The Silver Swan sits on a stream made of twisted glass rods and within a clear glass box. It preens and stares intently into its fabricated pond before swallowing up a little silver fish. When Mark ...

The developers behind “Bitcraft: Age of Automata” want you to build the world from the ground up. Villages, towns, cities, nations and empires are all in players hands. That’s how Clockwork Labs ...

For a moment, suspend your worldview and adopt Descartes’s mechanistic interpretation that living beings are essentially complex machines: a collection of inherently unrelated parts that move and ...

The height of interest in automata was from the 1880s to the 1920s. One of the key forms of automata from this time was the figures dancing on French music boxes. Did you know with a Digital ...

This essay is excerpted from Strange Frequencies by Peter Bebergal, published by Penguin/TarcherPerigree. In an enormous Goodwill in Seattle, the horologist (a watchmaker and expert in related devices ...

Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor, and she hopes to get you as enthralled with the wonders of the universe as she is. When she's not daydreaming about flying through space, she's daydreaming ...