Robotics

Rats took over this Pacific island. Now drones are leading the fightback

Wired UK: When the people who would become the first Polynesian islanders ventured out into the remote Pacific some 3,000 years ago, they took three main animals with them; pigs,…

Tencent’s New Wheeled Robot Flicks Its Tail To Do Backflips

IEEE Spectrum: Ollie (I think its name is Ollie) is a “a novel wheel-legged robot” from Tencent Robotics. The word “novel” is used quite appropriately here, since Ollie sports some unusual planar parallel legs atop driven wheels. It’s also got a…

The rise of ferrofluids

Chemistry World: Rocket scientists at the Nasa Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, US, were working day and night. It was 1963 and they were testing hundreds of different combustion chamber designs and injectors for liquid hydrogen engines, trying to iron out problems with combustion stability that could thwart efforts to…

Researchers Are Getting Closer to Making Medical Robots That Can Swim In Your Bloodstream

Discover Magazine: It’s often remarked of technological progress that everything keeps getting smaller (with the exception of televisions). Phones, computers, appliances and more have shrunk in size since they were…