Audi and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology envision a future where robots riding shotgun make us happier, safer drivers and create a “symbiotic relationship” between car and driver.  The Affective Intelligent Driving Agent, Aida, would analyze our driving habits, keeping track of frequent routes and destinations to provide real-time traffic info, and make friendly suggestions [...]

Even the world’s most powerful supercomputers can’t replicate basic aspects of the human mind.  The machines can’t imagine a wall painted a different color, for instance, or picture a person’s face and connect that to an emotion.  If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks — by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, [...]

Last week, Karin Hill, the director of education and public programs for the National Museum of the United States Navy in the District, visited Calvert Middle School in Prince Frederick.  Her mission: to teach the members of the school’s all-girls engineering club — which is the first of its kind in a Calvert County school [...]

Scientists have invented a carbon-based sponge that can soak up organic pollutants, such as oils and solvents, from the surface of water.  No water is absorbed and the sponge can then be wrung out and reused, like an ordinary household sponge.  Absorbing up to 180 times its own weight in organic matter, the sponge is [...]

A proposed hub for connecting the three independent electricity grids that span the continental United States could make it easier to ramp up production of renewable electricity.  The project, called the Tres Amigas Superstation, would use superconducting “pipelines” and converter stations to connect three grids: the Western, Eastern, and Texas Interconnections.  Connections between the grids [...]

Researchers in the European Union are using telematics to create “road trains” that join the benefits of carpooling with the freedom of driving alone.  The latest concept, part of the EU’s Safe Road Trains for the Environment initiative, groups cars with similar destinations into road trains over long stretches of highway.  The lead vehicle will [...]

Along with the usual mix of teabags, banana skins, and egg shells, compost bins of the future could contain biodegradable electronic circuits, according to researchers in the U.S.  The electronic components could also be made biocompatible, so they could be implanted into the body for a short period of time before being broken down and [...]

Transition lenses–which darken automatically in response to bright sunlight–have been available for eyeglasses for 40 years. But adapting this flexibility to contact lenses has proven challenging. Now researchers in Singapore have developed UV-responsive, or photochromic, lenses that darken when exposed to ultraviolet light, protecting the eyes against the sun’s damaging rays, and return to normal [...]

Kwabena Boahen’s love affair with digital computers began and ended in 1981, when he was 16.  Boahen lived outside the city of Accra in the West African nation of Ghana.  One afternoon Boahen’s father rolled down the driveway with a surprise in the trunk of his Peugeot: a RadioShack TRS-80 — the family’s first computer.  [...]

After about a decade of engineering, Ford is ready to roll out a technology that will improve safety for rear-seat passengers: inflatable seat belts.  The belts expand like an air bag in the event of a crash and distribute the force of the impact across a wider area of the passenger’s chest.  The belts, covered [...]