Consumer

I, Roboticist

I wanted a robot butler, so I built one

My New Laptop

New Life For Nixies

Novel digital clocks get their glamour from the Nixie tube, the mother of electronic numerical displays

In Defense of Dumb

Gadgets don't necessarily get better when you give them brains

Jeannine Mosely: Paper Sculptor

mini-profile

Engineering Everquest

Online gaming demands heavyweight data centers

Inside Hollywood

The journey of Naren Shankar—from engineer to media mogul

The Wizardry of Id

Behind the action and the terror of Id Software's video games lies a revolution in desktop technology

Engineering the Harvard Engineer

One man's determined quest to make Harvard a contender in engineering—after 372 years

Video-Game Music: Better Than Film Scores?

An interview with video-game music composer John Debney

Genius on the Block

The foundations of the computing age go up for auction

Hard Drive

Robotic cars impress in rough road race

The End of AT&T

Ma Bell may be gone, but its innovations are everywhere

The Mash Monsters

DJs Adrian & the Mysterious D sing the praises of the mashup, a do-it-yourself combo of existing music that has copyright lawyers licking their chops

Dream Jobs 2008

Studying penguins in Antarctica, watching shooting stars in the South Pacific, tracking robots through the Amazon—yes, this is engineering

Loser: Social Networking Goes To The Dogs

A $200 RFID dog tag tells owners—and their neighbors—when their pets are alive, at home, and sniffing things

Tell Us What You Think

Why Losers?

We don't do this because we're mean spirited. We do it because we care

Winner: Make Your Very Own Virtual World with OLIVE

Forterra's OLIVE software makes the business of virtual-world environments real

You Tell Us

Winning ideas are often doomed by poor execution or by nothing more than being ahead of their time. Here are a few products that could go either way. Tell us how you think they'll fare.