Flying Robot Moves Like a Jellyfish

Flying-Robot

Miniature robots can fly like helicopters and insects. Why not a jellyfish? Weird as it sounds, Leif Ristroph of New York University decided that the aerodynamics of jellyfish offered a good method of designing a flying robot while keeping the size down

Turtle Robot Dives Wrecks

Turtle Robot

Diving shipwrecks can be dangerous work. As their name implies, these deep sea curiosities are underwater disaster zones that could trap an unwary diver.

Palm Size Drones Buzz Over Battlefield

Nano-drone

Weighing only 0.56 ounces (16 grams), the Black Hornet looks like a tiny toy helicopter. But it's really a nano-size piece of military hardware.

Pee Powered Robot

Pee Powered Robot

There's a new use for artificial hearts, and it involves a more taboo bodily fluid than blood. A device that mimics the squeezing action of the human heart has been.

World's First Robotic LEGO Band Rocks Out

Robotic LEGO

The Italian music producer has put together the “Toa Mata Band,” a quartet that includes several small robotic LEGO figures programmed to play various electronic instruments.

Can Drones Save the Elephants?

This week, 89 African elephants in southern Chad were slaughtered for their ivory tusks, the worst such incident since the killing of 300 elephants a year ago in Cameroon.
To stop the massacre of these stately beasts, conservation groups are fighting poachers with eye-in-the-sky drones.

CONTACT LENSES COULD SEND TEXTS TO YOUR EYES

CONTACT LENSES

Belgian technologists just created curved liquid crystal display for contact lenses, a novel step toward having augmented reality literally right before our eyes.

Indian Sitar Legend Ravi Shankar Dead at 92

Ravi Shankar

World-renowned sitar player Ravi Shankar, one of the greatest ambassadors of Indian music, has died in San Diego, near his Southern California home. He was 92 years old.

CASSETTES COMING BACK IN A NEW WAY

CASSETTES

Cassette tapes are dead. Long live cassette tapes! The music staple of the late 20th century is making a comeback in the form of big data storage. That's right, kids, the same thing that made the mix tape possible in the 80s could hold tomorrow's pictures and mp3 files.

KINETIC CHARGER MAKES YOU A POWER SOURCE

Just the other day, I read yet another article about the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle. I was sitting while I read it. Don't judge. Obviously, being active is good for our health, but what if it was good for our gadget's battery life? A concept device from design studen Toby Blake uses movement to power up your phone.

SUN-POWERED OVEN MAKES SALT WATER DRINKABLE

What if getting clean, drinkable water to developing countries was as simple as using a resource they already have in abundance? Sunlight. Designer Gabriele Diamanti believes this simple idea is key to solving the world's water problem -- so much so, that's he created the Eliodomestico oven, which turns salt water into drinkable water.

NANOSCIENCE EXPLAINED: GOTTA-SEE VIDEO

Nanoscience is small science with huge possibility. "Nano-" is a prefix that means "a billionth." Basically just recognize that when we talk about nanoparticles, nanobots, nanoscience, nanotubes or nanotech, this stuff is REALLY tiny. Nanoscience has been around a while, but people aren't necessarily aware of what research and applications are being explored. Take a quick tour of nanoscience here and learn enough to make a few declarative statements

'Curiosity Rover’ Ultimate UAV With 17 Cameras

One of the best parts of having NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars is the incredible images that it’s going to start beaming back to viewers on Earth.

After the probe’s safe landing, it sent several pictures of its wheels on the ground to mission control to let engineers know that everything was okay. But these dusty, close-up images cannot compare to the snapshots that the rover will soon be taking.

WI-FI SEES MOVEMENT THROUGH WALLS

Your Wi-Fi router helps out in a lot of situations, mostly pertaining to surfing the Web for info or connecting with other people. However, researchers from the University College in London have created a detector that uses Wi-Fi to detect movement through a brick wall that’s one-foot thick.

Wi-Fi radio signals are found in 61 percent of households nationwide. Researchers Karl Woodbridge and Kevin Chetty developed a suitcase-size device that can use these signals along with the Doppler effect to detect movement.

'SUPER FALCON' SUB AIMS TO FLY UNDERWATER

A new submarine could pull off underwater maneuvers similar to aircraft flying stunts during a Lake Tahoe expedition in October. The makers of the DeepFlight Super Falcon hope to raise $45,000 through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to test the boundaries of submarine technology.

The two-seater submersible resembles a sleek missile or aircraft with wings, tail surfaces and ailerons -- the brainchild of Graham Hawkes and Hawkes Ocean Technologies based near San Francisco. Such a sleek design allowed the Hawkes team to dream big and set the goal of pulling off a full underwater loop similar to what World War I fighter pilots pulled off during aerial dogfights.

Japanese scientists create first swimming robot

Tokyo University of Technology has created a 'Swumanoid' robot using a 3D scanner to perfectly map a human swimmer's physique, which has perfected the back-stroke and tries freestyle swimming.

Apart from life-saving ambitions, the Swumanoid can be useful in helping research into swimming.

The team, led by associate professor Motomu Nakashima, hopes that eventually robots like the Swumanoid can act as robot lifeguards, patrolling our shores and helping swimmers in distress, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

ARTIFICIAL JELLYFISH MADE FROM RAT CELLS

Aside from Frankenstein, previous attempts to make synthetic life have focused on genes. Geneticist Craig Venter and his colleagues, for example, announced in 2010 that they had created a one-celled creature by inserting an artificial genome in an existing cell that reproduced.

Now a separate team of scientists from Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology have built an eight-armed jellyfish by inserting muscle cells from a rat into a sheet of silicone.