The Swiss company called K-Team invented a new kind of robot! The engineering team took as a basis the swarm intelligence of ants and created the kilobot swarm. Each of the devices follows a small set of rules, but when placed together, they mold into some sort of a universal mind clever enough to solve complex tasks. In the future, this system will be able to unify not only kilobots but other robots too, the ones we can see only at exhibitions for now.
What will happen if they start swarming around cities of the future all at once? Which robots would come to our aid during the worst disasters? Why is this piece of magnetic slime learning how to sneak into your intestines? And how will robots change our lives in a real city of the future?
Get the low down on the main differences between the Robertson and Phillips screw. Perhaps, just perhaps, you’ll never use a Phillips screw ever again.
Microsoft is warning customers that Windows updates released since June 28 will trigger printing issues on devices connected using USB.
“Microsoft has received reports of issues affecting some printing devices following installation of Windows updates released June 28 (KB5014666) and later,” Redmond explained.
Affected platforms include both client (Windows 10, version 20H2, 21H1, and 21H2) and server (Windows Server, version 20H2).
Another 999 attempts and the trash will be gone forever.
The first 100,000 kg of plastic has now been recovered from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization engaged in removing plastic dumped in oceans, revealed in a LinkedIn post.
Founded in 2013, The Ocean Cleanup is developing technologies that can help remove plastics that are discarded into the oceans as well as intercept them in the rivers before they enter the larger water bodies. The organization’s target is the GPGP in the North Pacific Ocean, where trash from countries in Asia, South America, and North America gathers into a large gyre of debris in the water. ## How does The Ocean Cleanup plan to clear it?
As part of its strategy to clear up the GPGP, the organization built System 001\.
Less than a decade since its founding, The Ocean Cleanup marks a major milestone and gears up for faster and more efficient cleanup in the future.
Scientists in China have invented a powerful laser which can essentially scorch the air to create patterns. Lasers have already been used to create optical illusions, but they needed dust or clouds as a medium.
The Wuhan-based team demonstrated the laser by writing Chinese characters in the air, which can be viewed and even touched.
Sunlight sparkling on water evokes the rich phenomena of liquid-light interaction, spanning spatial and temporal scales. While the dynamics of liquids have fascinated researchers for decades, the rise of neuromorphic computing has sparked significant efforts to develop new, unconventional computational schemes based on recurrent neural networks, crucial to supporting wide range of modern technological applications, such as pattern recognition and autonomous driving. As biological neurons also rely on a liquid environment, a convergence may be attained by bringing nanoscale nonlinear fluid dynamics to neuromorphic computing.
Researchers from University of California San Diego recently proposed a novel paradigm where liquids, which usually do not strongly interact with light on a micro-or nanoscale, support significant nonlinear response to optical fields. As reported in Advanced Photonics, the researchers predict a substantial light-liquid interaction effect through a proposed nanoscale gold patch operating as an optical heater and generating thickness changes in a liquid film covering the waveguide.
The liquid film functions as an optical memory. Here’s how it works: Light in the waveguide affects the geometry of the liquid surface, while changes in the shape of the liquid surface affect the properties of the optical mode in the waveguide, thus constituting a mutual coupling between the optical mode and the liquid film. Importantly, as the liquid geometry changes, the properties of the optical mode undergo a nonlinear response; after the optical pulse stops, the magnitude of liquid film’s deformation indicates the power of the previous optical pulse.
