Thousands of gallons of ill-aimed pee could be spared from lavatory floors thanks to a new urinal design, scientists say.

Around 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) of urine are spilled onto the floor and walls of public restrooms each day in the U.S. thanks to current urinal shapes, creating hygiene issues and unpleasant smells.

But now, in a new study published Tuesday (April 8) in the journal PNAS Nexus, scientists have proposed a new urinal design that could significantly reduce this spillage — improving the hygiene of public bathrooms and reducing cleaning costs.

Urinals have not changed much since they started becoming popular in 19th-century Europe, as part of growing public health reforms in fast-growing cities. There are now around 56 million public restrooms across the U.S. alone, the scientists said in the study.

"Urinals are a staple of public spaces yet their designs have remained essentially stagnant for over a century,” the researchers wrote in the study. "The use of urinals often results in significant splatter (splashback) as urine splashes upon impact with the urinal generating droplets which travel back onto the floor and user."

This splashback is a breeding ground for bacteria, resulting in bad smells in public restrooms and the potential for the spread of diseases.

Related: The Physics of Peeing, and How to Avoid Splash-Back

"The surfaces of urinals have significantly higher concentrations of bacteria than traditional toilets, with surrounding floors having the highest level," the researchers added.

This high level of spillage of urine requires frequent cleaning, which uses a large volume of water, is unpleasant work for custodial staff and is very expensive.

Some bathrooms attempt to reduce splashback using urinal screens, mats, or even stickers to tell people where to aim their urine. The use of such stickers at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport was found to reduce splashback by between 50 and 80% and lower cleaning costs by 8%.

New urinal designs are making a splash

To resolve these problems, the team created a fluid physics model of how a stream of liquid splashes when it hits a surface like the back of a urinal, and experimentally tested these models by spraying liquid at surfaces at various angles.

They mimicked a stream of urine by creating a "pseudo-urethra nozzle," which had the same internal geometry as a human urethra, and used dyed liquid to better determine where splashback was occurring.

They found that when the urine stream hit the surface at less than 30 degrees, the level of splashback was reduced to only 1.4% of the levels seen in a traditional urinal design.

They used these models to design two new urinal shapes, which they dubbed Cornucopia and Nautilus. The Cornucopia somewhat resembles a public trash can, while the Nautilus wouldn't look out of place in an avant-garde furniture store.

The researchers' Cornucopia and Nautilus designs both achieved a significant reduction in urine splashing, with the Cornucopia performing best. However, the Nautilus was considered the most ideal design due to its height, which would allow shorter people — including children or those in wheelchairs — to more easily use it. Its larger gape would also be easier to clean, and would be more accepting of poor aim, and therefore would also be appropriate for use on boats or airplanes.

The researchers suggest that if Nautilus was to replace the 56 million urinals across the U.S., around 1 million liters of urine would be prevented from being splashed onto the floor every day. Assuming that the volume of water needed to clean up spilled urine is about 10 times that of the volume of urine, about 10 million liters (2,199,692 gallons) of fresh water could be saved every day, the scientists said.

The widespread adoption of these urinal designs "would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility," the researchers wrote.

Phones are integral to the everyday lives of most people, but who should be regarded as the device's mastermind? The Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell is routinely credited as the inventor of the telephone and the first person to speak over the phone. In that first telephone call, on March 10, 1876, he famously told his assistant Thomas Watson, "Mr. Watson, come here; I want to see you."

But, as Iwan Morus explains in his book "How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the 19th-Century Innovators Who Forged Our Future" (Icon Books, 2022), inventions are rarely the results of a sole pioneer.

"Many — I'd almost say all — nineteenth-century electrical inventions were highly contested, with different inventors claiming credit for having solved the key problems first," Morus told Live Science in an email. "Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke, the co-patentees of the first British electromagnetic telegraph, for example, didn't take long to fall out over which of them really invented it. Samuel Morse quarreled with pretty much everyone about his claims to inventing the telegraph. And there were similar debates about the lightbulb, and so on."

Related: 20 inventions that changed the world

Likewise, many people other than Bell claimed to have invented the telephone, Christopher Beauchamp, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, wrote in a 2010 article in the journal Technology and Culture. In fact, some people even suggested that "Bell seized the honor fraudulently," Beauchamp said.

"It's not surprising that Bell's claims were contested," Morus added. "There was a lot of money, as well as fame, at stake. However, as a historian, I'm less interested in deciding who really invented something, and more interested in how particular individuals emerged from the pack to win the credit."

Italian inventor Antonio Meucci (who was belatedly honored by U.S. House of Representatives for his contributions to the telephone's invention in 2002); American engineer Elisha Gray; and German physicist Johann Philipp Reis, who constructed the first "make-and-break" telephone in 1861, all played roles in the development of the telephone.

Reis' contraption was slightly different to Bell's more refined solution. Reis' worked by a process of making and breaking connections with a circuit. His device was able to capture sound and then convert it to electrical impulses, which could then be transmitted via electrical wires to another device that, in turn, was able to convert them into sounds. The system was reliant on connections being repeatedly made and then broken, which meant that, unlike Bell's device, a continuous conversation was not possible.

That is partly why Bell's name has stood the test of time, but, according to Beauchamp,the overwhelming reason is somewhat more bureaucratic: patent law. 

In the 1880s, "in one of the largest and most controversial litigation campaigns of any kind during the nineteenth century," Beauchamp wrote in his article, Bell hired a collective of high-profile, powerful attorneys, who won a spate of patent cases that resulted in the telephone industry coming under a "legal monopoly." The courts declared Bell's claims that he pioneered the telephone's technology to be true and, as a result, awarded him "broad rights over electrical speech communication," Beauchamp explained.

It is worth noting that both Bell and Gray submitted independent telephone-centric patents on Feb. 14, 1876. And while Gray's application arrived at the patent office ahead of Bell's, Bell's lawyers were more proactive than Gray's and paid the application fees as soon as possible. Consequently, Bell's application was seen and registered first and ended up being approved and registered on March 7, three days before his famous call with Watson.

Related: How do fax machines work?

But what, exactly, did Bell invent? "The key to the telephone was finding a way to turn the vibrations caused by the voice into a varying electric current, and turning those electric variations back into acoustic vibrations at the other end," Morus said. "Bell's real breakthrough was finding a way of doing that reliably." This, Morus notes, is what made Bell's device superior to Reis'.

However, Bell's ability to create a narrative may have played an important role. A year after Bell got the patent, his father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard organized the new Bell Telephone Company. "In Bell's case, I think it was partially a matter of having an appealing inventor-story to tell," Morus said, "and the fact that his telephone company was quick to take off and remained dominant in the US for so long."

Another factor in Bell's legacy is his focus on transmitting vocals, as opposed to written messages. "What struck people at the time was the transmission of the human voice, in particular," Morus said. "Telegraphy was big business by the 1870s on both sides of the Atlantic, and inventors — including Bell — were competing to find ways of sending messages more and more efficiently. Ironically, not many of Bell's competitors were all that interested in transmitting the voice because, they thought, it simply wasn't an efficient enough means of transmitting information. 

Though some may disagree about who should be credited as the inventor of the telephone, it's clear that it was one of the most influential and important inventions of the Victorian era. "I think the key thing about the telephone was the way it brought the electrical future (so to speak) right into the Victorian middle class home," Morus said. "It was a vital component in the way the Victorians thought the future would be."

Hyperintelligent cyborg dogs. Parasitic alien shape-shifters. Portal guns that open gateways between dimensions. A nanoscale amusement park in a living human body, with a pirate-themed ride through the pancreas.

The sci-fi world of the popular animated series "Rick and Morty" is bizarre and fantastic. In episode after episode, rogue scientist Rick Sanchez demonstrates that he's the smartest person — and possibly the most dangerous one — in this and other universes, as he brews concentrated dark matter or steals energy-generating crystals from a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Whether Rick and his inventions will save humanity or guarantee its annihilation is never certain until the credits roll.

But while devices such as Rick's multiverse-crossing portal gun may not exist in the real world, the scientific concept of multiverses — multiple copies of the universe that coexist invisibly — is certainly real. And that's not the only kernel of genuine science seeded throughout the program, according to a new book, "The Science of Rick and Morty: The Unofficial Guide to Earth's Stupidest Show" (Atria Publishing Group), available today (Oct. 1). 

Related: Top 5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse

Much of the humor in "Rick and Morty" isn't what you'd call intellectual; the show wallows in gross-out gags and bathroom jokes. But while the comedy might often be silly, much of the science is serious stuff. From memory hacking to time freezing, from people-shrinking to human-habitable exoplanets, "throughout the series, they've touched on some really big ideas," said the book's author, Matt Brady, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of comic book news website (and Live Science sister site) Newsarama, and a high-school science teacher.

