News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Scientists have developed a new material that can undulate and therefore propel itself forward under the influence of light. To this end, they clamp a strip of this polymer material in a rectangular frame. When illuminated it goes for a walk all on its own. This small device, the size of a paperclip, is the world's first machine to convert light directly into walking, simply using one fixed light source. The researchers publish their findings in Nature.

Researchers combined gecko-inspired adhesives and a custom robotic gripper to create a device for grabbing space debris. They tested their gripper in multiple zero gravity settings, including the International Space Station.

Patients with common widespread forms of cancer will enjoy longer life expectancy and reduced risk of recurrence thanks to a multimodal optical spectroscopy probe developed by Canadian researchers.

Ask Siri to find a math tutor to help you 'grasp' calculus and she's likely to respond that your request is beyond her abilities. That's because metaphors like 'grasp' are difficult for Apple's voice-controlled personal assistant to, well, grasp. But new UC Berkeley research suggests digital helpers could someday learn the algorithms that humans have used for centuries to create and understand metaphorical language.

ASU professor and colleagues suggest a new approach to scientific exploration that they call exploration telepresence.

Researchers at Numenta have introduced two contributions to the field of anomaly detection for streaming applications. The first is a novel unsupervised anomaly detection technique based on a theory of how the brain works. The second is a benchmark that provides a controlled open-source environment for testing anomaly detection algorithms on streaming data. These contributions appear in a new peer-reviewed paper, Unsupervised real-time anomaly detection for streaming data, published in a special issue of Neurocomputing.

Researchers from the University of Luxembourg, in cooperation with the University of Strasbourg, have developed a computational method that could be used to guide surgeons during brain surgery.