Researchers at Northwestern University have created a robotic fish that can move from swimming forward and backward to swimming vertically almost instantaneously by using a ribbon-like fin inspired by the black ghost knifefish – a night fish that lives in rivers of the Amazon basin. It hunts for prey using a weak electric field around ... »
Located on a scenic waterfront site in downtown St. Petersburg, Fla., the 6,317 square-meter (68,000-square-foot) structure doubles the size of the original 1982 Dali Museum, a one-story warehouse. Exhibits include oils, watercolors, sketches, sculptures and other works from a 2,140-piece permanent collection. It stands more than 22.8 meters (75 feet) tall and is decorated by ... »
The fruit fly has evolved a method for arranging the tiny, hair-like structures it uses to feel and hear the world. A team of researchers in Israel and at Carnegie Mellon University were inspired by that method and they think it could be used for more effectively deployed wireless sensor networks, such as environmental monitoring, ... »
In his experiment, University of Vermont roboticist Josh Bongard created both simulated and actual robots that, just like tadpoles become frogs, change their body forms while learning how to walk. Over iterations in versions (generations), his simulated robots managed to evolve – spending less time in “infant” tadpole-like forms and more time in “adult” four-legged ... »
After writing about bird-protection glass and blast-resistant glass, here’s an article about glass which is stronger and tougher than steel. A new type of damage-tolerant metallic glass has been developed and tested by a collaboration of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the California Institute of ... »
Researchers from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have broken one of the major roadblocks on the path to growing transplantable tissue in the lab, because they found a way to grow the blood vessels and capillaries needed to keep tissues alive. In a combination with their previous research, the team could grow ... »
A while ago, we wrote about Siftables – a different approach used for information interaction which allows physical and natural way to interact with information. David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, the folks that initially made the prototype while they were students at the human-computer interaction at the MIT Media Lab, co-founded Sifteo Inc. and presented ... »