"It's my hope that with or without this book — with, I hope! — people watching the show will go, 'That's interesting, I wonder if it's real?' Then, they'll check it out and maybe learn a bit of science," Brady told Live Science.

"Rise above. Focus on science."

In one memorable episode, "Pickle Rick," a transformed Rick (now a pickle) traps a cockroach and takes control of its body by manipulating the insect's brain with his tongue. Scientists may not be able to turn themselves into pickles, but researchers have demonstrated that they can control cockroaches' nervous systems through brain stimulation, Brady said. 

"Precise anatomical location aside, there is a spot in the insect brain that, if you poke it, you'll get legs to move (among other things): It's called the central complex," Brady wrote in the book. 

Rick's tongue, saturated with potassium and sodium, disrupts the bug brain's electrochemistry to send commands to the roach's limbs. In the real world, there are even kits that provide all the necessary tools for creating cyborg roaches that can be controlled remotely — though, not with the user's tongue, Brady told Live Science.

"It takes a little bit of cockroach surgery, and it's not for the faint of heart," he warned.

Multiverses, a staple of the "Rick and Morty" world, have also been proposed and championed by scientists, Brady wrote. Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University in New York City, has produced a model of nine multiverses, and Max Tegmark, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has suggested that there are up to four multiverses.

These hypotheses and others use physics principles to delve into the possible existence of other, unseen universes. The observable universe occupies space-time fabric, a continuum of time combined with 3D space. Because the precise composition of space-time is unknown, scientists can't rule out that it contains infinite copies of the universe that we simply can't see.

Related: The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics

"A large number of physicists now believe at least one version of what Greene and Tegmark have proposed, or something very close to it," Brady wrote. Though it's possible we do inhabit a multiverse, "figuring out what type of multiverse, that's going to be the trick," Brady said. Even the infinite multiverses in "Rick and Morty" — and infinite copies of every person — are within the realm of possibility, he added.

"If there are infinite repeats of particles, Earths will show up over and over again. How many? An infinite number. How many copies of me are out there? An infinite number. It's one of those thoughts I'd introduce to my physics students. I'd say, 'You're going to think about this, and you're going to want to lie back and stare up at the sky for a very long time and just say, whoa.'"

"We're all gonna die. Come watch TV."

For now at least, multiverses remain a concept for computer models and thought experiments. By comparison, some of the hands-on science in "Rick and Morty" raises serious ethical questions that real-world scientists frequently confront. Rick's choices and actions, however, generally reflect his own agenda rather than bending to conventional morality, said Brady.

"'I wouldn't say that 'Rick and Morty' is the place to go for ethical or moral guidance in science," he said. 

Take cloning, for example, which Rick uses in several episodes (to send a younger version of himself to high school to hunt vampires, to create a duplicate of his daughter Beth so she can abandon her family, to replace Beth's childhood friend Timmy and save Timmy's father from execution for committing cannibalism). A clone is an organism created from identical copies of genetic information that came from another animal. Scientists have been successfully producing mammal clones since Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997, through a process known as reproductive cloning. 

Recent cloning success stories include a clone of the so-called Sherlock Holmes of police dogs and puppies that are reclones of a cloned canine. Researchers have even cloned monkeys, coming one step closer to cloning another primate: people.

However, while scientists say it's biologically possible to clone a human, the extraordinarily high risk of developmental deformities and death make such an endeavor extremely unethical.

And even though Rick seemingly acts without concern for ethics, he frequently has to address the harm his science causes. As a result of one experiment, he and Morty abandoned their version of Earth because Rick, in trying to fix a wayward love potion's effects, accidentally turned nearly all people on the planet into hideous monsters.

"In 'Rick and Morty,' the lesson of unintended consequences is always there," Brady said. 

"To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum [playing chaos theory mathematician Ian Malcolm in "Jurassic Park"], 'You can do this, but should you do this?' That's one of the strong arguments that we've historically made in science," Brady added.

"The Science of Rick and Morty: The Unofficial Guide to Earth's Stupidest Show" is available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Imagine sitting down to dinner with a group of friends, when a laser tickles the water molecules inside your ear.

"You need to get home right away," your older child shouts. The younger one has fallen and cut their knee, and might need stitches.

You stand up, excuse yourself, and make for the exit. Your friends have no idea why, but assume you heard a message inaudible to the rest of them in the noisy room, transmitted into your ear by laser light.

That's the future scientists at MIT imagined when they developed a laser system for sending sound across a room using laser light.

Their method isn't the first to transmit sound waves using lasers. But it is the loudest. Their machine, described in a paper published on Jan. 25 in the journal Optics Letters, relies on wiggling a laser back and forth across the water molecules in the air by someone's ear. That wiggling motion (accomplished with a fast-twitching mirror) jolts the molecules into motion, causing them to bang against the surrounding air molecules and produce sound waves. [What's That Noise? 11 Strange and Mysterious Sounds on Earth & Beyond]

Not that much water is needed.

"This can work even in relatively dry conditions because there is almost always a little water in the air, especially around people," research team leader Charles Wynn said in a statement. "We found that we don't need a lot of water if we use a laser wavelength that is very strongly absorbed by water. This was key because the stronger absorption leads to more sound."

Other methods now under development, they noted, produce clearer sounds. But those methods (like switching a laser on and off really fast to jiggle the water molecules) don't make sounds as loud as the wiggling method. (The researchers call it "sweeping" rather than wiggling.)

The point of all this is to send messages to individuals in a crowd without blasting them over loudspeakers.

"The ability to send highly targeted audio signals over the air could be used to communicate across noisy rooms or warn individuals of a dangerous situation such as an active shooter," the statement said.

In the paper, the researchers said that some laser-sound techniques are under development by the military.

One remarkable point is that the underlying concept here isn't very new. The paper notes that Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the first practical telephone, patented a device back in 1880 along with a partner named Charles Sumner Tainter that transmitted sounds via light.

Bell and Tainter's "photophone-transmitter" was a proposed "instrument for controlling a radiant beam and imparting to it a varying character, whereby in falling on an appropriate receiving-instrument the said beam may be made to produce sound."

In other words: Wiggle light over some material, and sound should emerge.

The key differences, of course, in the modern MIT system are that the receiver material is just ambient water vapor, and that the light is a precision laser. But the underlying concept is the same.

The next step for the MIT device, the researchers wrote, is to try it outdoors and at longer range.

Live Science contacted the authors to request more detail on what it's actually like to hear the laser-transmitted sounds, and will update this article if they respond.

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Originally published on Live Science.

When Vincent Connare invented the typeface Comic Sans in 1994, he never set out to offend anybody. The typographer designed it for some of the first Microsoft home computers: it was intended for the speech bubbles of an animated cartoon dog that would help people navigate the Microsoft Windows interface for the first time.

"I said, 'Comic dogs don't talk in Times New Roman,'" Connare recalled. So, he developed an alternative; a playful, friendly font inspired by comic book type, designed to look handwritten and targeted at younger users. "My original idea was it was going to be used for kids. It wasn't made for everybody to like it," Connare told Live Science.

Unexpectedly, Comic Sans began to spread, appearing in formal documents, on signs, in advertisement — even on billboards. But then, when two typographers started a "Ban Comic Sans" movement in 2002, it gained worldwide traction as other designers began to voice their derision for the goofy font. It got bad enough that when Connare was asked to give a talk at the prestigious Design Museum in London, there were complaints that he shouldn't be presenting there. "I think I had a bodyguard!" he recalled, humorously. 

Related: Breaking the code: Why eYuor Barin Can Raed Tihs

Today, Connare is amused by all the attention that his humble, friendly font has received since he invented it almost three decades ago. But what exactly makes most people despise Comic Sans so much?

Rugged and beautiful fonts

A single typeface carries multiple nuanced cues — and we're surprisingly good at picking up on them. In a series of studies published in the early 2000s, academics at Wichita State University in Kansas revealed that people perceive typefaces as having distinct personalities, and that they're able to drill these down to precise traits.

"Results showed that people's perceptions of typefaces boil down to three main factors: their 'ruggedness and masculinity', 'perceived beauty' and 'excitement,'" said Barbara Chaparro, who led the research when she was the head of a usability research lab at Wichita State University at the time. (She's now a professor of human factors and behavioral neurobiology at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.)

Later studies showed that when people were asked to rate the suitability of these typefaces for formal documents like résumés, they typically chose typefaces rated as clearly “legible” and more "beautiful,", over those that were more "excitable," and “loud”, Chaparro told Live Science. This suggests that humans are good at determining when a typeface suits a given context.

These qualities are cued by multiple subtle traits of the design. For instance, serif fonts have tiny extenders on the ends of letters, which lends them a more refined and elegant quality to the average eye. Consequently, "more professional documents tend to use serif fonts," Chaparro said. San serif fonts, on the other hand, don't have these elegant extenders, and tend to come across as more casual. Asked why we read these subtle cues the way we do, Chaparro said that's hard to know for sure. But, "from the typewriter days, there is a history of serif fonts being used for business documents," she said. Perhaps, over time we have come to link these visual cues to formal writing.

