Read about the world's tallest building, the longest bicycle, the most modern tractor and a discovered time capsule that cannot be opened until the year 2957. Shoe manufacturer New Balance is stepping onto the 3-D printing platform with a new running shoe that incorporates a 3-D printed midsole that can be customized to each runner. New Balance is making the shoe available for the first time in Boston in April, 2016 -- timed to coincide with the Boston Marathon. It's difficult to believe that with all of the unrest in Iraq, a company such as AMBS Architects would propose building a skyscraper to rival Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which stands 830-meters high. But here it is: the 1,152-meter-tall Bride's tower.

Can artificial intelligence lay paint to paper to create meaning and evoke emotion? It was open to students from universities and high schools and awarded cash prizes in two categories: fully automated execution or manually generated. Here are the results from the 10 winners, which were chosen thanks to feedback from the public as well as that from a panel of judges. Did the robots create something beautiful? TAIDA is a fully automated robot artist that uses a visual feedback system to compare the image it paints on a canvas with the original image. It then improves upon the painting until it's satisfied.

"Hiding behind your glasses" just took on a whole new meaning. At Tokyo's National Institute of Informatics, Isao Echizen, an associate professor in the Digital Content and Media Sciences Research Division, unveiled a privacy visor -- a set of glasses that prevents cameras with face-recognition software from recognizing you. Echizen designed the glasses with near-infrared LEDs placed around the eyes and the bridge of the nose, two areas that computers use to pick out faces. Near-infrared is invisible to people, but many cameras can pick it up. The lights add digital "noise" to the image and when the computer tries to match the image with ones in a database, it gets confused and is unable to complete a match.

Dogs have always had a role in combat but now they are helping engineers build better robots. Dogs are now in the field wearing high-tech bulletproof vests, parachutes and video cameras into combat. Rolling robots are getting stronger, smarter and smaller. Robots are being made to be more dog-like and dogs are being trained to be methodical, like robots. From infantry units to secret SEAL teams, the U.S. military is using increasing numbers of dogs and robots to assist in conflicts across the world.

Oh, what the future has in store. Above: Polish architect Krzysztof Kotala, owner of 8 8 Concept Studio in Warsaw, wants to build a tennis court off the coast of Dubai, a proving ground for audacious feats of engineering. The dome-shaped structure would accommodate seven courts as well as a rooftop coral reef to attract sea life. Critics say there are too many technical challenges to overcome, such as manufacturing much larger sheets of glass than exist today in order to reduce the number of joints. But come on, it's Dubai, home to the tallest building in the world, artificial islands, and an indoor ski resort.

We've seen robots that can slither up a tree and shimmy up telephone poles, and now engineers in Hong Kong have developed one that can crawl up trees autonomously. Treebot is the work of Tin Lun Lam, Yangsheng Xu, and colleagues at the Advanced Robotics Lab in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. It was designed to demonstrate how an autonomous robot can implement path and motion-planning algorithms. A paper about Treebot was presented recently at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (ICRA) in Shanghai. It uses grippers and tactile sensors attached to its Slinky-style body to slowly move its front, then its back, up a trunk like an inchworm.

I've always felt like Australians had their own language going on, what with all the Vegemite and Walkabouts and such, but now some Aussie researchers have set a few robots loose on the linguistic landscape. The result is that the Lingodroids have actually managed to create their own language. Using only their shared understanding of some apparently nonsense words, the Lingodroids more-or-less successfully communicated directions to each other and even created fairly accurate maps of their surroundings. Here's the basic gist of how it works. The Lingodroids assign a randomly chosen syllable combination to name a specific location.

Impossibly thin televisions, wireless HD video systems for the living room, and TVs that respond to gestures instead of a remote control were all things seen first at Ceatec, the annual gadget extravaganza outside Tokyo. The show's well-earned reputation as a peek into our gadget future remains intact as Ceatec 2010 kicks off Tuesday. It's guaranteed to be full of some of the geekiest stuff you've ever seen, along with some fantastically designed gadgets, and a mostly realistic look into what the rest of the world will some day be buying for their homes, backpacks, and cars. Oh, and there will be plenty of creepy robots too. The annual Japanese gizmo gathering will inevitably lead many Americans watching coverage from afar to ask, yet again: Why can't we get this stuff here?

SAN FRANCISCO--iRobot hopes someday soon a robot waiter will deliver your food--and it might well use an Android tablet to see, hear, speak, and think. At the Google I/O show here today, iRobot CEO Colin Angle showed off a prototype called AVA that the company plans to begin selling this year to developers to try to ignite the market. Today there are two general robot types that are sustainable businesses: high-end, expensive ones for defusing bombs in Afghanistan or monitoring radiation in Japan, and low-end ones for vacuuming. Angle wants an intermediate category and believes tablets will enable that market to develop. "The third option is the interesting one, with technology advances enabling robots to do things more like Rosie from the Jetsons," Angle told thousands of developers assembled at Google's show.

On March 8 and 9, 2011, just days before the largest earthquake in its recorded history literally moved Japan 8 feet, the country played host to the inaugural International Forum on Cybernics 2011 in Tokyo. While calling the event groundbreaking might qualify as crass, researchers showcased some truly innovative ideas in the world of cybernics, an emerging field that Japan's University of Tsukuba Cybernics department describes as the "fusion of human, machine and information systems." The word itself is a fusion of cybernetics, mechatronics, and informatics. One of those ideas, the HAL-5 exoskeleton robotics suit by Tokyo-based company Cyberdyne, is a wearable device that helps ordinary people accomplish extraordinary feats, such as lifting objects they otherwise couldn't. Think of the improvements possible for caregivers, people with missing or paralyzed limbs, the elderly who want to continue living independently, factory workers, etc. "We'd like to use the same technology to support both care-giving and heavy duties in factories," says robotics pioneer Yoshiyuki Sankai of Cybernics.