Governments around the world are rushing to develop military robots capable of killing autonomously without considering the legal and moral implications, warns a leading roboticist. But another robotics expert argues that robotic soldiers could perhaps be made more ethical than human ones.
A new catalyst that can split carbon dioxide gas could allow us to use carbon from the atmosphere as a fuel source in a similar way to plants.
Robots that artificially evolve ways to communicate with one another have been demonstrated by Swiss researchers. The experiments suggest that simulated evolution could be a useful tool for those designing of swarms of robots.
Life-saving operations on soldiers in combat zones could become possible thanks to a portable robotic surgeon that allows doctors to perform surgery on the battlefield without endangering themselves.
Nuclear reactors could be built more efficiently using supercomputers to artificially 'evolve' designs, say engineers from the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They have found they can speed up the extremely complex process of designing a reactor and generate novel designs from scratch by simulating natural selection.
A scanning method that could prove crucial to the development of a practical quantum computer has been developed by US researchers.
A framework for translating the write-ups of experiments into a format that can be processed by computers has been developed by academics. The new tool could revolutionise the way scientific papers are written and help scientists make creative leaps, researchers say.