To be an inanimate object must be, I fancy, a very uninteresting affair. Certainly, being one appears to have a disastrous effect upon the disposition. No one who has had any intercourse with ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Living beings and inanimate phenomena may have more in common than previously thought. At least that is the view of Duke University engineer Adrian Bejan and Penn State biologist James ...

When you think of robotics, you likely think of something rigid, heavy, and built for a specific purpose. New 'Robotic Skins' technology flips that notion on its head, allowing users to animate the ...

Do animals -- like humans -- divide the world into things that move and things that don't? Are they surprised if an apparently inanimate object jumps to life? Yes -- according to scientists. Do ...

Typically, robots are built to perform a single task. To make them more adaptable, researchers from Yale University have developed a kind of “robotic skin” that transforms ordinary objects into ...