluorescent, and they have a more conventional shape, contain no mercury, and last at least
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Plants are extremely efficient converters of light into energy, more or less setting the bar for researchers creating photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. As such, researchers are constantly trying to mimic the tricks that millions of years of
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Researchers at Yale's Grab Lab aren't about to let the nuances of rotary-wing flight restrict what unmanned aerial vehicles can do. A team there has developed a hand-like modular grasping and manipulation platform that can be fitted to the bellies of UAVs to provide them
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Quantum cryptography is one of the most secure known means of transmitting data, due to the fact that even if a third party does intercept a quantum signal, that interference changes the encryption key, making the tampering apparent to parties at both ends. But a handful
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Plenty of human-gadget interfaces can let you control a robot or a computer with your mind. But these communications are command-based -- your PR2 still can't tell whether you're asking it for a beer to celebrate, or to drink away your sorrows. An EEG-based affective computing
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A sharp-looking tabletop touchscreen can be used to command robots and combine data from various sources, potentially improving military planning,
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Nano-thin sheets of metal can be used to build a tiny high-definition display, according to University of Michigan researchers. They built
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Imagine a gesture-based mobile device with no screen, no keyboard, and no other peripheral inputs or outputs, a mobile device that's not really a device at all. Can you see it in your mind's eye? If so, you're probably picturing something akin to a new
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Forget sourcing and designing custom-built laptops on foreign websites. Pioneer Australia is offering an accessible high-end laptop solution.
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Everyone loves the beer-fetching Willow Garage PR2 robot. Evidently, it even loves itself. When developers at Bosch Research gave it a pen, it drew a handsome self-portrait.
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Airships of the future are getting a little closer to reality. A new time-lapse video shows the world's largest airship being inflated in an Alabama cattle barn, and the ship's manufacturer says it will be ready for test flights soon.
It took six hours
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Swarms of autonomous, solar-powered towel-bots, based on a nanowire mesh, could help those oil-eating microbes clean up the Gulf of Mexico. The "Seaswarm" robot moves like a tank in water, using
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Meet your friendly neighborhood Spider-Kid! It's the stuff of childhood dreams, right? A boy in Cambridge, England, can climb the walls just like his favorite superhero.
OK, Vacuum-Boy's powers are slightly less subtle than Peter Parker's. But
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While most early adopters will know full well that their uncontrollable urges to get their hands on the latest gear ASAP isn’t rewarded by savings afforded to those who wait for newer technology to drop in price, they are at least ensured the product. The problem, it seems, for shrewder folk
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Big Brother was watching before, but soon he'll bewatching with a whole new set of high-tech eyes. The US Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is creating a wide-eyed
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The Israelis are developing a hovering, rapidly deployable eye in the sky that smartly skirts the usual problems associated with hovering aircraft. Israel Aerospace Industries has worked up two functioning prototypes of a hovering
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Why scan when you can snap?
For more than 20 years, flatbed scanners have used slow-moving sensor bars to copy an image by scrolling over documents a little at a time. In replacing that bar with a retooled camera sensor, the Lexmark Genesis captures the entire image
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Regardless of where you fall in the Plasma versus LCD screen-preference debate, it’s difficult to deny the popularity and progression of the LCD display. But perhaps the scariest reality of owning an LCD screen—even scarier than the dreaded appearance of dead pixels—is physical damage
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At PopSci we're comfortable with the concept of time travel, but this story is perhaps a bit more than we can wrap our heads around. The Saudi Arabian city of Mecca is building the biggest clock in the world -- a massive 600-metre tower sporting four timekeeping faces
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We're all more or less used to navigating
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CES may be over, but in our post-technalia hangover we?re still discovering a few small wonders that flew under the radar last week, not least of which is this RCA
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Our complete impressions and analysis of Apple's new tablet are here, with photos and video
The iPad, one of the most anticipated gadgets in history, is here. And the stakes, clearly, are high: to my knowledge, this is the first time Apple has referred to one of their
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We're here in San Francisco for Apple's anticipated announcement
Update: Here are our hands on impressions of the iPad. Our liveblog with all the details of the announcement is archived
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Remember that groundbreaking Apple Super Bowl ad from 1984? The one where the woman throws a hammer at Big Brother, signifying a new era of freedom that would be ushered in with Macintosh? My, how times have changed. Here we are more than 25 years later and the despotic,
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iPhone, meet mPhone
Gadget lovers are nothing if not fickle, always
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See our gallery for a look at the future of toys
Say the word "toy" to a techie, and
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High-capacity SD cards are the black holes of digital photo libraries. Eight gigs of
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