Lifeboat Foundation

Picture this: hundreds of ant-sized robots climb over rubble, under rocks and between debris to inspect the damage of a fallen building before human rescuers explore on-site.

Downscaling legged robots to the size of an insect enables access to small spaces that humans and large robots cannot reach. A swarm of small robots can even collaborate like their insect counterparts to haul objects and protect one another. Picotaur, a new robot from the labs of Sarah Bergbreiter and Aaron Johnson is the first of its size, able to run, turn, push loads and climb miniature stairs.

“This robot has legs that are driven by multiple actuators so it can achieve various locomotion capabilities,” said Sukjun Kim, a recent Ph.D. graduate advised by Bergbreiter. “With multiple gait patterns, it can walk like other hexapod robots, similar to how a cockroach moves, but it can also hop from the ground to overcome obstacles.”

Scientists hope to accelerate the development of human-level AI using a network of powerful supercomputers — with the first of these machines fully operational by 2025.

Solar opponents will have to figure out a new line of attack when perovskite solar cells suddenly plaster the world.

Hey, I have a nice story for you. During my childhood, I used to live in Italy. We would eat pasta every day and life was simple. I loved my house, but one d…

SOM, the architecture firm behind some of the world’s tallest buildings, is working to develop gravity energy storage solutions for skyscrapers and other buildings.

Helen Edwards was a particle physicist who led the design and construction of the Tevatron, a machine built to probe deeper into the atom than anyone had gone before.

Data centers are facilities that house the computing hardware used to process and store data. While some businesses maintain their own data centers on site, many others rely on ones owned and operated by someone else.

As our digital world continues to grow, demand for data centers — and clean electricity to operate them — is also increasing. To find out how we’ll be able to keep up, let’s look at the history of data centers, the challenges facing them, and ideas for overcoming those issues — on land, at sea, and in space.

A trio of chemists at the University of Copenhagen has developed an AI application that can be used to figure out the phase of x-rays that crystals have diffracted as part of efforts to predict the structure of small molecules.

Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have made unexpected progress toward developing a new optical memory that can quickly and energy-efficiently store and access computational data. While studying a complex material composed of manganese, bismuth and tellurium (MnBi2Te4), the researchers realized that the material’s magnetic properties changed quickly and easily in response to light. This means that a laser could be used to encode information within the magnetic states of MnBi2Te4.