Imagine a robot companion that cleans up in the kitchen, loads the dishwasher, wipes the table and counter, makes your bed and picks up your bathroom towels. Would this appeal to you? Well at the Robot Learning Lab in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University in Ithaca, Ne

What a challenging couple of weeks for my family. Who knew that moving in the 21st century was no different from moving in the 20th. All the things that can go wrong usually do and one of them was our phone and Internet connection. At my old house my landline was buried in a PVC pipe

My wife and I have been downsizing and ridding ourselves of over 40 years of furniture collecting as we prepare to move to our new apartment in downtown Toronto. IKEA, the assemble-it-yourself furniture store, has figured largely in our lives in the last few months as we replace the o

Every year the MIT Technology Review picks the ten technologies that represent significant breakthroughs.  Past years have included crowdfunding in 2012, gestural interfaces to computers in 2011, engineered stem cells in 2010 and low cost DNA sequencing in 2009, just to name a few. Wh

For those of you so inclined on Wednesday, April 24th at 11 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time (2 p.m. Eastern), Planetary Resources is celebrating its one year anniversary since announcing its plans to begin mining asteroids. And you are invited to join them for a live hangout online. They

Technology played a critical role in the news events of this week beginning with the crudely-fashioned, low tech, pressure-cooker bombs planted at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and the mayhem and death they wrought, followed by the technology of our communication age uncoveri

Waste sulfur, seen below in the image of an Athabaska oil sands production site, is being transformed into lightweight plastic for use in electric batteries. The research into a new chemical process has been headed up by University of Arizona and involves contributions from Seoul Nati

Most of you, my readers, are too young to remember the old Perry Como song “Catch a Falling Star” but I think the lyric captures the mission that NASA is proposing. Described as a “capture and redirect” of an asteroid by a robotic spacecraft followed by a visit

ROPITS is the creation of Hitachi Ltd., the Japanese electronics and engineering company. Seen in the image below, this is a self-driving robotic car. The name translates to Robot for Personal Intelligent Transport System. Not meant to be a replacement for automobiles but rather as a

iRobot, developers of military robots and the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, have been building robots for more than 23 years. In 2012 they reported having sold 8 million home robots and more than 5,000 iRobot unmanned ground vehicles worldwide. For all of these robotic devices iRobot h