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Tech
Engineers routinely face tradeoffs as they design robotic limbs – weight vs. speed, ease of control vs. fluidity. A new hybrid fluid transmission developed at Disney Research Pittsburgh promises to eliminate some of those tradeoffs, making possible robot arms that are light enough to move swiftly and gracefully, yet with precise control.
North Carolina State University researchers have developed a suite of technologies that can be used to enhance communication between dogs and humans, which has applications in everything from search and rescue to service dogs to training our pets.
New York | Heidelberg, 30 October 2014 Biological membranes are mainly composed of lipid bilayers. Gaining a better understanding of adsorption of solution ions onto lipid membranes helps clarify functional processes in biological cells. Now, a new study provides a quantitative description of the equilibria between lipid membranes and surrounding solution ions. Joanna Kotyńska and Zbigniew Figaszewski from the University of Bialystok, Poland, are the authors of a study describing these findings, just published in EPJ E.
"All we need is these self-propelled nanorobots and UV light," said Jinxing Li, a doctoral student at the Jacobs School of Engineering and first author. "They work together like minions, moving and writing and are easily controlled by a simple magnet."
Research suggesting air pollutants released by unconventional oil and gas production are well over recommended levels in the US is published today in the open access journal Environmental Health. High levels of benzene, hydrogen sulfide and formaldehyde were found. The study is the first to be based on community sampling by people who live near production sites and could be used to supplement official air-quality monitoring programs.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – With an eye toward making better running robots, researchers have made surprising new findings about some of nature's most energy efficient bipeds – running birds.
Although birds are designed primarily for flight, scientists have learned that species which predominately live on land and scurry around on the ground are also some of the most sophisticated runners of any two-legged land animals. These characteristics may have been evolving since the time of the dinosaurs and, some would say, now transcend the ability of other bipedal runners, including humans.
Among the top 125 colleges on a list compiled by U.S. News & World Report, 48 percent have indoor tanning facilities either on campus or in off-campus housing despite evidence that tanning is a risk factor for skin cancer, according to a study published online by JAMA Dermatology.
NORTH GRAFTON, Mass. Developing resiliency has important benefits for children, especially those from military families faced with significant challenges such as parental deployment and frequent moves. New research published online in Applied Developmental Science supports the idea that, along with other key resources, strong attachments to animals may help military-connected children develop resiliency and other positive developmental traits.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 29, 2014—Scientists and science fiction writers alike have dreamt of aircrafts that are propelled by beams of light rather than conventional fuels. Now, a new method for improving the thrust generated by such laser-propulsion systems may bring them one step closer to practical use.
In addition to providing other potential benefits to public health, all of those tweets and Facebook posts could help curb the spread of HIV.
Although public health researchers have focused early applications of social media on reliably monitoring the spread of diseases such as the flu, Sean Young of the Center for Digital Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes in an October 29th article in the Cell Press journal Trends in Microbiology of a future in which social media might predict and even change biomedical outcomes.
In a darkened, hangar-like space inside MIT's Building 41, a small, Roomba-like robot is trying to make up its mind.
Standing in its path is an obstacle — a human pedestrian who's pacing back and forth. To get to the other side of the room, the robot has to first determine where the pedestrian is, then choose the optimal route to avoid a close encounter.
Your next pair of yoga pants could be made out of corn or, more precisely, from dextrose derived from corn, part of a 20 year effort toward consumer goods that are being produced from plants rather than petroleum-based materials. But a complete transition to a biobased economy won't be easy, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN).
Cities around the world are increasingly making urban data freely available to the public. But is the content or structure of these vast data sets easy to access and of value? A new study of more than 9,000 data sets from 20 cities presents encouraging results on the quality and volume of the available data and describes the challenges and benefits of analyzing and integrating these expanding data sets, as described in an article in Big Data.
Sophia Antipolis, 20 October 2014. The condition of an athlete's heart has for the first time been accurately monitored throughout the duration of a marathon race. The real-time monitoring was achieved by continuous electrocardiogram (ECG) surveillance and data transfer over the public mobile phone network to a telemedicine centre along the marathon route. This new development in cardiac testing in endurance athletes, said investigators, "would allow instantaneous diagnosis of potentially fatal rhythm disorders".