Roberts

Where do you find inspiration for your work? Robert Full, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, and his team looked to lizards when it came to thinking of ways to better design robots for search and rescue missions.

Such robots have to be more agile. So Full's team studied the movements of a red-headed Agama lizard and discovered the importance of having a tail.

"I think what this shows is that even the strangest creature that we think has nothing to offer really holds fundamental secrets of how things work, and those can be translated to … Read more

The uplifting thing about Google's doodlers is that, unlike many of their engineer colleagues, they don't often resort to the obvious.

How lovely, therefore, to awaken this morning and see a doodle commemorating the 100th birthday (had he still been alive) of Robert Doisneau.

Doisneau was the Frenchman who wandered around Paris and photographed people in natural, compromising positions. You know, like kissing.

I only mention the kissing because that particular photograph -- of two people loving each other up in the middle of the street in 1950 -- has surely been seen on more college dorm room … Read more

Robert Howsare, a student from Ohio University, has built a rudimentary yet interesting drawing machine out of two old turntables and some wooden planks.

The home project, which cost a mere $50 to put together, is simply known as the "drawing apparatus." The drawings produced by the machine are surprisingly attractive, with random asymmetrical lines and patterns as shown in the below video. In fact, I personally found watching the rotating turntables and planks entertaining, and even therapeutic to some extent.

So before you throw out any outdated but still functional hi-fi components, you may want to consider the ways they could be repurposed first. … Read more

Has the Federal Communications Commission finally learned its lesson on spectrum management?

The FCC began proceedings yesterday that could OK Dish Network's plan to use existing spectrum to build a terrestrial 4G LTE mobile broadband network. The rulemaking follows the agency's earlier rejection of Dish's request for a waiver of license conditions, which prohibit using the spectrum for anything other than satellite-based applications.

The decision to proceed with the slower but more formal process was certainly motivated in part by the recent fiasco involving LightSquared. In January 2011, the FCC granted LightSquared a waiver similar to the … Read more

John Doerr has been called the "world's wealthiest and most well-connected venture capitalist" by Forbes. The Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner has been an early-stage investor in some of the best-known companies in the tech industry, including Google, Amazon, Sun, and Zynga, and he has 109,000 Twitter followers.

I'm a fairly prolific professional journalist writing for a national publication and covering a wide range of topics from startups to Lego to aviation to NASA and more. I have 6,250 followers on Twitter.

I'm happy with my place in life and how my … Read more

When Robert Moog originally pioneered the modular voltage-controlled analog synthesizer in the 1950s and 1960s, I don't think he could have imagined the instrument's tremendous impact on music.

Moog's synthesizers continued to evolve, and his Minimoog became the most popular monophonic synthesizer of the 1970s; it was embraced by bands such as Yes and Tangerine Dream.

Robert Moog passed away in 2005, so I wonder what he would have thought of the Animoog, a fully featured synthesizer designed for the iPhone 4 and 4S. According to the Moog Web site, "The Animoog captures the vast sonic … Read more

Robert Noyce, a man as responsible as anyone for the name and culture of Silicon Valley, was honored today with a Google doodle to commemorate what would have been his 84th birthday.

Visitors to Google.com are greeted with an image of an integrated circuit with Google etched onto its center. Noyce is credited as one of the inventors of the integrated circuit, which combines multiple compute functions on a semiconductor.

Noyce was a co-founder of the Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel, which he co-founded with Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove in 1968.

He was considered a visionary and … Read more

An effort on Capitol Hill to overturn the federal government's controversial Net neutrality regulations failed today.

By a 46-52 vote, the U.S. Senate rejected a Republican-backed proposal that would have lifted the regulations before they take effect on November 20.

This morning's vote was an anticlimactic affair. A veto threat two days earlier from President Obama, coupled with evidence that there was nowhere near a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers, meant that the repeal effort would fail.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted the regulations by a 3-2 party line vote last December. Once they take effect, broadband … Read more

Hackers supportive of the Occupy Wall Street protests today released personal information of former Citigroup and Goldman Sachs executive Robert Rubin who was U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Clinton when the banking reform Glass-Steagall Act was repealed.

The CabinCr3w, hackers aligned with the Anonymous group of online activists and the protests, have been releasing personal data of the CEOs of Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and other bankers. They also released information on a New York police officer accused of unprovoked and excessive use of pepper spray on people at the protests, which began September 17 in New … Read more