Browsing: Invention

A seemingly ordinary starfish robot created by scientists at Harvard has pushed the frontiers of robotics one step further by showing that it can wiggle. The soft bodied mechanism was inspired by squids, worms and starfish, and is built out of elastomers and powered by pneumatics – a cheap and effective mechanism; it has every […]

No, the people in the photo are not sniffing the bra or… something. This is Emergency Bra, or Ebra, for short may very well be the thing that saves your life; literally. How does it work ? Well, it converts into a respiratory mask. Good thing about it is that since it has two cups, […]

The future is here, baby ! Robot archers, that’s what it’s all about ! This little humanoid robot, nicknamed iCub may be using just arrows with suction cups, but hey – you have to start somewhere ! Italian researchers developed an algorithm that can teach the robot how to shoot arrows. So, after being taught […]

When the ultra-strong glass was invented more than 40 years ago, it was labeled as interesting, but a manufacturing use for it was hard to find. This glass is about three times harder than regular glass, while it’s also thinner (about as thin as a dime). The so called Gorilla glass will probably be worth […]

I was writing a while ago that major biofuel production is not really that far away and the good news is things seem to be moving in that direction. The importance of biofuels has been underlined as a possible solution to fight the crisis, but the big problem was that creating such alternative fuels required […]

Researchers from Yale University succeeded in what seemed to be an impossible task: they’ve created a transistor from a single molecule. In case you don’t know, a transistor is a “semiconductor device commonly used to amplify or switch electronic signals” (via wikipedia). The team showed that using a single benzene molecule attached to gold contacts […]

Physicists from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) have demonstrated what they claim to be the first universal programmable quantum information processor that will be able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics (the set of principles that describe the atomic and subatomic matter). They managed to accomplish this using two quantum bits […]

Physicists from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) have demonstrated what they claim to be the first universal programmable quantum information processor that will be able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics (the set of principles that describe the atomic and subatomic matter). They managed to accomplish this using two quantum bits […]