Scientists aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have used magnetism as a gravity replacement in a biomanufacturing device that can make human cartilage tissue out of individual cells. The researchers say this isn’t just the first time a complex material has been assembled—it also represents an entire new field using magnets to “levitate” materials in zero-gravity environments.
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Stanford’s made a lot of progress over the years with its gecko-inspired robotic hand. In May, a version of the “gecko gripper” even found its way onto the International Space Station to test its ability to perform tasks like collecting debris and fixing satellites.
In a paper published today in Science Robotics, researchers at the university are demonstrating a far more terrestrial application for the tech: picking delicate objects. It’s something that’s long been a challenge for rigid robot hands, leading to a wide range of different solutions, including soft robotic grippers.
The team is showing off FarmHand, a four-fingered gripper inspired by both the dexterity of the human hand and the unique gripping capabilities of geckos. Of the latter, Stanford notes that the adhesive surface “creates a strong hold via microscopic flaps — Van der Waals force – a weak intermolecular force that results from subtle differences in the positions of electrons on the outsides of molecules.”
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Korea has developed a robot hand that has abilities similar to human hands. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes how they achieved a high level of dexterity while keeping the hand’s size and weight low enough to attach to a robot arm.
Creating robot hands with the dexterity, strength and flexibility of human hands is a challenging task for engineers—typically, some attributes are discarded to allow for others. In this new effort, the researchers developed a new robot hand based on a linkage-driven mechanism that allows it to articulate similarly to the human hand. They began their work by conducting a survey of existing robot hands and assessing their strengths and weaknesses. They then drew up a list of features they believed their hand should have, such as fingertip force, a high degree of controllability, low cost and high dexterity.
The researchers call their new hand an integrated, linkage-driven dexterous anthropomorphic (IDLA) robotic hand, and just like its human counterpart, it has four fingers and a thumb, each with three joints. And also like the human hand, it has fingertip sensors. The hand is also just 22 centimeters long. Overall, it has 20 joints, which gives it 15 degrees of motion—it is also strong, able to exert a crushing force of 34 Newtons—and it weighs just 1.1.kg.
Why AI will completely take over science by the end of the next decade:
‘’It can take decades for scientists to identify physical laws, statements that explain anything from how gravity affects objects to why energy can’t be created or destroyed. Purdue University researchers have found a way to use machine learning for reducing that time to just a few days.’‘.
Bionaut Labs aims to use robots smaller than a grain of rice to deliver medications exactly where they are needed and minimize the side effects for the body.
Semiconductor specialist Renesas has announced two new technologies designed to dramatically improve the efficiency of embedded devices built for the Internet of Things — by reducing the power required to write into RAM.
“With the accelerated spread of IoT technology in recent years, there has been strong demand for reduced power consumption in microcontroller units (MCUs) used in endpoint devices,” the company claims in its technology announcement. “MRAM requires less energy for write operations than flash memory, and is thus particularly well suited for applications with frequent data updates.”
“However, as demand for data processing capability surges for MCUs, the need to ameliorate the trade off between performance and power consumption increases. Therefore, further power consumption reduction remains a pressing issue.”
A NASA spacecraft has officially ‘touched’ the sun, after it plunged through the unexplored solar atmosphere known as the corona, passing just eight million miles from the core of the star.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe battled temperatures of 2370F and radiation 500 times stronger than on Earth as it made its eighth approach to the celestial body, finally passing through its upper atmosphere.
The flight occurred in April but scientists have only just been able to confirm the probe traveled through the corona, after waiting months for the data to arrive back from the spacecraft.
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