When artificial intelligence was all the rage in the 1980s, researchers joked that by the turn of the century, smart vacuum cleaners built in Japan would be cleaning smart tanks built in the United States. As it turns out, though, a few years into the new century the vacuum bot that is grinding across the [...]

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday said that Bill Joy, its co-founder and chief scientist, is leaving the company.
Joy helped develop many Sun technologies, including its Java software, SPARC microprocessor architecture and the Solaris operating system.
Greg Papadopoulos, currently Sun’s chief technology officer and executive vice president, will take over Joy’s responsibilities. A Sun representative said the 48-year-old [...]

From on-board radar and Wi-Fi to electronic steering, amazing technologies already here or soon coming promise to create a new automotive era
Last year, General Motors (GM ) made a splash with a concept car called Hy-wire that features Nintendo-style handgrips for steering, plus brakes and an accelerator that work electronically instead of via pressure [...]

It’s the first day of school and Matt Miller, director of food services for Penn Cambria schools, sits at a table next to the registration desk, collecting digital images of students’ fingerprints with a portable scanner.
The line of students waiting to be scanned is short; Miller is there mostly to scan students who’ve recently [...]

Genetically-modified vaginal bacteria may be able to serve as a “living condom”, secreting proteins that protect women against HIV, suggests a new report.
The bacteria have already been used to cripple the virus in test tube experiments. Now the researchers are verifying whether the unmodified parental strain – a natural component of the vaginal microbial flora [...]

In a Pentagon-backed project, University of Massachusetts researchers Swades Chaudhuri, an Indian, and Derek Lovley, an American, say the battery’s source is an underground bacterium that gobbles up sugar and converts its energy into electricity.
Their prototype device ran flawlessly without refuelling for up to 25 days and is cheap and stable.

An ice core recently shipped from Antarctica has yielded its first, eagerly awaited results. The tests confirm that the 3200-metre core dates back at least 750,000 years, making the ice the oldest continuous core ever retrieved.
Gases and particles trapped in the layers of an ice core provide information about the Earth’s climate and atmosphere. Oxygen [...]