Building blocks from our childhood and our imagination enabled us to create new worlds and explore different ways to use what we had at our disposal. A year ago, Modular Robotics came up with Cubelets – simple robotic cubes which serve as building blocks that behave differently depending on how you connect them, like a… »

While some groups search for ways to lower and store carbon dioxide (CO2) gas emissions, there are efforts worldwide to convert this molecule into a chemical feedstock. Researchers at RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Wako, Japan, developed the first protocol for attaching both CO2 and boron atoms to unsaturated carbon–carbon triple bonds. This protocol uses… »

In an emerging field of science known as DNA nanotechnology, DNA is being explored for use as a material that can be used to build small and programmable structures. Researchers at the Wyss Institute have used short synthetic strands of DNA to developed interlocking DNA “building blocks” able to form complex nanostructures. Named single-stranded tiles… »

In one of our previous articles, we wrote about two ideas that employ robots building construction, but researchers from Cornell University came up with a different approach in a project named Machine Metabolism – Truss Structure Manipulation using Robots. The project involves a robotic system capable to break down modular elements and reuse them to… »

Tabletop computers based on diffuse illumination can track markers placed on the table’s surface. We demonstrate how to do the same with objects arranged in a three-dimensional structure without modifying the table. We already wrote about tabletop interfaces, as well as the interface with multiple sources of information able to operate in 3D, but this… »