Lifeboat Foundation

Created by Wissam Tedros, RoDog is a reliable and hobby-level quadruped robot constructed out of accessible parts. The project implements a dozen RC servos actuators, measurement units such as a gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and unity for inertial measurement, an ESP32-CAM for streaming and WiFi connectivity, an OLED display, and more, all within a 3D-printed casing.

Entirely open source, Tedros’ post includes the BOM and all necessary files, as well as notes on mechanical design and assembly and data obtained from a MATLAB Simulink trial of the inverse kinematic control used with the embedded system. RoDog features a custom STM32F4 board for its brain, with the design available in full detail. The bot is quite compact at 20×10×5 cm, and the 12 motor controller board incorporates position and current feedback.

It is still in development 0, having gone through many iterations and tweaks, most of which are logged in the project files. However, its current form should perform well as a hobbyist’s robotic pet with room for add-ons.

Wireless implantable devices and IoT could manipulate the brains of animals from anywhere around the world due to their minimalistic hardware, low setup cost, ease of use, and customizable versatility.

A new study shows that researchers can remotely control the brain circuits of numerous animals simultaneously and independently through the internet. The scientists believe this newly developed technology can speed up brain research and various neuroscience studies to uncover basic brain functions as well as the underpinnings of various neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at KAIST, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, created a wireless ecosystem with its own wireless implantable devices and Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to enable high-throughput neuroscience experiments over the internet. This innovative technology could enable scientists to manipulate the brains of animals from anywhere around the world. The study was published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on November 25.

A new method of creating aerogels can produce up to 70 times more hydrogen than other means! This could help enable hydrogen power at greater scales.

Photonics is a branch of technology development that specializes in the creation of devices that can generate, detect or manipulate light. Recently, researchers at Université Paris-Saclay coined a new term for a new photonics sub-field called non-Euclidean photonics.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the team introduced new devices that could be used as a test bed for non-Euclidean photonics. These devices are microlasers in which the laser cavity is a curved surface. In particular, they investigated one-sided, non-orientable surfaces known as Möbius strips.

“Our project started 10 years ago with the Ph.D. thesis of Clement Lafargue,” Melanie Lebental, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “At the time, we had good expertise on 2D polymer-based microlasers and their use as quantum chaos platforms. We wanted to explore the third dimension, because we expected a lot of different features and a broad variety of dynamical behaviors, particularly regarding the symmetry classes of the laser modes and their polarization features.”

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.

Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications.

Enabled by a joint design of the camera’s hardware and computational processing, the system could enable minimally invasive endoscopy with medical robots to diagnose and treat diseases, and improve imaging for other robots with size and weight constraints. Arrays of thousands of such cameras could be used for full-scene sensing, turning surfaces into cameras.

Today’s quantum computers are complicated to build, difficult to scale up, and require temperatures colder than interstellar space to operate. These challenges have led researchers to explore the possibility of building quantum computers that work using photons—particles of light. Photons can easily carry information from one place to another, and photonic quantum computers can operate at room temperature, so this approach is promising. However, although people have successfully created individual quantum “logic gates” for photons, it’s challenging to construct large numbers of gates and connect them in a reliable fashion to perform complex calculations.

Now, Stanford University researchers have proposed a simpler design for photonic quantum computers using readily available components, according to a paper published Nov. 29 in Optica. Their proposed design uses a laser to manipulate a single atom that in turn, can modify the state of the photons via a phenomenon called “quantum teleportation.” The atom can be reset and reused for many quantum gates, eliminating the need to build multiple distinct physical gates, vastly reducing the complexity of building a quantum computer.

“Normally, if you wanted to build this type of quantum computer, you’d have to take potentially thousands of quantum emitters, make them all perfectly indistinguishable, and then integrate them into a giant photonic circuit,” said Ben Bartlett, a Ph.D. candidate in applied physics and lead author of the paper. “Whereas with this design, we only need a handful of relatively simple components, and the size of the machine doesn’t increase with the size of the quantum program you want to run.”

To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses.

Now scientists have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction—and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.

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Circa 2019

Brazilian design studio Furf designed furniture made with a leather-like material made from leaves, developed by organic tannery Nova Kaeru.

Vegan, plastic free leather alternatives are a booming industry at the moment. One of the most notable examples is Piñatex, made from leftover leaves after the pineapple harvest, but there are also leather-like materials made of anything from tree bark to fruit leftovers to mycelium (for an extensive list of options, click here).

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Circa 2019

Cellular enhancement in banana leaves

Banana Leaf Technology started in 2010 when Tenith Adithyaa, then 11 years old, saw farmers in Southern India dump heaps of banana leaves as trash due to the lack of a preservation technology. The spark ignited when the question came to the mind, ‘can these leaves be enhanced biologically?’ By trial and error, he succeeded in preserving the leaves for about a year without using any chemicals. For four years, he perfected his technology of cellular enhancement. He received his first international award for this technology in 2014, at the global invention fair in Texas.

Continue reading “Processed banana leaves, an eco-friendly packaging solution” »