People have been trying to predict earthquakes for centuries—using animal behavior, weather, and seismic monitoring—but have had less than stellar success. As the human population shifts from a mostly rural existence to a mostly urban one, earthquakes exact a higher price, both in property damage and in lives lost.

Autonomous mobile robots rely on sensors to navigate through their environment.

If you've ever worked while resting a laptop computer on your lap, you know that computers emit heat, and the more powerful the computer, the greater the heat produced. This is a problem because electronics really don't enjoy elevated temperatures. A hot computer is a slow computer or, worse, a computer that will cease functioning.

In an increasingly wired world, knitting together data from disparate sources into an interoperable whole can present disaster managers and first responders with critical information during a major emergency or crisis. Building on a vendor-neutral interoperability framework for Web-based discovery, access, control, integration, and visualization of online sensors, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) tested this idea in a December 2006 disaster response demo.

Three major wireless communications protocol rivals have made new moves in home automation , while energy-harvesting pioneer pursues its own path to the building market.

CityTV News in Calgary, AB, Canada, reports that motorists don't see the value in road sensors installed by the city's Roads & Maintenance division.