Drivers hoping to slip the surly—and traffic congested—bonds of Earth moved a step closer to realizing their dream, as a U.S. firm said it had successfully tested a street-legal plane. Massachusetts-based firm Terrafugia said their production prototype “Transition” car-plane had completed an eight-minute test flight, clearing the way for it to hit the market within a year. “With this flight,... 

Honda Motor Co on Thursday announced the development of a new continuously variable transmission (CVT) for midsize vehicles that significantly enhances both driving performance and fuel economy. The new CVT is the latest addition to the Earth Dreams Technology series of revolutionary next-generation technologies for automobiles. Also announced today, the all-new Step WGN and Step WGN Spada will be... 

Mazda Motor Corp has announced that the all-new Mazda CX-5 for the US market has been named a “Top Safety Pick” for 2012, the highest possible safety rating, by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in their crashworthiness tests. The IIHS evaluation methods include: frontal offset test for a vehicle driving at 40 mph (approximately 64km/h), side impact test for a vehicle driving at... 

When Benjamin Gleitzman moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay area, he used a talking turn-by-turn driving app to guide him across the country. In the middle of Wyoming, the voice told him to turn left where there was no road. Rather than complain to the maker of the app, called Waze, he logged in and made a note for anyone else who happened to drive that way that the road wasn’t there. It... 

BMW Group and Toyota Motor Corp have signed an agreement on collaborative research in the field of next-generation lithium-ion battery cells and have begun said research. The agreement follows the memorandum of understanding concerning a mid-to-long-term collaboration on next-generation environment-friendly vehicles and technologies announced by the two companies on Dec 1, 2011. The research project... 

There is light at hand for those who toil away in a poorly-lit office. Scientists at the CeBIT high-tech fair have developed a system that gives the feeling of working outside under blue skies. The system, called “virtual sky”, uses large flat-screen ceiling panels with 288 tiny light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that can each produce red, blue, green and white—giving a total of 16 million color combinations. The... 

Nagoya University and Fujitsu on Monday announced their successful development of the world’s first technology to analyze phone conversations to automatically detect situations in which one party might “overtrust” the other party. Specifically, this is the kind of situation in which an individual may have a diminished capacity to objectively evaluate an explanation being given by the other party. By... 

Wall Street’s bonuses fell nearly 25 per cent in 2011, a New York City fiscal watchdog estimated on Monday, a less severe drop than the industry has anticipated, though still likely to deliver a blow to the economies of New York City and New York state. Compensation experts had said this important component of total wages earned by securities industry employees would plunge 30 per cent to 40... 

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd on Tuesday announced that it has developed the world’s fastest simulation technology for systems using the ARM) computing core, widely used in mobile phones and other electronic devices. This technology is able to faithfully reproduce hardware operations with cycle-for-cycle real-time accuracy. Systems using the ARM core have become dramatically more complex in recent years,... 

Of all the weird and wacky futuristic gadgets and inventions at this year’s CeBIT, the world’s biggest high-tech fair, few have turned heads like a pair of pole-dancing robots. The sleek, white, life-sized humanoids, with camera-shaped lights as heads, gyrate suggestively to the music, provided by a third “DJ” robot, with a megaphone for a head, who bops around the stage in time to the beat. The...