One thing is clear to typographers: "Comic Sans is a sans serif typeface — designed to be informal, casual and used for that kind of material — like a comic," Chaparro said. "I do not think it was ever intended to be used for serious documents."

And this, it seems, is where the problem lies for most people who despise its goofy characters. After the invention of Comic Sans, people started to use it in contexts that it wasn't intended for — such as, in formal documents — giving it a disjointed quality that some found jarring. "People, especially typographers, get upset when it's used improperly. For example, if someone sends an email or writes a document using it," said Chaparro, "it results in a mismatch — an informal, childlike, 'funny' typeface for a potentially serious topic." 

Related: Why are some people better at drawing than others?

Naivety and novelty

Connare has a theory about why that occurred. In the 1990s, when home computers started becoming the norm, they gave people a sense of agency that they hadn't had before. Suddenly, anyone with access to a computer could choose from a variety of fonts with which to personalize their documents. "This was the first time that people had a choice, so they were picking crazy things because they could do anything," Connare said. Essentially, it came down to naiveté and novelty, he explained. "People didn't have much experience, and so they just picked what was different." With its unusual, playful style that mimicked handwriting, Comic Sans had mass appeal, triggering its rapid spread.

"This typeface was taken up by a number of non-designers in their documents — things like homemade flyers, homemade invitations, websites that were done by non-professionals," said Jo Mackiewicz, a Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University who has done research on why people perceive different personalities in different typefaces. "I think a lot of the reasons people hate it is that it's seen so often, and in places where it should not be used. The fact that it was being used outside of its rather limited purpose — that became obnoxious to people who knew better."

Mackiewicz also thinks that because of the ubiquitous and informal use of Comic Sans, it became associated with other bad design elements, "like centered types, or all caps, or underlining" — features that make typographers' skin crawl. As others took up the cause against Comic Sans, it grew into its reputation as the pariah of the typography world — and marked those who used it as lacking in taste.

"Comic Sans is a special case because so many people do hate it," Mackiewicz told Live Science "So using it now is particularly problematic because people can just discount you, outright.”

Where does this leave the beleaguered — but eternally cheery — typeface and its maker?

These days Connare lives in the French countryside, where he grows olive trees and practices calligraphy in his spare time — not overly concerned about people's opinions of him, or his font. But he said that when he meets people and talks about Comic Sans, surprisingly, many confess to him that they are fans. So, for all the offense it has caused, perhaps it has a secret following.

"Most people are friendly and nice about it," Connare said. "It's like it's a song that they don't want anybody to know that they like."

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Originally published on Live Science.

Unlike chocolate chip cookies or tomato soup, the invention of bread can't be pinned down to a single person or people; instead, it evolved to its present state over the course of millennia.

Although the modern version of sliced bread is a fairly new invention (Wonder Bread began marketing the first sliced loaf of bread in 1930), bread itself is an ancient food with origins dating back more than 22,000 years.

In 2004, at an excavation site called Ohalo II, in what is modern-day Israel, scientists found 22,000-year-old barley grains caught in a grinding stone: the first evidence of humans processing wild cereal grains. But these early "bread" creations were probably more like "flat cakes of ground seeds and grains heated on a rock, or in the embers of a fire," than standard sandwich bread, Howard Miller, a food historian and professor at Lipscomb Universityin Nashville, Tennessee, told Live Science. [Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel]

Bread grains, the first plants to be domesticated, were first harvested in the wild by the Natufians. This Mesolithic group of hunter-gatherers lived in the Jordan River Valley region of the Middle East about 12,500 years ago.

"The Natufians are thought to be the first people to make the transition between survival purely on foods that you harvest from nature to becoming farmers who control all aspects of the food supply," William Rubel, a food historian and author of "Bread: A Global History" (Reaktion Books, 2011), told Live Science. "The Natufians had the infrastructure for grinding barley and then making it into bread."

The Natufians had the earliest known agricultural-based society and would process grains into a coarse flour, from which they made a "small, pita-like, unleavened loaf cooked directly on the coals of a fire," Miller said.

Over the next several thousand years, agriculture and the cultivation of grains spread across the Middle East and southwest Asia through trade contacts with other hunter-gatherer peoples in the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia and east of the Indus Valley.

"Bread was the evolutionary spark that led to the development of state and large political units," Rubel said. "Bread allowed for the accumulation of surplus, and so the villages got bigger until you had actual cities."

More than 5,000 years after the Natufians began making flatbread, three civilizations were rapidly growing and expanding during the Bronze Age: the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians (in what is modern-day Iraq) and the Harappans (in the Indus Valley, in what is modern-day Pakistan). All three civilizations, considered the largest in the ancient world, depended on bread.

"Bread was the majority of their calories," Rubel said. "Bread allowed for the building of surpluses and developing of [social] classes. You didn't have a class of full-time artisans until you had bread."

The first-known leavened bread made with semi-domesticated yeast dates back to around 1000 B.C. in Egypt, according to Miller. However, scholars debate the exact origin, as evidence suggests that Mesopotamians also produced yeast-risen bread, Rubel said.    

In fact, the invention of yeast-risen bread likely has boozy roots. Ancient Egyptians used barley and emmer wheat both to brew sour beer and to make sourdough bread, according to a 1994 study in the journal Egyptian Archeology. The ancient Egyptians could have made beer by baking "richly yeasted dough" into "beer loaves," then crumbling that bread and straining it with water, which would then ferment into beer, according to the book "Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology" (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

"Beer is liquid bread," Miller said. "They have the same ingredients — water, grain, yeast — just in different proportions."

From the cradle of civilization's flatbreads to the packaged supermarket slices we know today, bread has evolved alongside society, ever since humans first crushed grains against a grinding stone thousands of years ago.

Original article on Live Science. 

Once thought of as the province of only "Star Trek" or "Harry Potter," cloaking technologies could become a reality with a specially designed material that can mask itself from other forms of light when it is hit with a "beam of invisibility," according to a new study.

Theoretically, most "invisibility cloaks" would work by smoothly guiding light waves around objects so the waves ripple along their original trajectories as if nothing were there to obstruct them. Previous work found that cloaking devices that redirect other kinds of waves, such as sound waves, are possible as well.

But the new study's  researchers, from at the Technical University of Vienna, have developed a different strategy to render an object invisible — using a beam of invisibility. [Now You See It: 6 Tales of Invisibility in Pop Culture]

Complex materials such as sugar cubes are opaque because their disorderly structures scatter light around inside them multiple times, said study senior author Stefan Rotter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna.

"A light wave can enter and exit the object, but will never pass through the medium on a straight line," Rotter said in a statement. "Instead, it is scattered into all possible directions."

With their new technique, Rotter and his colleagues did not want to reroute the light waves.

"Our goal was to guide the original light wave through the object, as if the object was not there at all. This sounds strange, but with certain materials and using our special wave technology, it is indeed possible," study co-author Andre Brandstötter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna, said in the statement.

The concept involves shining a beam, such as a laser, onto a material from above to pump it full of energy. This can alter the material's properties, making it transparent to other wavelengths of light coming in from the side.

"To achieve this, a beam with exactly the right pattern has to be projected onto the material from above — like from a standard video projector, except with much higher resolution," study lead author Konstantinos Makris, now at the University of Crete in Greece, said in a statement.

The pattern that is projected onto an object to render it invisible must correspond perfectly to the inner irregularities of that item that usually scatters light, the researchers said.

"Every object we want to make transparent has to be irradiated with its own specific pattern, depending on the microscopic details of the scattering process inside," Rotter said in a statement. "The method we developed now allows us to calculate the right pattern for any arbitrary scattering medium."

Rotter and his colleagues are now carrying out experiments to see whether their idea will actually work. "We think that an experiment would be easiest to perform in acoustics," Rotter told Live Science. For instance, loudspeakers could generate sound waves to make a tube "transparent" to other forms of sound.

"For me, personally, the most surprising aspect is that this concept works at all," Rotter said. "There may be many more surprises when digging deeper along these lines."

Eventually, similar research could also experiment with light, he said. Such work could have applications in telecommunication networks, Rotter said. "It is clear, however, that considerable work is still required to get this from the stage of fundamental research to practical applications," Rotter said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Sept. 8 in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

Original article on Live Science.

This futuristic-sounding tech could one day help vehicles see around blind corners, the researchers said.

"We may eventually be able to use this idea to alert drivers to pedestrians or cars that are about to dart out from behind buildings into a driver's path. Perhaps a few seconds of notice could save lives," said study lead author Katie Bouman, an imaging scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[Mind-Controlled Cats?! 6 Incredible Spy Technologies That Are Real]

"Search and rescue, or helping to understand what is going on behind a wall in a hostage situation, are also potential applications," Bouman added.

