Technology
Stimuli-responsive polymers will bring next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots.
Even now, these materials have made robots that can walk, swim and jump. Now, a FAIRY can even fly. FAIRY is the nickname of the Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly program at Tampere University. It flies by wind and is controlled by light, using a soft actuator.
"The actuator is made of light-responsive liquid crystalline elastomer, which induces opening or closing actions of the bristles upon visible light excitation,” explains Hao Zeng, group…
Empathy is critical to having supportive conversations about mental health. But this skill can be tricky to learn, especially in the moment when a person is sharing something hard.
A team led by researchers at the University of Washington studied how artificial intelligence could help people on the platform TalkLife, where people give each other mental health support. The researchers developed an AI system that suggested changes to participants' responses to make them more empathetic. The system helped people communicate empathy more effectively than traditional training did. In fact,…
One Drive a service many Windows users rely on for storage and, unadvisedly as backup, is down. This will be especially bothersome for devices that have smaller internal drives and rely on the cloud for storage, and for certain office apps that rely on the cloud. UPDATE: They are slowly restarting their servers and the service is coming back little by little. Events like this are a reminder to back up your data. Have at least two offline backups, one of which is a cold backup not attached to your computer unless it is being written to. …
In 2017, three researchers from the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE), Denis Bourguet, Benoit Facon and Thomas Guillemaud, founded Peer Community In (PCI), a peer-review-based service for recommending preprints (referring to the version of an article that a scientist submits to a review committee).
The service greenlights articles and makes them and their reviews, data, codes and scripts available on an open-access basis. Out of this concept, PCI paved the way for researchers to regain control of their review and publishing system in an effort to…
If you’ve drunk the MBA kool-aid, you believe VCs and M&A bean-counters rationally price their investments. If an honest professor has confessed to you that company valuation is a black art, i.e., that there’s a heavy dose of intuition involved, you’ve been ahead of the game. The Twitter cockup now shows valuation to be a total dice-roll.
There are, in any case, fewer reasons to buy a company. In the knowledge age and the digital era, there are few hard assets (capital equipment or real estate) to acquire. Then what? The engineers? The brand? The eyeballs?
The knowledge workers are…
My nice Plaxo online address book disappeared when the host company was sold and the buyer discontinued the service. My contacts, up in smoke.
Dropbox (cloud storage and data synch) and TunnelBear (VPN) both decided not to support my OS any more, as did Google Chrome. I face expensive upgrades.
Evernote (online note taking and note storage) lost all my data some years back. I gave them a second chance. Now they too have stopped supporting their client app on my OS. Their web-only version is painfully slow, not worth bothering with.
Uber’s convenient, but oh, my, their September, 2022 data…
A recent survey found that even if the cost was 10X as much (though still a small amount), users would pay more if they liked the feel of a smartphone cover. This means designers might benefit more factoring that into product design.
The caveat; this was a small number of students and Hiroshima University staff so not representative even of Japan. Still, it showed willingness to pay more when the reference smartphone cover price was 100 yen and 1000 yen. The covers were differentiated by surface smoothness, height, slipperiness, dampness, granularity, stickiness, and dryness.
The survey was…
The internet creates and propagates data by default. Decades since its development, we now live in the Age of Big Data. From recommendation systems to drug discovery, big data has enabled unprecedented innovations. Yet, the downside of the growth of data, and the shift to digital, is that malware enjoys an exponentially growing attack surface. The number of attacks has risen, and their economic impact has soared. Data centers have struggled to keep up because the growth of the industry makes it more vulnerable, by growing the attack surface.
The Paradox of Big Data
The paradox of the…
A common first step in embryonic development is that an egg meets a sperm but in a Weizmann Institute of Science study published today in Cell, researchers have grown synthetic embryo models of mice outside the womb by starting solely with stem cells cultured in a petri dish.
Without the use of fertilized eggs.
In the new study, the team set out to grow a synthetic embryo model solely from naïve mouse stem cells that had been cultured for years in a petri dish, dispensing with the need for starting with a fertilized egg. This approach is extremely valuable because it could, to a large extent…
A new study may improve the sense of embodiment when using autonomous prosthetic limbs. The work had left and right limbs are controlled by two people simultaneously and revealed that the visual information necessary to predict the partner’s intentions behind limb movements can significantly enhance the sense of embodiment towards partner-controlled limbs during virtual co-embodiment.
This "joint avatar" project builds on previous work (Hagiwara et al., iScience 2020) which found that the average movements of two individuals using a shared avatar were smoother and straighter than the…