Lifeboat Foundation

MIT team develops steerable soft thread-like robot capable of navigating tiny blood vessels

Snake robots are among the most familiar type of mechanical device for working in confined spaces. Flexible, tubular robots have been used for applications such as working in the interior of nuclear reactors, water distribution systems and inside the human body to aid surgery. The MIT team, mechanical engineers affiliated to the institution’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, have downsized the snake paradigm to the scale of a thread half a millimetre in diameter, which can be remotely controlled by magnetic fields to worm its way through the convoluted blood vessels of the brain to deliver clot-busting drugs or devices to break up and remove the blockage. Such robots have the potential to quickly treat a stroke and prevent damage to the brain, the team claims.

| Hackaday

Quantum computers aren’t quite ready for the home lab, but since there are ways to connect to some over the Internet, you can experiment with them more easily than you might think. [Norbert] decided to interface a giant quantum computer to an ordinary Arduino. Why? Well, that isn’t necessarily clear, but then again, why not? He explains basic quantum computing and shows his setup in the video below.

Continue reading “Arduino Meets Quantum Computer” »

Sonifying science: from an amino acid scale to a spider silk symphony – Physics World.

Markus Buehler and Mario Milazzo explain how they have been able to explore new avenues of research by translating living structures into sound.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to a tweet on Monday discussing the risk posed to him and his family by publishing details about his travel plans.

It’s unclear whether or not the new Ryzen-based systems can run Crysis.

A team of physicists, philosophers and biologists have come up with a list of organisms that could withstand the harsh conditions of interstellar space, and tardigrades take the top spot.

The back of your eye, called the retina, reveals a wealth of health information to doctors, and may one day show your body’s true biological age, regardless of how old you are.

On one hand, he wants to travel to other planets and on the other he wants to make our planet cleaner. So I really wonder, do you think he’s helping the world or is he out of touch with reality?

Light-matter interactions form the basis of many important technologies, including lasers, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and atomic clocks. However, usual computational approaches for modeling such interactions have limited usefulness and capability. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a technique that overcomes these limitations.

In a study published this month in The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, a research team led by the University of Tsukuba describes a highly efficient method for simulating light-matter interactions at the atomic scale.

What makes these interactions so difficult to simulate? One reason is that phenomena associated with the interactions encompass many areas of physics, involving both the propagation of light waves and the dynamics of electrons and ions in matter. Another reason is that such phenomena can cover a wide range of length and time scales.