Researchers have taken many different approaches in trying to make the "superpower" of seeing around corners a reality. For example, in 2015, researchers showed they could use lasers to see objects around corners by firing light pulses at surfaces near the items. Those surfaces could act like mirrors, scattering the laser pulses onto any hidden objects. By analyzing the light that was reflected off the objects and other surfaces back onto the scanners, researchers could reconstruct the shapes of the hidden items.

Although most strategies for seeing around corners "are really great ideas," they also "usually require complex modeling [or] specialized hardware, or are computationally expensive," Bouman told Live Science. The 2015 study's technique, for example, required both extremely fast lasers and extraordinarily sensitive cameras.

But Bouman and her colleagues' method for seeing around corners simply uses a smartphone camera.

"We use light naturally in the scene and do not have to introduce our own light to probe the hidden scene," Bouman said. "This allows us to use common consumer cameras and not specialized equipment to see around corners."

The new system, known as CornerCameras, analyzes light that is reflected off objects hidden around corners and that falls on the ground within the line of sight of the camera. This light is called the "penumbra."

The system analyzes this penumbra over several seconds, stitching together dozens of distinct images, according to the study. This data helps the system measure the speed and trajectory of objects around corners in real time. (It does not see any identifying details about those objects — just the fact that they are moving.)

"I think the biggest surprise was that the system worked well in situations that I would not have expected," Bouman said. "For instance, once, during filming, it started raining. This caused big raindrops to start appearing on the ground, changing the color of the concrete floor."

Because CornerCameras is trying to analyze light signals that are just 0.1 percent of the total brightness of the ground, "I thought these raindrops would wipe out any signal we had," Bouman said. However, CornerCameras analyzes the data of a scene across dozens of images, so "the effect of the raindrops was essentially averaged out."

One current limitation of CornerCameras is that it requires a stationary camera that's held very steady. "In many situations, such as in a collision-avoidance system on a car, you do not have the luxury of a stationary camera," Bouman said. The researchers are now focused on getting the system to work first on a moving wheelchair and eventually on a moving car, she said.

Future research will also aim to make CornerCameras work in a variety of lighting situations, or in changing lighting conditions, such as when clouds overhead constantly move in front of the sun. "Getting the system to work in these scenarios would open up the possibility of it being able to be used by a person with a handheld smartphone," Bouman said.

Bouman and her colleagues will detail their findings on Oct. 25 at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Venice, Italy.

Original article on Live Science.

Rubber electronics and sensors that operate normally even when stretched to up to 50 percent of their length could work as artificial skin on robots, according to a new study. They could also give flexible sensing capabilities to a range of electronic devices, the researchers said.

Like human skin, the material is able to sense strain, pressure and temperature, according to the researchers.

"It's a piece of rubber, but it has the function of a circuit and sensors," said Cunjiang Yu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston. Yu and his team describedtheir innovation in a study published online Sept. 8 in the journal Science Advances. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Yusaid the rubber electronics and sensors have a wide range of applications, from biomedical implants to wearable electronics to digitized clothing to "smart" surgical gloves.

Because the rubbery semiconductor starts in a liquid form, it could be poured into molds and scaled up to large sizes or even used like a kind of rubber-based ink and 3D printed into a variety of different objects, Yu told Live Science.

One of the more interesting applications could be for robots themselves, Yu said. Humans want to be able to work near robots and to coexist with them, he said. But for that to happen safely, the robot itself needs to be able to fully sense its surroundings. A robot — perhaps even a soft, flexible one, with skin that's able to feel its surroundings—could work side by side with humans without endangering them, Yu said.

In experiments, Yu and his colleagues used the electronic skin to accurately sense the temperature of hot and cold water in a cup and also translate computer signals sent to the robotic hand into finger gestures representing the alphabet from American Sign Language.

Electronics and robots are typically limited by the stiff and rigid semiconductor materials that make up their computer circuits. As such, most electronic devices lack the ability to stretch, the authors said in the study.

In research labs around the world, scientists are working on various solutions to produce flexible electronics. Some innovations include tiny, embedded, rigid transistors that are "islands"in a flexible matrix. Others involve using stretchy, polymer semiconductors. The main challenges with many of these ideas are that they're too difficult or expensive to allow for mass production, or the transmission of electrons through the material is not very efficient, Yu said.

This latest solution addresses both of those issues, the researchers said. Instead of inventing sophisticated polymers from scratch, the scientists turned to low-cost, commercially available alternatives to create a stretchy material that works as a stable semiconductor and can be scaled up for manufacturing, the researchers wrote in the study.

Yu and his colleagues made the stretchable material by mixing tiny, semiconducting nanofibrils — nanowires 1,000 times thinner than a human hair — into a solution of a widely used, silicon-based organic polymer, called polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS for short.

When dried at 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), the solution hardened into a stretchable material embedded with millions of tiny nanowires that carry electric current.

The researchers applied strips of the material to the fingers of a robotic hand. The electronic skin worked as a sensor that produced different electrical signals when the fingers bent. Bending a finger joint puts strain on the material, and that reduces electric current flow in a way that can be measured.

For example, to express the sign-language letter "Y," the index, middle and ring fingers were completely folded, which created a higher electrical resistance. The thumb and pinky fingers were kept straight, which produced lower electrical resistance.

Using the electrical signals, the researchers were able spell out "YU LAB" in American Sign Language.

Yu said he and his colleagues are already working to improve the material's electronic performance and stretchiness well beyond the 50 percent mark that was tested in the new study.

"This will change the field of stretchable electronics," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

A new "Magic Bench" designed by Disney Research lets you interact with endearing animated characters — and no special glasses or headsets are required.

Instead, the complete environment — the seat, the sitter and the cartoon humanoid animals — is mirrored on a screen opposite the bench, making it possible for others to watch the scene unfold. 

How does the illusion work? A camera and sensor capture images and gather depth information about physical objects — the bench and the person — that algorithms integrate with the 3D animations, the researchers wrote in a study. Meanwhile, haptic sensors built into the bench deliver vibrations that are synchronized to animated actions on the screen, creating the illusion that the animated figures are occupying real-world space next to the user. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

"Our mantra for this project was: hear a character coming, see them enter the space, and feel them sit next to you," Moshe Mahler, principal digital artist at Disney Research, said in a statement.

Augmented-reality overlays animated elements into views of the real world, typically by using special optical devices or mobile technology. However, one of its limitations is that its illusion can be glimpsed by only a single user. The Magic Bench allows groups of people to gather in a single environment and collectively participate in an augmented- reality experience, all at the same time, according to the study authors.

Sitting on the bench triggers the augmented-reality experience, introducing a character into the scene. In a video demonstration, a small cartoon donkey trots into view and kicks the bench, generating a sharp sound and making the seated person jump in surprise. Another test shows two people on the bench, reacting as they "feel" an animated rabbit leap up beside them and jump up and down. When a user passes his hand over the rabbit, a shadow moves across its head — as though it were occupying the same physical space as the person next to it.

Researchers used the real-color camera and the depth and color sensors in a Microsoft Kinect to capture the real-world scene of the Magic Bench and the person (or people) on it. Rebuilding them in 3D places the bench between a foreground and background, which can then be populated with whimsical characters. But the Disney engineers discovered that if the reconstructed 3D scene were viewed at an angle, missing data and a small difference in alignment between the camera and sensor created gaps in the image known as "depth shadows."

To eliminate these depth shadows, designers layered another element into the scene — a 2D background captured by the Kinect's RGB camera, which seamlessly aligned with the scene when viewed head-on, the study authors wrote. Once the "stage" is set, it's ready to be shared with animated co-stars — from elephants offering up a glowing orb to a giraffe lending an umbrella during a sudden drizzle.

Disney Research technicians presented the Magic Bench at SIGGRAPH 2017, an annual conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques, that was held in Los Angeles from July 30 to Aug. 3.

Original article on Live Science.

In the sophisticated world of counterfeiting, it can often be difficult to tell fakes from the real deal. But now, scientists have developed a new method that can stamp things with "atomic fingerprints" to keep phony products at bay.

"There is no bigger crime than counterfeit crime," said Robert Young, a professor of physics at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and chief technology officer of the tech startup Quantum Base. [Faux Real: A Gallery of Forgeries]

Earlier this month, Young and his colleagues announced a relatively simple technique for confirming the authenticity of an object — an advance that could put a dent in the counterfeit industry, where fakes, forgeries and imitations cost the global economy half a trillion dollars in lost revenue each year, according to the most recent data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, headquartered in Paris. 

The new anti-counterfeiting method, published online in ArXiv, the open-access preprint journal from Cornell University, has two components: a unique molecular pattern that can be incorporated into a holographic label and a smartphone app.

