MENLO PARK, Calif.--If you've never seen a robot climb straight up an entirely flat vertical wall, I dare you not to be impressed the first time you do. That was my certainly experience when I watched a wall-climbing robot do its thing at SRI International here the other day. Indeed, my host, who had been with me through several product and project demonstrations over about three hours, noticed how excited I was by watching this little device go straight up the wall, and, I think, began to wonder if I was actually interested in any of the other things I'd seen. In fact, she shouldn't have worried. I was at SRI as part of my ongoing Road Trip at Home series and was getting a rapid-fire lay of the land at this Silicon Valley research and development--and incubation--powerhouse.

Early 16th Century Hans Bullmann creates the first androids - simulated people that can play musical instruments for the delight of paying customers. While training as a Jesuit, Jacques Vaucanson creates flying angels which cause him to be thrown out of the order. Five years later, funding is cancelled when the shortcomings of the machine become apparent. Academics start to concentrate on small, smart useful robots rather than simulated people. Genghis, one of the first walking robots created by the mobile robots lab at MIT, makes its debut.

Your email address will not be published. Imagine checking in at the airport, buying a cup of coffee at a local café, even paying for your clothes or groceries at the store's register… all with a quick wireless scan of your smartphone. It's all possible today, thanks to a new type of tech called Near Field Communications (NFC). No receipts to sign and then stuff into your pocket. The spread of NFC technology is a win-win for the customer and the merchant alike.

It's hard to teach a robot to sew. Robots are good at handling materials that are rigid and easy to lift, cut and maneuver. It's why they're are widely used in auto manufacturing. There's some automation in garment manufacturing, but you still won't find robots sewing clothes from start to finish. "It has no corners and edges. It stretches and snags," said entrepreneur Jonathan Zornow, whose startup Sewbo has found a way around that.

Jones built his first fortune in the early 1990s. A graduate of Indiana University, he was working as a research scientist at MIT's artificial intelligence lab when he met Greg Carr, a Harvard grad student. Carr believed that the 1984 breakup of Ma Bell would present some sort of opportunity, and the two 26-year-olds would just have to figure out what it might be. At a telecom conference in Atlanta, Jones saw the current state-of-the-art voicemail hardware: million-dollar refrigerator-sized machines invented in the early '80s. "I was coming out of MIT's AI lab, where everything was progressive, young, vibrant, energetic," says Jones with characteristic chutzpah.

The earliest instances of robotics all seem to have been created for artistic reasons, and were usually in the form of automatons, generally for theatrical and musical use. The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time…As the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would have had Yen Shih [Yan Shi] executed on the spot had not the latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to pieces to let him see what it really was.

Dubai: In the build-up to the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC), students from 28 universities across the globe have been developing prototypes for flying robots that can "think" for themselves. No longer the domain of science fiction, autonomous aerial vehicles have uses in the military, natural disasters, medical emergencies and other areas that have yet to be looked into. This year Bits Pilani's Dubai team came first in the IARC held recently in North Dakota. The eight students, whose majors include electronics, mechanical engineering, computer science and IT, built an autonomous indoor flying vehicle that could navigate through an unknown environment and retrieve a 100-gram object. Although the prototype didn't manage to retrieve an object -- to win the $20,000 prize money -- it got the maximum number of points.

For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips's technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone. But in 2008, Mr. Phillips's company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. "I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market," Nuance's chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation. Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci's company filed the first of six lawsuits. Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci's firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees. When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won.

IT'S EVERYONE'S FONDEST DREAM: A COMPUTER THAT WILL do your legal work and won't bill you at $400 an hour. Sorry, it's not about to happen anytime soon. But then there's Frederic Parnon, a former Manhattan litigator who left his firm five years ago to develop software that can be used to give legal advice of sorts. Working from a cramped, nondescript lab above Rockefeller Center, Parnon has spent more than $1 million of his own moneycreating a program called Jnana, which means "knowledge"in Sanskrit. Already, a handful of companies and law firms, such as General Electric, J.P. Morgan and Davis Polk & Wardwell, have bought the program and customized it for their needs. Typically the program is made available to employees through the Internet, allowing them access to advice they aren't getting–or are paying to get from law firms.

Strange but true - a real world mineral with most of the chemical properties of kryptonite has been discovered in Serbia, and now reposes (disguised by the harmless-sounding moniker "jadarite") in the Natural History Museum's mineral hall. Also in the science news this week, Harvard Medical School is conducting experiments that should lead to the development of Six Million Dollar Man-style bionic vision: stimulating the visual centres of the brain and routing the results through a prosthetic eye. Equally startling are the smart retinal implants being developed at the University of Bonn (reported in last week's New Scientist), where sighted users are "training" the software for the ultimate in vision-replacement. The research is medical, but one day, not far off, innovations like this will be giving us wearable computers: the eye that really is a camera; internet access at a blink. It's hardly surprising if the children of the 21st century find it difficult to distinguish between a scientific discovery, this year's new gadget, and utterly fantastic concepts such as the man with the 50s'do, who wears his pants over his tights and flies faster than a speeding bullet.