panasonic

Families won't see any more household squabbles over dishwashing duty in the future, if Panasonic's kitchen robot has any say. The mechanical server uses a four-fingered hand to serve food from pans and fill waiting dishes, as well as empty glasses in the sink before depositing them safely in the dishwasher.

It's not all about singing robots in Tokyo this year. The annual CEATEC tech expo is loaded with the makings of your gadget-geek future.

For everyone out there who's been fighting aliens with a flamethrower, but now needs something with a little more kick, you're in luck. Panasonic has taken a break from hawking TVs and camcorder to build the power loader from Aliens.

Designed by Panasonic subsidiary Activelink, the "Dual Arm Amplification Robot" weighs 500 pounds, and allows the user to lift 220 pounds with the flick of a wrist. That's not quite enough to bench press an alien queen, but then again, it's still in the design phase.

Mobility-impaired patients and layabouts alike can rejoice at the debut of Panasonic's robotic bed that transforms into a wheelchair. Human nurses and hospitals may also breathe a tiny sigh of relief.

The bed-shaped bot morphs upon command to sidestep the usual trouble of moving a bedridden person from bed to wheelchair, or vice versa. Yet unlike the Japanese bear bot nurse that carries patients, a self-controlled bed bot allows humans to regain some independence and dignity.

This is the week of the Internationale Funkausstellung (er, International Consumer Electronics Show) in Berlin, which is pretty much just what it sounds like. It's one whopping, European CES. The trouble with IFA for us on the State-side, though, is that a lot of companies forget one key thing: the magical Internet can cross water. Because of that, a lot of "new product announcements" are "things we have already seen," so it takes a little more effort (and flexing what's left of my undergrad German skillz) to figure out what's worth paying attention to.

Over the last two days, the IFA press preview has kicked up some real goodies -- even before the show floor opens to the public today. IFA '09 has already shown us a real taste of how our home theaters will look in the next half-decade, laptops on serious diets, and a couple cool new toys.

Panasonic was the first out of the gate with a Micro Four Thirds camera, a system that promises SLR quality in small packages. It was Olympus, however, that hit small-body sweet spot with the EP-1. Today, Panasonic announced their own realization of the Micro Four Thirds promise with the svelte Lumix DMC-GF1.

Sports cars have long tested their 24-hour endurance on the Le Mans racing circuit in France. Now a Panasonic robot named Mr. Evolta will try to claim the distance record for a remote-controlled car, pedaling along furiously at 1.3 kilometers per hour (0.8 mph).

The tricycling robot should manage about six laps of the 4-kilometer (2.5 mile) Le Mans circuit during the required day-long period, when it makes the attempt next Wednesday. It will navigate the winding course by following an infrared beam emitted by a lead buggy that travels ahead.

How could a technology be failing if it performs better and costs less than its competitor? That's probably what plasma TV makers keep asking themselves, and one we're been thinking about since both Pioneer and Vizio pulled out of the business last month. So we asked a few folks in the biz for their thoughts.

No matter how good your technique, ultimately it's size that matters. I'm talking about cameras, of course.

Regardless of how sophisticated the camera or the photographer is, truly beautiful photos—with fine detail and rich exposure—rarely come from a point-and-shoot with an image sensor the size of the fingernail on your pinky. That's usually too little silicon to soak up enough light for a good picture. For quality, you need the giant slab found in an SLR, which is from about 15 to 30 times larger.

Rome was neither built nor disassembled in a day. While historians point to September 4, 476—the overthrow of the last emperor—as the date it all fell apart, the fall really began decades earlier and continued for decades afterwards.