Posts

In the evocatively titled “Cockroaches traverse crevices, crawl rapidly in confined spaces, and inspire a soft, legged robot,” Kaushik Jayaram and Robert Full of the Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley explain what they learned about roach compression and how they applied it to their robot. Essentially, roach bodies are really elastic. Standing normally 10mm (or less than half an inch) tall, roaches can squeeze through gaps as narrow as 3mm (or 1/10th of an inch) and then rise to their full height....

Ghost Robotics, makers of a family of four-legged robots called Q-UGVs, has made dog-like robots for the military for a few years. These robots have been seen everywhere from trade show floors in Detroit to guarding an Air Force base in Florida. But at the Association of the United States Army’s 2021 annual conference, held in Washington, DC on October 11-13, the Q-UGV on display featured a rifle mounted in a pod on its back....

This also means that for solar power to continue to transition society towards green, renewable energy systems, designers will need to get creative on how to keep costs down while maintaining efficacy. One potential solution courtesy of the solar installation startup, Erthos, is to embrace a hyper-minimalist approach to their panel arrays. The company recently announced a partnership with Industrial Sun for a radically designed, 100 megawatt (mW) utility-scale solar farm in Texas that does away with traditional elevated, racked setups in favor of installing panels directly across the ground....

Foresters have long marveled at so-called living stumps, tree remnants that manage to stay hydrated and nourished despite losing their leaves, branches, and trunks. These undead relics sometimes inspire comparisons to zombies, but recent results suggest that vampirism might be a more apt metaphor. A team of New Zealand ecologists have determined that at least one vivacious hunk of wood staves off death by literally sapping its neighbors’ lifeforce through a shared underground root network....

Watch A French Researcher Control A Robot With His BrainVets Want A Global Monitoring System To Track Sickness In Pets Before It Jumps To HumansTo Fight Bacteria, Coat Everything In MucusFYI: Can Japan’s Latest Soft Drink Really Help You Lose Weight? And don’t forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week: Innovation Of The Year: Google NowThe Best of What’s NewFYI: What Is Sea Foam? Where Does It Come From?...

The technical term for this worst-case scenario is Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first used the RCPs in preparing their Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2014. There are four main RCPs: 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, 8.5. The numbers represent different values for radiative forcing, a measure of how much of the sun’s energy the atmosphere traps. Starting with 2005, the RCPs project the trajectory of greenhouses gas into 2100....

Below, a few of our favorite at-home weight sets. This dumbbell set from Bowflex is essentially 15 sets of dumbbells in one compact set. Just turn the dial to change the resistance anywhere from 5 pounds to 52.5 pounds. The nice thing for beginner lifters is the weight can be changed in 2.5-pound increments for the first 25 pounds. These weights also come with a case to hold them in....

As I write this, fires are consuming huge swathes of Australia and conditions are expected to worsen. The situation is attracting global interest, and reporting has been extensive. But it isn’t always easy to find reliable information on how the situation is developing in specific areas that are home to your family and friends. The following short guide draws on my experience covering bushfires as a reporter and my academic research....

Percussion massagers have been raved about by athletes and casual users, largely due to their efficiency in preventing DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness). Percussive therapy has also been found to help in enhancing range of motion, relieving pain, speed recovery, and promoting healthy circulation. While brand-name percussion massagers are endorsed left and right by fitness influencers, it doesn’t mean that they’re the only effective ones on the market. FirstHealth Deep Tissue Percussion Massager works just as great and costs significantly less....

The upshot is that Twitter will become a private company after the transaction is completed, and all Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock. The company is expected to release this year’s first quarter earnings on April 28. After trying to enact a “poison pill” in response to the takeover attempt, Bret Taylor, Twitter’s independent board chair, said the company comprehensively evaluated Musk’s proposal and found that it would “deliver a substantial cash premium” for Twitter shareholders....

The weather organization released The Provisional State of the Global Climate in 2022, which finds that the past eight years were the hottest on record and notes that the changing climate has become more apparent. Since 1993, the rate of sea level rise has doubled, with the past two and a half years alone accounting for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements began about three decades ago....

A newly published, 6-year global survey of 1,000 sites in 87 marine protected areas across 40 countries has found that at least 4 of 5 key factors must be present for a marine reserve to succeed: The researchers shorthand these features as “NEOLI”: no take, enforced, old, large and isolated. The scope of this project is “an order of magnitude bigger-scale than what’s been done before in terms of field studies,” says co-author and field biologist Graham J....

Here, let’s try that again, slower: That’s three bursts. The first is 30 rounds, and the second and third are each 60 rounds. After firing, the F-35A pilot would have 31 rounds of its initial 181 left in its gun. The gun fires at 3,000 rounds per minute, which means a pilot can be out of ammunition in under four seconds of combat. The Marines’ F-35B and the Navy’s F-35C variants will each carry 220 rounds of ammunition in external “conformal pods”, rather than internally like in the F-35A....

At first, the sharks seemed skeptical. Then they pounced! Though, they quickly became bored of the iron seal and swam away. Further observations found that the sharks would often lurk below the drones, before suddenly swimming up and striking in the middle, like in the second gif above. Members of the Oceanographic Systems Lab of the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution captured the footage and compiled it in a video below....

“It’s a thoroughbred, all-electric racing plane,” says Matheu Parr, who leads the project for Rolls-Royce. Here’s what to know about the experimental aircraft and why Rolls-Royce is flying it. How does the plane work? The aircraft, which has flown three times, resembles a regular airplane on the outside. In fact, it began as a kit, a Sharp Nemesis NXT, a type of small aircraft known for competing in the Reno Air Races in Nevada; in 2009 it reached speeds of more than 400 mph....

The Delta Flume is nearly 1000 feet long, 16 feet wide, and over 30 feet deep. Water in the flume is pushed along by a 32 foot high wave-making wall that shoves it into huge waves, battering a slope at the other end of the structure. There, scientists will be able to test the durability of storm mitigating techniques including boulder barriers, sand and mud banks, and even trees. The wall of water is both beautiful and terrifying at first, and almost looks ready to change into something else (think Star Trek: DS9 or Terminator 2) See the resemblance?...

The electric vehicle from Geely will be a “version” of a vehicle called Zeekr, Waymo said in a blog post, and will be created “specially for autonomous ride-hailing.” The floors will be flat, and as envisioned today, it will have bench seats facing forwards. Waymo touts the amenities the cabin will hold, such as easily-reachable phone chargers and screens, and also looks towards a future where the most notable feature may be that which the car lacks, like a steering wheel....

We might smooch to pass along sex chemicals… But though some primates, like chimpanzees and bonobos, do seem to kiss like we do (and even slip in some tongue) it turns out that humans are nearly alone in the animal world when it comes to the desire to kiss romantically. How come? It could be our way of passing along cues about our willingness and ability to mate. Since humans emit chemical signals through their saliva, kissing could be our equivalent of, say, peeing all over the place or flying upwind of a potential partner....

Embalming may be our worst offender. The practice of filling bodies with chemicals like formaldehyde to preserve them dates back to ancient Egypt, but it caught on stateside in the mid-1800s as a way to transport fallen Civil War soldiers. Today, U.S. morticians embalm roughly 1 million people every year. It takes between 3 and 4 gallons of chemicals to preserve the average body. That’s a lot of carcinogens to leave floating around for the sake of the dead....