Toggle light / dark theme

In organisms, fluid is what binds the organs, the and the musculoskeletal system as a whole. For example, hemolymph, a blood-like fluid in a spider’s body, enables muscle activation and exoskeleton flexibility. It was the cucumber spider inhabiting Estonia that inspired scientists to create a complex , where soft and rigid parts are made to work together and are connected by a liquid.

According to Indrek Must, Associate Professor of Soft Robotics, the designed soft robot is based on real reason. “Broadly speaking, our goal is to build systems from both natural and artificial materials that are as effective as in wildlife. The robotic leg could touch delicate objects and move in the same complex environments as a living spider,” he explains.

In a published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the researchers show how a robotic foot touches a primrose stamen, web, and pollen grain. This demonstrates the soft robot’s ability to interact with very small and delicate structures without damaging them.

Although the Tesla Cybertruck has only been available for about six months, it is already making a major splash in the electric pickup scene.

According to data from S&P Global Mobility, Tesla’s first all-electric pickup had more registrations in March than one of its most notable foes, the Rivian R1T.

March was the fourth month the Tesla Cybertruck was available for purchase. Production is still ramping, and after Tesla built 1,000 units in a single week during Q1, it is evident the company is starting to get the hang of things.

But out of everything Meta announced, one particular demo blew my mind. Meta AI comes with its own image-generation tool called Imagine, which is available in beta to some WhatsApp and web users. The new Meta AI feature can do something OpenAI’s ChatGPT can’t: It creates images instantly with no waiting necessary.

This is the second time an AI product has blown my mind this week. Earlier, I showed you Microsoft’s VASA-1 tool, which generates talking video clips out of a portrait image and a voice recording. VASA-1 isn’t made for the public though, and we might never get access to this particular AI. Anyone could create misleading fakes with it, so Microsoft is only showing off a proof of concept.

Sign up for the most interesting tech & entertainment news out there.

The tension between quantum mechanics and relativity has long been a central split in modern-day physics. Developing a theory of quantum gravity remains one of the great outstanding challenges of the discipline. And yet, no one has yet been able to do it. But as we collect more data, it shines more light on the potential solution, even if some of that data happens to show negative results.

That happened recently with a review of data collected at IceCube, a neutrino detector located in the Antarctic ice sheet, and compiled by researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington. They looked for signs that gravity could vary even a minuscule amount based on quantum mechanical fluctuations. And, to put it bluntly, they didn’t find any evidence of that happening.

To check for these minuscule fluctuations, they analyzed more than 300,000 detected neutrinos that IceCube had captured. IceCube is an impressive engineering feat, with thousands of sensors buried over one sq km in the ice. When one of the detectors is triggered by one of a hundred trillions of neutrinos passing through it every second, data on whether it was affected by any perturbations in the local gravity of that area can be collected.

Scientists use laser ablation technology to develop a deformable micro-supercapacitor. Professor Jin Kon Kim and Dr. Keon-Woo Kim from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), in collaboration with Dr. Chanwoo Yang and Researcher Seong Ju Park from the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH), have achieved a significant breakthrough in developing a small-scale energy storage device capable of stretching, twisting, folding, and wrinkling. Their research has been published in the electronic engineering journal, npj Flexible Electronics.

The advent of wearable technology has brought with it a pressing need for energy storage solutions that can keep pace with the flexibility and stretchability of soft electronic devices.

Micro supercapacitors (MSCs) have emerged as a promising candidate for deformable energy storage, due to high-power density, rapid charging, and long cycle life.

Photo : siqi zhao & huirong yan.

Astrophysicists from the University of Potsdam have made a significant step toward solving the last puzzle in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence theory by observing the weak to strong transition in the space plasma turbulence surrounding Earth with newly developed multi-spacecraft analysis methods. Their pioneering discovery was published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Turbulence is ubiquitous in nature. It exists everywhere, from our daily lives to the distant universe, while being labelled as “the last great unsolved problem of classical physics” by Richard Feynman.