Robots are taking over Chicago. Experts showed off three animal-inspired robots today at the annual meeting of AAAS, which publishes Science. The robots are designed to gallop, navigate, and swim like their real-world cheetah, ant, and fish counterparts. The mechanical trio’s novel movement could help future robots trek across the rocky terrain of other planets and plunge into the dark depths of the ocean.
Falls are the leading cause of injury for older adults, causing more than 20,000 deaths a year in the United States alone. Now, a team of researchers is using the same technology found in smartphone touch screens to detect these dangerous tumbles as soon as they happen.
The truth behind the mysterious underwater circles that periodically appear off the coast of Denmark has been discovered, and sadly it doesn’t involve aliens, fairies, or the fabled lost city of Atlantis. In 2008, a tourist snapped photos of several large dark rings that appeared near the white cliffs of Denmark’s island of Møn in the Baltic Sea.
Unlike books, curling up with a good scroll is a bad thing. Long-term storage of bound scrolls can cause the edges of the paper to twist outward, potentially tearing fibers and fading ink. Curators have traditionally blamed the deformation, known in Chinese as Qi-Wa, on humidity and imperfections in the scroll’s construction, but the biggest culprit is the flexible backing layer that the ornate top layer is mounted on, according to a mathematical formula reported this month in Physical Review Letters.
A mother Magellanic penguin pants doglike in the afternoon heat, shading her newborn chick from the hot sun. But it’s not enough. The chick’s thick downy coat isn’t designed for the heat, and its efforts to stretch out its wings and neck to cool off don’t work. Despite the mother’s best efforts, the youngster dies.
As the Voyager space probes plunge into the inky cosmic void, each carries a golden record with 27 songs ranging from Mozart to Chuck Berry. Now, with help from a musical physicist, the twin space probes boast a song of their own.
Robot lovers, rejoice: The world is one step closer to “robocat.” Many mammals use special hairs on their faces to feel for unseen objects. Researchers realized artificial whiskers could help robots sense the world around them, but until now, attempts at whiskerlike sensors have been bulky and inefficient. Using cutting-edge materials, a team of researchers has now developed electronic whiskers with a sensitivity and size mimicking their natural counterparts.
The latest Hollywood blockbuster may be coming soon to a window near you. Researchers have developed a see-through video screen embedded with silver nanoparticles that’s both scalable and relatively inexpensive. While traditional projection screens come in pearly white in order to evenly reflect the whole spectrum of visible light, the new display reflects only a single, specific shade of blue.
Things are heating up in the world of genetics. The hot pepper (Capsicum annuum) is one of the most widely grown spice crops globally, playing an important role in many medicines, makeups, and meals worldwide. Although the plant’s so-called capsaicin chemical is well known for spicing things up, until now the genetic spark responsible for the pepper’s pungency was unknown.
By itself, the migratory locust is about as harmless as a grasshopper. But under the right conditions, it can assemble with billions of its comrades into apocalyptic swarms that destroy thousands of hectares of crops in Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Now, scientists have discovered that a gut parasite may be key to keeping these insects living the single life.
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