Museum of Science and Industry

Fresh fruit is so delicious, especially when the piece is perfectly ripe! So how can you tell when something is ready to eat? Do you squish or sniff, searching for a subtle change in coloring? What if the fruit is trapped in a box, waiting to be put out onto grocery store shelves? An MIT professor and his students are developing inexpensive ethylene sensors to help monitor the freshness of produce!

Ethy...

How would you like a door lock that opens to your touch and your touch only? Instead of giving someone a key to your house while you’re gone, just program the lock to recognize their bones! Wait… what? Yes. Well, not quite yet, but a technology being prototyped at AT&T Labs sends vibrations from your smartphone through your bones. This

If you’re like me, you often step outside and yell, “Hey everybody, it’s 2012... Where are all the electric cars?” Batteries, it turns out, are a tough obstacle on the road to electric car efficiency. One big issue is that usually the more juice a battery can crank out, the heavier it must get. But IBM is seeking to address that problem with lightweight batteries capable of propelling a car 500 miles on a single charge.

The Battery 500 Project...

While we're still pretty far from the "grey goo," the robot revolution is upon us! MSI celebrated this month's National Robotics Week by showcasing some pretty awesome bots, including Anybot's QB2. Known as a telepresence robot, QB2 is a mobile webcam/microphone...

If you have eyeballs, Google might someday change the way you use them. The search engine giant recently unveiled "Project Glass," an endeavor to develop internet-integrated, augmented-reality glasses. Google’s concept video suggests that features may include voice-command integration, real-time directions, and video chat. For now, these features (and this product)...