The unique pattern is created by intentionally fabricating flaws into an atom-thin layer of material, such as graphene oxide. Flaws may include removing a carbon atom, or adding extra oxygen atoms, or creating a ridge of atoms, according to the researchers. Once the flaw is set, the material is incorporated into an ink and then, using an inkjet printer, printed onto a hologram, which can be added as a label to any product.

To confirm the presence of the atomic pattern, a person would use a smartphone camera and its built-in flash to photograph the label. The flash excites the atoms, which produce a unique color based on the pattern. A corresponding app can instantly analyze the image and confirm whether the label is authentic or not, the researchers said.

"I'm really satisfied by how simple it is," Young told Live Science.

Solving such an extensive problem like counterfeiting requires a solution that can be adopted by a large number of people, Young added. A technique that's easy to incorporate and easy to analyze could ensure that it's widely adopted much faster, he said.

Young and his team are working with a company that prints 10 billion holograms per year and said that the first application could be in the automotive industry, where parts are already spray-painted with labels. By piggybacking onto existing manufacturing applications, the researchers can prove that the method works, according to Young.

"We're expecting the first products in market in the first quarter of next year, in 2018," he said.

From there, the researchers would like to branch out to other industries, including pharmaceuticals, where $200 billion a year is lost from counterfeit drugs, Young said. And what's worse, this illegal medicine can sometimes lead to death.

"Thirty percent of counterfeit pharmaceuticals don't contain the correct active ingredient," Young said. "People buy these things, believe they're real, but they're not being treated for the disease."

Young said that eventually, the atomic fingerprints his team has developed could be laminated directly onto individual pills.

"This is genuinely a really exciting application," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

Whether they're swooping in to deliver packages or spotting victims in disaster zones, swarms of flying robots could have a range of important applications in the future, a new study found. The robots can transition from driving to flying without colliding with each other and could offer benefits beyond the traditional flying-car concepts of sci-fi lore, the study said.

The ability to both fly and walk is common in nature. For instance, many birds, insects and other animals can do both.

Robots with similar versatility could fly over impediments on the ground or drive under overhead obstacles. But currently, robots that are good at one mode of transportation are usually bad at others, study lead author Brandon Araki, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and his colleagues said in their new study. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

The researchers previously developed a robot named the "flying monkey" that could run and fly, as well as grasp items. However, the researchers had to program the paths the flying monkey would take; in other words, it could not find safe routes by itself.

Now, these scientists have developed flying cars that can both fly and drive through a simulated city-like setting that has parking spots, landing pads and no-fly zones. Moreover, these drones can move autonomously without colliding with each other, the researchers said. "Our vehicles can find their own safe paths," Araki told Live Science.

The researchers took eight four-rotor "quadcopter" drones and put two small motors with wheels on the bottom of each drone, to make them capable of driving. In simulations, the robots could fly for about 295 feet (90 meters) or drive for 826 feet (252 meters) before their batteries ran out.

The roboticists developed algorithms that ensured the robots did not collide with one another. In tests in a miniature town made using everyday materials such as pieces of fabric for roads and cardboard boxes for buildings, all drones successfully navigated from a starting point to an ending point on collision-free paths.

Adding the driving apparatus to each drone added weight and so slightly reduced battery life, decreasing the maximum distances the drones could fly by about 14 percent, the researchers said. Still, the scientists noted that driving remained more efficient than flying, offsetting the relatively small loss in efficiency in flying due to the added weight.

"The most important implication of our research is that vehicles that combine flying and driving have the potential to be both much more efficient and much more useful than vehicles that can only drive or only fly," Araki said.

The scientists cautioned that fleets of automated flying taxis are likely not coming anytime soon. "Our current system of drones certainly isn't robust enough to actually carry people right now," Araki said. Still, these experiments with quadcopters help explore "various ideas related to flying cars," he said.

The scientists detailed their findings on June 1 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore.

Original article on Live Science.

A tech startup on a mission to make modern commercial and housing estates energy neutral has outfitted the headquarters of a Dutch bank with the world's first commercial, fully transparent solar-power-generating windows.

The windows have solar cells installed in the edges at a specific angle that allows the incoming solar light to be efficiently transformed into electricity.

"Large commercial estates consume a lot of energy," said Ferdinand Grapperhaus, co-founder and CEO of the startup, called Physee. "If you want to make these buildings energy neutral, you never have enough roof surface. Therefore, activating the buildings' facades will significantly contribute to making the buildings energy neutral." [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas]

The windows could generate 8 to 10 watts of power, according to Grapperhaus.

"This enables the user to charge a phone per every square meter [11 square feet] two times a day," he told Live Science.

The first installation of Physee's PowerWindows was unveiled in June in Eindhoven, in the south of the Netherlands. The headquarters of Rabobank, the Netherlands' biggest bank, has been fitted with 323 square feet (30 square m) of the PowerWindows. The bank's employees will be able to plug their smartphones into the windows using USB ports to charge their batteries, according to Physee.

Other buildings in the Netherlands are already lined up to receive the innovative solar technology, which has won Physee a place on the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers 2017 list.

At the end of June, the headquarters of the Amsterdam-based charity the Postcode Lottery were fitted with the PowerWindows. After that, Physee will move forward with its first large-scale project: a 19,000-square-foot (1,800 square m) installation in a large, newly built residential complex in Amsterdam, the Bold tower.

"I believe that every new type of glass needs power," Grapperhaus said. "Either for the glass to be tinted electrically or heated or inside windows there are these solar blinds, which are electrical and can go up and down but also more and more you can see video glass."

Grapperhaus said that the cost of the wiring that brings power from the grid to such windows is considerable in large commercial estates, and investing in power-generating windows would therefore make commercial sense.

Physee is already working on the next-generation technology that would triple the efficiency of the PowerWindows. The surface of the second generation of PowerWindows will be coated with a special material that transforms oncoming visible light into near-infrared light, which is then transported toward the solar cells in the edges of the windows.

"It works similarly to a [glow-in-the-dark star]," Grapperhaus said. "The difference is that the glow star emits the green wavelength, but the coating on our windows emits light in near-infrared wavelength."

The coating is based on the rare-earth metal thulium. Grapperhaus, together with his friend Willem Kesteloo, discovered the ability of thulium to transform a broad spectrum of light into near-infrared light in 2014, during their studies at the Delft University of Technology.

"Over time, our efficiency will improve further due to the development of better solar cells but also because of the economies of scale," Grapperhaus said. "Right now, we are looking for iconic projects all over the world to show that a large glass building can be made energy neutral in an aesthetic way."

Physee was among 30 early stage technology pioneers highlighted for 2017 and selected by the World Economic Forum for their potential to change the world. The list, announced June 14, consisted of firms developing various technologies, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity solutions and biotechnology.

Physee's presence on the list shows that the world is starting to take climate change seriously, Grapperhaus said.

"Ten years ago, sustainability was something that wasn't taken very seriously — not by venture capitalists, not by many governments and neither by large corporations," Grapperhaus said. "What I have seen over the last three years is that corporations are becoming more and more responsible, governments are becoming more and more supportive, and venture capitalists are becoming more and more interested" in sustainability.

Original article on Live Science.

The device, a square that measures just 0.04 inches by 0.05 inches (1 by 1.2 millimeters), has the potential to switch its "aperture" among wide angle, fish eye and zoom instantaneously. And because the device is so thin, just a few microns thick, it could be embedded anywhere. (For comparison, the average width of a human hair is about 100 microns.)

"The entire backside of your phone could be a camera," said Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical engineering and medical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the principal investigator of the research paper, describing the new camera. [Photo Future: 7 High-Tech Ways to Share Images]

It could be embedded in a watch or in a pair of eyeglasses or in fabric, Hajimiri told Live Science. It could even be designed to launch into space as a small package and then unfurl into very large, thin sheets that image the universe at resolutions never before possible, he added.

"There's no fundamental limit on how much you could increase the resolution," Hajimiri said. "You could do gigapixels if you wanted.” (A gigapixel image has 1 billion pixels, or 1,000 times more than an image from a 1-megapixel digital camera.)

Hajimiri and his colleagues presented their innovation, called an optical phased array, at the Optical Society's (OSA) Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, which was held in March. The research was also published online in the OSA Technical Digest.

The proof-of-concept device is a flat sheet with an array of 64 light receivers that can be thought of as tiny antennas tuned to receive light waves, Hajimiri said. Each receiver in the array is individually controlled by a computer program.

In fractions of a second, the light receivers can be manipulated to create an image of an object on the far right side of the view or on the far left or anywhere in between. And this can be done without pointing the device at the objects, which would be necessary with a camera.

"The beauty of this thing is that we create images without any mechanical movement," he said.

