Lifeboat Foundation

Minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, in which a surgeon uses tools and a tiny camera inserted into small incisions to perform operations, has made surgical procedures safer for both patients and doctors over the last half-century. Recently, surgical robots have started to appear in operating rooms to further assist surgeons by allowing them to manipulate multiple tools at once with greater precision, flexibility, and control than is possible with traditional techniques. However, these robotic systems are extremely large, often taking up an entire room, and their tools can be much larger than the delicate tissues and structures on which they operate.

A collaboration between Wyss Associate Faculty member Robert Wood, Ph.D. and Robotics Engineer Hiroyuki Suzuki of Sony Corporation has brought surgical robotics down to the microscale by creating a new, origami-inspired miniature remote center of motion manipulator (the “mini-RCM”). The robot is the size of a tennis ball, weighs about as much as a penny, and successfully performed a difficult mock surgical task, as described in a recent issue of Nature Machine Intelligence.

“The Wood lab’s unique technical capabilities for making micro-robots have led to a number of impressive inventions over the last few years, and I was convinced that it also had the potential to make a breakthrough in the field of medical manipulators as well,” said Suzuki, who began working with Wood on the mini-RCM in 2018 as part of a Harvard-Sony collaboration. “This project has been a great success.”

His motto is “Aim high, fly-fight-win.” But for a top U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and weapons school graduate, aiming high—and in one instance aiming low—wasn’t enough to prevail against an AI opponent in a simulated competition last week.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) sponsored the AlphaDogfight trials as part of its effort to use AI to help pilots in realtime combat and encourage developers to sign up for its Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program to design AI defense systems.

Continue reading “Heron AI prevails over human in air combat” »

A trio of researchers has found a way to pick an ordinary physical lock using a smartphone with special software. The three, Soundarya Ramesh, Harini Ramprasad, and Jun Han, gave a talk at a workshop called HotMobile 2020 at this year’s International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, outlining their work.

With traditional locks, such as those found on the front doors of most homes, a person inserts the proper (metal) key and then turns it. Doing so pushes up a series of pins in the lock by a certain amount based on the ridges on the key. When the pins are pushed in a way that matches a preset condition, the tumbler can turn, retracting the metal piece of the door assembly from its berth, allowing the door to open. In this new effort, the researchers have found that it is possible to record the sounds made as the key comes into contact with the pins and then as the pins move upward, and use software to recreate the conditions that produce the same noises. Those conditions can be used to fabricate a metal key to unlock the door. The result is a system the team calls SpiKey, which involves use of a smartphone to record lock clicks, decipher them and then create a key signature for use in creating a new metal key.

The researchers acknowledged in their presentation that the weak link in their system is recording the key unlocking the door. Because of its nature, they assume that the recording would have to be done secretly so as to not alert a homeowner that their lock is being picked. They suggest that several possible options for wrongdoers, including walking past while holding a microphone, hiding a microphone nearby, or installing software on the victim’s phone. Each has its own risks, they note, which would minimize the likelihood of run-of-the-mill burglars using such an approach. But for high-profile victims, the effort might be worth the risk. They say that they next plan to investigate ways to foil such attacks by modifying traditional locks.

The plastic tips attached to the ends of shoelaces keep them from fraying. Telomeres are repetitive DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) sequences that serve a similar function at the end of chromosomes, protecting its accompanying genetic material against genome instability, preventing cancers and regulating the aging process.

Each time a cell divides in our body, the telomeres shorten, thus functioning like a molecular “clock” of the cell as the shortening increases progressively with aging. An accurate measure of the quantity and length of these telomeres, or “clocks,” can provide vital information if a cell is aging normally, or abnormally, as in the case of cancer.

To come up with an innovative way to diagnose telomere abnormalities, a research team led by Assistant Professor Cheow Lih Feng from the NUS Institute for Health Innovation & Technology (iHealthtech) has developed a novel method to measure the absolute telomere length of individual telomeres in less than three hours. This unique telomere profiling method can process up to 48 samples from low amounts (1 ng) of DNA.

When six-time Powerboat World Champion Erik Stark climbs aboard a boat, it’s often to rocket toward a gold medal at around 150 mph (240 km/h). But today we’re all getting a chance to go along for a ride as he tests out a very different type of boat: Candela’s electric hydrofoil boat.

The opportunity comes via Stark’s new Team Subtech video where he toured the Candela factory in Stockholm, Sweden.

An extract from Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle.

At the other extreme is the massive Dyson Sphere, theorized by physicist Freeman Dyson – a metallic globe large enough to hold a star at its centre and contain a human population at a sufficient distance from the star to comfortably support their survival. This is a highly theoretical idea and is more of a thought experiment than a workable design, at least with any foreseeable technology.

Concerns have been raised about what kinds of governments might take hold in space settlements, and what possible risks they might face from ever more powerful economic and military establishments back on Earth.

Continue reading “Settling the final frontier” »

Circa 2011

This gorgeous, stainless steel and bronze toy car is simply named Toy Car, which seems an appropriately stripped-down name for such a minimalist vehicle. Without a body, or even a cover over the engine, you can see exactly how the car works.

It’s essentially a fancy version of the pull-back-and-go cars found in cereal boxes and kids’ fast-food “meals” everywhere. Pull the car backwards while pushing down and the motion of the turning wheels is stored as energy in a coiled spring inside the big central toothed wheel. Let go and it unwinds, propelling the machine forward. When the spring has fully sprung, a clutch disengages and lets the car roll free.

Continue reading “It’s a Wind Up: Gorgeous Spring-Powered Toy Car Not for Kids” »

Testing teams have successfully completed a critical milestone focused on demonstrating that NASAs James Webb Space Telescope will respond to commands once in space.

Known as a “Ground Segment Test,” this is the first time commands to power on and test Webb’s scientific instruments have been sent to the fully-assembled observatory from its Mission Operations Center at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

Since reliably communicating with Webb when in space is a mission-critical priority for NASA, tests like these are part of a comprehensive regimen designed to validate and ensure all components of the observatory will function in space with the complex communications networks involved in both sending commands, and downlinking scientific data. This test successfully demonstrated the complete end-to-end flow from planning the science Webb will perform to posting the scientific data to the community archive.