Tag: Robots

Hard drives gone bad dont always have to end up in the trash. Miguel Rivera, a systems administrator, took a pile of used drives, gutted some and turned them into beautiful sculptures.

The overall concept was to make something out of just hard drive parts and pieces, says Rivera. I wanted it to look solid and heavy so I leaned towards just using metal no plastic or gluing things together.

A new study may inspire aeronautical engineers to be more flexible with their designs. Thats because the bends and twists in locusts flexible, flapping wings power the insects extraordinary long-distance flights, a Sept. 18 Science paper reveals.

Even though researchers have been studying how insects and other creatures fly for a long time, we still dont completely understand the aerodynamics and architectures of wings, comments Tom Daniel of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the new study. The new work, Daniel says, uncovers the flight signatures of flapping, flexible wings.

Though coordinating eight separate arms might seem a tricky task for an octopus brain, whats really demanding is controlling the arms flexible, infinitely variable movements. Now researchers have figured out part of their secret.

Unlike us, specific regions of an octopus motor cortex dont correspond to specific parts of its body. Instead, each region controls different parts at different times. Their motor neural network seems as flexible as their bodies a phenomenon that expands the range of neurophysiological possibility, and could refine the design of arm-flexing robots.