Hajimiri called this feature a "synthetic aperture." To test how well it worked, the researchers laid the thin arrayover a silicon computer chip. In experiments, the synthetic aperture collected light waves, and then other components on the chip converted the light waves to electrical signals that were sent to a sensor.

The resulting image looks like a checkerboard with illuminated squares, but this basic low-resolution image is just first step, Hajimiri said. The device's ability to manipulate incoming light waves is so precise and fast that, theoretically, it could capture hundreds of different kinds of images in any kind of light, including infrared, in a matter of seconds, he said.

"You can make an extremely powerful and large camera," Hajimiri said.

Achieving a high-power view with a conventional camera requires that the lens be very big, so that it can collect enough light. This is why professional photographers on the sidelines of sporting events wield huge camera lenses.

But bigger lenses require more glass, and that can introduce light and color flaws in the image. The researchers' optical phased array doesn't have that problem, or any added bulk, Hajimiri said.

For the next stage of their research, Hajimiri and his colleagues are working to make the device larger, with more light receivers in the array.

"Essentially, there's no limit on how much you could increase the resolution," he said. "It's just a question of how large you can make the phased array."

Original article on Live Science.

Unusual structures on moth eyes that help the insects see at night have inspired a new anti-reflection film for electronic devices. The new technology could help users see their screens even in bright daylight.

The film significantly reduces glare as well as the need to duck into the shade to read what's on the screen. 

"For most commercial smartphones, the moth-eye film can improve the readability of the screen by 10 times under a clear sky. Under direct sunlight, the readability can be improved by five times," said physicist Shin-Tson Wu, a professor in the College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida (UCF). [7 Things You Don't Know About Moths, But Should]

The nature-inspired film is expected to be inexpensive to manufacture, he said, and has the added benefits of being scratch-resistant and self-cleaning. Users could finally rid their phones of the dust, fingerprints and grime that tend to collect on regular touch screens, the researchers report.  

The researchers described their technology in a study published online June 22 in the journal Optica.

Wu's team, including Guanjan Tan, the study's lead author, and Jiun-Haw Lee's team from National Taiwan University (NTU), were inspired to develop the anti-reflective film after hearing about the so-called moth-eye effect. This term refers to the unique pattern of anti-reflective nanostructures on the outer surface of a moth's corneas.

The nanostructures allow light to pass into the eyes, but don't allow it to reflect out. This helps moths see in the dark but also prevents their eyes from reflecting light that might give the insects away to predators.

Other scientists inspired by this adaption in moths made solar cells with nanostructured surfaces to reduce the amount of sunlight that reflected away from the panels. This helps boost efficiency. Wu and Tan thought the technique could serve as a low-cost solution to improve the readability of electronic displays.

Many smartphones and laptops have been designed to solve the problem of glare using a sensor that detects the quality of light and can enhance the brightness or even dim the screen according to the environment. But increasing the display brightness typically drains a device's battery.

With this new coating, no additional power is required.

"The moth-eye-like nanostructure film can be fabricated and sold as anaccessory for our devices, just like screen-protection films," Wu said. Or, "it can also be integrated into the whole device-manufacturing process."

To make the film, the researchers first created a mold using tiny "nanospheres" that they applied to a glass surface and that self-assembled into a tightly packed layer. The researchers then used the mold like a template to press the pattern into the film. [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

Scaling up the assembly to industrial levels would be simple to do, Wu said. They would apply the mold to a wheel and use it for roll-to-roll manufacturing, he said. Like an old-school printing press.

The next step for the researchers, they said, is to improve the film's durability, finding the right balance between flexibility and hardness.

Wu said his team of researchers is very excited about the results they achieved. The technology can be applied to smartphones, tablets and TVs that are already on the market, Wu said. But it doesn't have to stop there. Because the coating is so thin and flexible, it could be used in the future on flexible or even foldable displays.

"That even makes us more excited," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

In experiments with 11 able-bodied people, the so-called human-in-the-loop algorithm took about an hour to optimize the exoskeleton, and afterward, reduced the amount of energy participants needed to walk by 24 percent, on average, said research team member Rachel Jackson, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]

"The size of the reduction was pretty astounding," Jackson told Live Science.

Jackson and her colleagues, led by Steven Collins, an associate professor of mechanical engineeringat CMU, and Juanjuan Zhang, formerly of CMU and now a professor at Nankai University in China, published the results of their research online today (June 22) in the journal Science.

A lightened load is certainly appealing, but a personalized exoskeleton could also increase the distance an able-bodied person can walk, and it could even help individuals run faster, Jackson said.

People with physical impairments, such as those who have suffered a stroke, a neurological injury or an amputation, may realize benefits as well, Jackson said. A personalized exoskeleton could make walking as easy or easier than it was before an amputation or injury, she said.

Previously, the largest average energy reductions achieved by other research teams were 14.5 percent, using manually adjusted ankle exoskeletons worn on both legs, and 22.8 percent, using an exosuit that acted on both hips and both ankles using preprogrammed settings.

But the CMU human-in-the-loop algorithm performed better, and it didn't rely on preprogramming.

"This algorithm was so good that it was able to discover an assistance strategy to reduce energy costs with just a single device," said Jackson. "That was pretty cool." [Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World]

The challenge with exoskeletons is that although they're meant to assist a person, they can impede motion, said Jackson. For starters, each device comes with its own weight, ranging from a few ounces to a couple of pounds, and the user has to carry that weight. Exoskeletons are also designed to apply force to certain parts of the body, but if the timing of the force is off, the person may need to use more energy to move, Jackson said. And that's counterproductive.

During the optimization phase of the recent study, each participant wore an ankle exoskeleton as well as a mask designed to measure levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide (CO2). These measures relate to how much energy the person is expending. As each person walked on a treadmill at a steady pace, the exoskeleton applied a set of different patterns of assistance to the ankles and toes.

Those patterns were a combination of when the force was applied and the amount of force. For instance, forces could be applied early in a stance (when the heel first hits the ground), in the middle of the stance (when the foot is flat) or late in stance (when the foot has rolled up to the toe). During those variations in positions, a greater or smaller amount of force could be applied.

The algorithm tested the participants' responses to 32 different patterns, which changed every 2 minutes. Then, it measured whether the pattern was making it easier or more difficult for the person to walk.

By the end of the session, which lasted just longer than an hour, the algorithm produced a unique pattern of assistance optimized for each individual.

"In terms of the general shape of the patterns, there was large variability, which speaks to the importance of customizing these strategies to each person, rather than applying that same thing to everybody," Jackson said.

She added that the device may have worked well not just because it was "learning," but also because as it changed up the pattern of assistance, the person using it was also learning.

"We think that it forces people to explore different ways of coordinating their gait to interact better with the device," Jackson said. That helps guide the person on how best to use the device and derive the greatest benefit from it. "It's a two-way street," she said.

Other members of the team plan to test how the algorithm could be scaled up to create an exoskeleton with six joints, designed to be worn on the entire lower half of the body.

Original article on Live Science.

Science fiction vs. science fact

Whether you're looking to scale skyscrapers like Spider-Man or wish you could have Wolverine's amazing powers of self-healing, researchers are devising ways to bring extraordinary abilities to the average mortal, and some of these amazing technologies may make you feel like a real-life superhero.

Flying exosuit | Superhero: Iron Man

A British oil trader has fashioned himself into a real-life Tony Stark, by building a jet engine-powered exoskeleton suit that lets him take flight.

Richard Browning created the exosuit by combining three sets of miniature jet engines and attaching them to his arms and back. He controls his speed and direction by changing the direction of the engines' thrust using only his upper body. There is no other steering mechanism.

The exosuit lacks some of Iron Man's fancier features, such as superhuman strength and repulsor rays, but it does allow Browning to fly for up to 10 minutes. In early experiments, Browning was able to soar 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) above the ground at about 5 mph (8 km/h), but he said he thinks future prototypes could fly at speeds of up to 60 mph (100 km/h) at altitudes up to 330 feet (100 meters).

But, being Ironman doesn't come cheap. Browning said his prototype costs about $250,000.

Self-healing | Superhero: Wolverine

Wolverine's amazing mutant powers of self-healing may seem impossible for the average human, but the experimental research arm of the U.S. military is developing tiny implants that could indeed help humans heal themselves. (Although maybe not from a duel with Lord Shingen.)

The Electrical Prescriptions Program, or ElecRX, seeks to develop miniature implants that would continually monitor a person's physical condition and provide electric stimulus to any systems in need. The devices are so tiny they can be implanted right at nerve endings with a needle — unlike today's more invasive technologies — making treatments more targeted.

The implants could be used to treat painful chronic inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic inflammatory response syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease. Alas, they won't give you Wolverine's remarkable longevity…

Run fast | Superhero: The Flash

If the idea of owning a jetpack isn't cool enough, imagine one that can help you run lightning fast, like a real-life Flash.

