| Researchers Spawn a New Breed of Robotic Fish Engineers have long looked to nature for clues that will help then build robots that move with anything close to the grace that living things exhibit. Although the use of rigid metal and plastic parts tends to result in stiff, mechanical motion, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) is experimenting with the use of a single piece of flexible silicon and urethane polymer to create robotic fish that smoothly wriggle through the water much like their natural counterparts.Fish propel themselves by contracting muscles on either side of their bodies, generating a wave that travels from head to tail. To mimic the motion, the M.I.T. researchers have created two different types of robo-fish. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Tenuous Times for the Endangered Florida Panther Dear EarthTalk: What's the story with the Florida Panther these days? Is it still teetering on the brink of extinction, or is it on the rebound? --Alex T., via email [More] rss.sciam.com |
Dammed if we do, dammed if we don't: New World's biggest freshwater fish at risk Two of the world's biggest freshwater fish are in big trouble, come reports from scientists in North and South America. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Sensed-Presence Effect In the 1922 poem The Waste Land , T. S. Eliot writes, cryptically: Who is the third who always walks beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together /But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you. In his footnotes to this verse, Eliot explained that the lines “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions [Ernest Shackleton’s] ... that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” [More] rss.sciam.com |
Brooklyn Inventgenuity Festival First Brooklyn Inventgenuity Festival for children, inspired and sponsored by Beam summer camp program in Strafford, NH, will take place this weekend at Invisible Dog art center in Brooklyn; photo nytimes.com |