There are few other ideas that have excited the human imagination more that of a machine that acts like a person. Long before Czech writer Karl Čapek coined the word “robot” (literally “servitude”), inventors and story-tellers throughout the centuries have proposed building automatons. Many mythologies, including Greek, Hebrew and Chinese, contain stories of men made [...]

When you get right down to it, all fuels are biofuels. We humans just got lucky that Mother Nature whipped up a batch for us in the form of fossil fuels derived from masses of organic matter left over from eons ago. But our supply of fossil fuels is facing a host of problems. First [...]

The answer may be blowing in the wind but it won’t necessarily be easy to find. Wind power offers tremendous potential for clean, renewable energy. It’s also one of the oldest energy technologies, stretching back to the windmills of medieval times. In a way, even ancient sailing ships could be seen as a form of [...]

Carbon dioxide: You can’t escape it. For one thing, you inhale and exhale it. For another, on any given day any newspaper, TV news show or website is likely to mention it. It is, literally and figuratively, on everyone’s lips. How did this common gas become so famous? As we’ve all heard by now, excess [...]

New ideas are funny things. Sometimes, they don’t appear all at once but evolve slowly. Other times, they pop up almost instantly yet, somehow, appear in several different places at simultaneously. Just look at some of the major inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Who invented the radio? It’s hard to say. Names like [...]