This battery-powered jetpack, worn like a backpack, helped one speedy test subject shave 20 seconds off of his mile time — already an impressive 5 minutes and 20 seconds.

The technology was originally developed as part of a DARPA program looking to find ways to make soldiers move faster on the battlefield, and now researchers are trying to help athletes improve performance.

"This is the future of where the jetpack is going," Jason Kerestes, a graduate student of engineering and robotics who leads the project at Arizona State University, told Live Science. "We feel that if we can enhance that technology, we can get somebody who can run a five-and-a-half-minute mile down to a four-minute mile."

Whether you use your newfound powers of superspeed for good or evil, however, is up to you.

Invisibility | Superhero: Invisible Woman

Invisibility cloaks may not allow you to hide anything with your mind like the Invisible Woman can, but in the event that you don't gain super-abilities from a cosmic storm, they're as close as you can get to making objects vanish.

Older attempts at creating invisibility cloaks tried to make objects disappear by bending light around them, but newer technologies are taking different approaches. One uses a new kind of technology called a metascreen that cancels out light waves bouncing off a cloaked object. (So far it only works in microwave light, not visible light.) Another reflects light off of an object as if it were a flat mirror, rendering the cloaked object invisible.

So far, only very small objects have been successfully cloaked, and not in real-world situations, but scientists are continuing to work on both projects.

X-ray vision | Superhero: Superman

Superman's X-ray vision lets the Man of Steel see through walls (unless, of course, they're made of lead), and now thanks to the work of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, humans can too. Well, almost.

MIT's RF Capture system uses short-wave radio signals to track movement through walls, and in experiments, scientists were able to identify 15 people through walls with up to 90 percent accuracy, tracking their movements within less than an inch. The system first gets the lay of the land, and then tracks for changes — as in those made by moving humans.

The technology's initial applications will likely be in healthcare, as researchers hope to create a system that can monitor seniors who are at risk of falling — a project Superman would definitely support. 

Super strength | Superhero: The Hulk

If you've ever dreamed about having your very own "Hulk Smash!" moment of super strength, a new high-tech suit of armor could make that dream a reality.

Called the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS, the suit "promises to provide superhuman strength with greater ballistic protection," according to the U.S. Army. The robotic suit can also help humans carry greater loads, rendering them super-strong.

In addition to improving strength, the suit can make its wearer bulletproof via an exoskeleton made of magnetorheological fluids that can change from liquid to solid in seconds.

Even the Hulk would be impressed by that.

Teleportation | Superhero: Nightcrawler

Bamf! Scientists have been able to make particles teleport just like Nightcrawler.

Welcome to the weird world of quantum teleportation. While researchers can't teleport matter across space, through the magic of quantum entanglement, a process by which subatomic particles are linked and can communicate instantaneously even when separated at great distances, they can beam information from one place to another. So far, scientists have been able to teleport particles between distances of up to almost 90 miles (145 kilometers).

Someday, they hope to create hack-proof quantum cybersecurity or quantum internet systems.

"A quantum Internet could allow you to establish communications channels that are much more secure than what we have with the standard encryption protocols we use everyday nowadays," Martin Stevens, a quantum optics researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, told Live Science.

Walk on walls | Superhero: Spider-Man

Spider-Man may have no trouble scaling skyscrapers, but for the average human, such feats have remained the stuff of science fiction — until now.

Inspired by the sticky feet of geckos, the Pentagon has developed handheld paddles that allow humans to climb walls, just like Spider-Man. The paddles were developed to allow soldiers to gain access to higher ground in urban environments. At the same time, researchers at Stanford University created similar climbing paddles, also using gecko-inspired technology. Stanford's device consists of two plates covered with postage stamp-size tiles covered in tiny rubber hairs.

"I was the climber in the tests," said researcher Elliot Hawkes, a mechanical engineer at Stanford. "That was extremely exciting. To be able to climb glass felt a little bit magical — it feels like you're hooking this device onto a perfectly flat smooth surface, and it doesn't feel possible." 

Telekinesis | Superhero: Jean Grey

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have created a brain-computer interface that could let users channel mutant Jean Grey and her ability to move objects with her mind.

The system allows users to fly a remote-controlled quadcopter with their thoughts.

Users wear a cap with attached electrodes that pick up electrical signals from the brain and transmit them to a computer, which then translates them into movement. Student volunteers first spent time learning how to move a virtual aircraft across a simulated model of the University of Minnesota campus using their thoughts, and then tried flying the quadcopter through an obstacle course.

Mind blowing.

Underwater breathing | Superhero: Aquaman

A device that promised to turn you into a real-life Aquaman turned out to be too good to be true.

The creators of Triton claimed their artificial gills could let humans breathe underwater for up to 45 minutes, at depths of up to 15 feet (4.5 meters), without the bulky equipment needed for scuba diving (like an air tank). But, scientists were skeptical. The device wouldn't be able to function unless swimmers were traveling at superhuman speeds and would still require a sizeable tank.

An Indiegogo campaign raised more than $800,000 to bring the product to market, but the company refunded its users in 2016. It re-launched the campaign, claiming it would have a product on the market in December 2016 that would retail for $399, but that didn't happen.

It looks like would-be Aquamen are still going to need their scuba tanks.

A new wireless power system could help people avoid the inevitable jumbled mess of tangled cords and offer a more efficient way to charge electric vehicles on the go, according to a new study.

Researchers at Stanford University adapted a concept from quantum physics to produce a wireless charger that does something other wireless chargers cannot: automatically tune the frequency of the radio wave — the medium that transfers the power — to account for changes in the distance between the charging pad and the device. In an experiment, the team showed that its system transferred power with 100 percent efficiency up to about 27 inches (70 centimeters).

"The range is perfect for electric cars," Sid Assawaworrarit, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at Stanford University, told Live Science. "The floor of a car is about 20 centimeters [8 inches] away from the road's surface. You could embed the charging pad below the road surface." [Hyperloop, Jetpacks & More: 9 Futuristic Transit Ideas]

Assawaworrarit and his colleagues reported their research in a study published online today (June 14) in the journal Nature.

Although other wireless-charging devices, such as those for phones, already exist, the efficiency drops dramatically if the device is too close or too far away from the charger. This means a phone has to be placed on top of a charging pad to work best, and an electric car needs to be parked directly over a pad to recharge efficiently. As such, electronic devices are still tethered, albeit invisibly, to their power source, according to Assawaworrarit.

The problem lies in the design of these wireless power systems. They typically consist of a source, which is the charging pad, and a receiver, which could be a phone or an electric car.

In the source, radio waves of a certain frequency are generated to excite electrons in a coil of wire, called a resonant inductor. The receiver in the phone or electric car also has a resonant inductor made from a coil of wires. When the two inductors are put near each other, the energy gets coupled from the source to the receiver. In the receiver, a component called a rectifier converts the energy from the radio waves to usable electrical energy for the phone or the car.

Finding the optimal frequency for the radio waves depends on the sensitivity of the equipment, the distance between the source and receiver and their orientation to each other.

Once the optimal frequency is found, deviations to the variables used to set it, such as changing the distance between the source and receiver, reduces the transfer efficiency. Assawaworrarit said a tuning circuit can, in theory, be built to adjust the frequency, but the design is complicated and puts limitations on how fast the device can be moved in relationship to the charging pad.

Assawaworrarit and his team created a wireless power system that doesn’t use a source for radio waves, nor does it require a tuning circuit. It also works even if the distance between the resonant coils fluctuates, the scientists said. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

The researchers accomplished this by taking advantage of a concept from quantum mechanics called parity-time symmetry, or PT symmetry for short. Like other concepts from the field of quantum science, it's peculiar, but systems built from it have symmetrically arranged parts that either absorb electromagnetic energy or emit it.

In an accompanying analysis of the new study published in the journal Nature, Geoffroy Lerosey a research scientist at the Langevin Institute, The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and ESPCI Paris, wrote that parity-time symmetry can work to tune different wavelengths of light from a multimode laser into a single-mode laser.

Here, Assawaworrarit and his colleagues simplified the whole setup. They built a system that has a source and receiver, just like in conventional systems. But instead of using radio waves to excite electrons in the resonant inductor, they used an amplifier designed to amplify the electromagnetic energy in the coil. The receiver has a resonant inductor and rectifier, just like in conventional systems, the researchers said.

The physics behind PT symmetry automatically selects the operating frequency that will result in a maximum amount of energy being transferred. It accomplishes this within tens of microseconds and the system, in its present form, can accommodate distances to a little more than 3 feet (1 meter), limited by the use of near-field coupling, according to the study.

"Over a range of distances, the PT physics is such that the gains compensate for the losses," Assawaworrarit said.

Although the researchers tested their idea both in a computer simulation and in an experiment using an LED light bulb, it will take some time for such a device to reach consumers, they said.

