Peaky Blinders, a gritty crime drama set in Birmingham, shows a wide range of crimes and misbehaviors, but modern eyes can still be shocked by the way the gangsters casually toss their cigarette butts on the ground. In 21st century America, that’s not acceptable behavior. Our societal rejection of the habit has had some positive… Read more »

Political intrigues aside, little changed for humankind for most of our existence as a species.  For millennia, life expectancy at birth hovered around 25 years (mostly due to infant and childhood mortality) and virtually everyone faced a life of abject poverty.  Civilizations were born and briefly flourished, only to be overwhelmed, torn asunder and replaced… Read more »

The Paris Games have enthralled the world in opulence, pageantry, elegance, fashion and joie de vie as only the French can do.  The quadrennial celebration of human excellence has managed to momentarily push aside the turmoils that daily pester human existence. One of the brightest moments—especially in the U.S.—has been the quest of the U.S…. Read more »

We’ve seen robot waiters, robot manicurists, robot rabbis, and robot pharmacists. So why not robot dentists? Well, because we don’t want a robot anywhere near our mouths, that’s why. Think again. Dentistry robots start with better imaging of teeth. With a process that’s more like ultrasound with light than like an X-ray, they create a… Read more »

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) range from AMRs (autonomous mobile robots) such as picking machines that transport loads in a warehouse or on the dock to self-driving cars, which basically don’t exist in real life yet. The promise of  AVS includes predictions of increased safety, but a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)… Read more »

“You look at other robotics peers that have spent over a billion dollars in a decade to build a robot dog that has no job,” said Andrew Ashur, founder of Lucid Bots. We sometimes feel frustration at the number of unemployed robots hitting the headlines, too. Proof of concept Sure, innovation requires open-minded research and… Read more »

When your Indramat drives mess up — and it doesn’t happen often — they give you an error code which you can then look up in a troubleshooting manual and address. There are two error codes that might be especially mystifying now: E296 Number of EcoX slaves incorrect E410 Slave not scanned, or address =… Read more »

Hellen Obiri of Kenya will race at the Paris Olympics wearing a pair of shoes manufactured in a completely new way.  The Cloudboom Strike LS from On is not created from pieces cut from patterns and sewn together, as is usual with shoes. Instead, the uppers are made of a translucent filament sprayed onto the… Read more »

How tall do you think the world’s tallest autonomous robot is? You might not have guessed that it’s 40 feet tall. It is.  It’s a global visibility platform. It travels through the warehouses it works in, scans everything, and creates a digital twin of the warehouse. It has to be as tall as the highest… Read more »

The economy in the United States is cooling. This is not a bad thing; in fact, economists have been hoping for a gradually cooling economy to reduce inflation and wage acceleration. It could even help with the ongoing layout shortages. The alternative could be a recession or continuing inflation. However, there may still be discomfort… Read more »