The United States is challenging every entrepreneur, engineer, developer and inventor to create the first military robot. The individual or team that creates a humanoid robot capable of walking on two legs and performing various tasks — driving vehicles and using tools — will be awarded $2 million by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The humanoid army isn’t intended for the battlefield, however; the military is interested in using robots for disaster-response scenarios in which rob...

A recent study showed that social networks like Twitter and Facebook are potentially more addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, and now we may have an idea why. A group of scientists from MIT in Massachusetts, IULM University in Milan and two other laboratories in Italy found that people showed physical and psychophysiological responses while using Facebook similar to those exhibited by people while playing a musical instrument or engaging in other creative activities. Beyond wanting to use Facebook for obvi...

Recently, China unveiled the Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing in Beijing. The Tianhe-1A has a staggering 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. What happens when you pump 4.04 megawatts of electricity through all that silicon? Well, LINPACK clocks the machine’s performance at 2.507 petaflops; the U.S. based Cray XT5 Jaguar, which did hold the top supercomputing spot, is benchmarked at 1.75 petaflops. The Tianhe, which cost $88 millio...

Mac OS engineers, architects, and designers can rejoice; AutoCAD, the popular 3D visualization package is now available for the Mac once again. AutoCAD left the Mac platform 18 years ago and has since been a Windows PC exclusive. To put things in perspective, AutoCAD is to engineers what Photoshop is to designers. This news, however, didn’t come as much of a shocker. Last month, Autodesk, the developers of AutoCAD released its free AutoCAD WS app for the iPad and iPhone.The transition from the Windows to...

Only in America can a man with the mental prowess to discover what was to be only the third form of pure-carbon molecule known to man, also lack the creativity to come up with a better name than buckminsterfullerene or “buckyballs”. Well, Harry Kroto might have been British but he and his team made the discovery here in America while conducting research at Rice University. That’s right, it’s all coming back to you from science class in elementary school. Kroto and his team went on to w...