In his review, Leroseynoted that the amplifier needs to be optimized, and he also questioned whether this concept will work if one coil is fixed and the other is moving, as would be the case with an electric car driving over a road embedded with charging pads.

"These questions need to be answered before this beautiful concept can have real-life applications," Lerosey wrote. "However, it already builds an inspiring bridge between the worlds of quantum physics and engineering."

Original article on Live Science.

Apple has spent years working on a car project that has been kept shrouded in secrecy — until now.

During an interview with Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the auto industry is experiencing disruption from three avenues: electric cars, ride-sharing companies and self-driving technology. And driverless cars, Cook revealed, is something that Apple has been focusing on. Cook said the artificial intelligence (AI) behind autonomous systems is an important "core technology" for the company moving forward.

"We're focusing on autonomous systems, and clearly one purpose of autonomous systems isself-driving cars [but] there are others," Cook told Bloomberg. "And we sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects — it's probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on." [Photos: The Robotic Evolution of Self-Driving Cars]

Though Cook did not say what will come from the AI project in terms of future products, he noted that autonomy in general is "incredibly exciting" for Apple. 

Many companies in Silicon Valley and beyond are refining autonomous vehicle technologies, ranging from Tesla's auto-pilot mode to the robotic car challenge put on by the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

One recently announced self-driving system comes in the form of a portable robot chauffer. The IVO (short for intelligent vehicle operator) uses cameras, motion sensors and a few mechanical devices to depress the brakes and turn the steering wheel.

Original article on Live Science.

There's been a lot of hype coming out of Silicon Valley in recent months about technology that can meld the human brain with machines. But how will this tech help society, and which companies are leading the charge?

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made waves in March when he announced his latest venture, Neuralink, which will design so-called brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Initially, the BCIs will be used for medical research, but the ultimate goal is to prevent humans from becoming obsolete, by enabling people to merge with artificial intelligence.

While these may seem like lofty goals, Musk is not the only one who's trying to bring humans closer to machines. Here are five companies that have doubled down on hacking the brain. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Neuralink

According to Musk, the main barrier to human-machine cooperation is communication "bandwidth."

This means that using a touch screen or a keyboard is a slow way to communicate with a computer. Musk's new venture aims to create a direct "high-bandwidth" link between the human brain and machines.

What that system would actually look like is not entirely clear yet. Words like "neural lace" and "neural dust" have been bandied about, but all that has really been revealed is a business model. Neuralink has been registered as a medical research company, and Musk said the firm will produce a product to help people with severe brain injuries within four years.

This will lay the groundwork for developing BCIs for healthy people, thus enabling humans to communicate by "consensual telepathy," which could be ready within five years, Musk said. Some scientists, particularly those in the neuroscience community, are skeptical of Musk's ambitious plans.

Facebook

Not to be outdone, just a few weeks after Musk launched Neuralink, Facebook announced that it is working on a way to let people type with their thoughts.

The goal is to build a device that would allow people to "type" up to 100 words per minute, according to Regina Dugan, head of the company's secretive Building 8 research group. Dugan also suggested that the device could work as a "brain mouse" for augmented reality (AR), removing the need to track hand movements to control cursors, The Verge reported.

Facebook has also been light on the details of its plans. The company has said it does not think implants are feasible in the long term, so it's focusing on developing some kind of cap that could track brain activity noninvasively, most likely using optical imaging.

But this technology doesn't exist yet. So, in the meantime, Facebook said that, within two years, it plans to create a prototype medical implant that would pave the way for future devices.

Kernel

Musk wasn't the first wealthy entrepreneur to dive into the underdeveloped neurotechnology space. Last August, Bryan Johnson, founder of the online payments company Braintree, invested $100 million into the startup called Kernel.

The company's initial goal was to develop a chip that could record memories and redeliver them to the brain, based on research by Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. But six months later, the two parted ways due to the long timescales involved, reported MIT Technology Review, and the company is now focusing on technology similar to Neuralink.

Kernel plans to build a flexible platform for recording and stimulating neurons, with the goal of treating diseases such as depression and Alzheimer's. But like Musk, Johnson is not afraid to discuss the prospect of using the technology to augment human abilities and merge with machines.

"There's this huge potential to co-evolve with our technology," Johnson told CNBC.

Emotiv

Unlike some other companies in this burgeoning industry, Emotiv actually makes products — electroencephalography headsets that record brain activity noninvasively.

The technology is lower fidelity than the kinds of neural implants other companies, such as Neuralink, are considering, but it is more established. The company has a research-grade device, called EPOC+, which sells for $799. But it also produces a more consumer-oriented headset, called Insight, which retails for $299.

Emotiv also produces a variety of software products that allow users to visualize their brain activity in 3D; measure their brain fitness; and even control drones, robots and video games, reported The Daily Dot. The company was selected to be part of the Disney Accelerator program in 2015, with the aim of creating a "wearable for the brain."

DARPA

Although it's not a company itself, the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a $60 million program last year to develop an implantable neural interface in collaboration with a consortium of private companies.

The project, which is a part of former President Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative, is ambitious. DARPA wants a device that can record 1 million neurons simultaneously and stimulate at least 100,000 neurons in the brain. DARPA also wants the device to be wireless, the size of a nickel and ready in four years, which is an incredibly aggressive deadline, according to MIT Technology Review.

Potential applications include compensating for sight or hearing problems because the device could feed digital auditory or visual information directly into the brain. The exact technological approach is unclear at this stage, but the project has the heft of some major engineering giants, such as Qualcomm, behind it,  Quartz reported.

Original article on Live Science.

Apple may have long ago cemented its status as a technology titan, but Steve Wozniak thinks the next major technological innovation won't come from the company he co-founded.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg Canada, Wozniak discussed advancements in the technology sector. One major topic was artificial intelligence, which he said can be applied in various forms, ranging from understanding language to developing new games.

One of the most innovative and obvious applications, according to Wozniak, is in self-driving vehicles. It is in this arena that the Apple co-founder said he is betting on Tesla, and its CEO Elon Musk, to develop the next "moonshot."

"I think Tesla is on the best direction right now. They’ve put an awful lot of effort into very risky things," Wozniak told Bloomberg Canada. "They started with a car, the Tesla Model S, that made little sense in engineering terms in how much you have to build for what price and what the market will be."

Wozniak also noted Musk's desire to find innovative solutions to other transportation systems, including the "Hyperloop," a proposed transportation concept in which passenger-filled pods are accelerated through a low-pressure tube to their destination. Musk's other transit innovation involves car-carrying electric sleds. The project, known as the Boring Company, would require a series of subterranean tunnels through which sleds could carry cars at speeds of about 125 mph (200 km/h).

Original article on Live Science.

The technique, dubbed Electrick by its inventors from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, relies on electrodes attached to an object made of or coated with any slightly conductive material. While not as precise as smartphone touch-screen technology, the resulting touchpads are still accurate enough to allow basic control functions, such as using a slider or pushing a button, the researchers said.

"The technology is very similar to how touch screens work," said Yang Zhang, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "When the user's finger touches on an electric field, it will shunt a fraction of the current to the ground, and by tracking where the shunting of the current happens, we can track where the user touches the surface." [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

The technique is known as electric field tomography and uses an array of electrodes to detect the position where the touch occurred.

In a video demonstrating Electrick's capabilities, the researchers added touch control to a model of a human brain made of Jell-O, a guitar and a section of a wall. When a person touched parts of the Jell-O brain, for example, he or she could to see on a computer screen the name of that particular part of the brain.

The researchers said the technology could be used for educational purposes, by hobbyists and in other commercial applications.

"The goal of this technology is to enable touch sensing on everything," Zhang said. "Touch has been very successful. It's a very intuitive way to interact with computer resources. So, we were wondering whether we could enable these touch-sensing capabilities in many more objects other than just phones and tablets."

Smartphone touch screens are made of expensive materials and require costly and sophisticated techniques to build. As such, it can be complicated to create touch surfaces on objects that are large or irregular in shape, Zhang said. There are ways to enable touch control on larger objects, but these methods mostly rely on detection of motion by cameras. However, these techniques also have limitations, Zhang said.

"If you use a camera, it won't work that well if the lighting condition changes," he said. "Users also could have privacy concerns to have cameras in their homes."

Zhang added that the Electrick technique enables touch control in objects that have been created using a wide range of manufacturing methods, including 3D printing and injection molding. The only condition is for the material to be slightly conductive, he said.

"It wouldn't work with normal plastic, which is totally nonconductive," Zhang said. "But we can use various carbon-loaded materials, materials that have carbon particles inside them, which make them slightly conductive."

The slightly conductive layer can also be sprayed onto the surface of an otherwise-nonconductive object of any shape, Zhang said. This way, the engineers can enable touch control in existing pieces of furniture, make a touch-controlled steering wheel or phone case, or enable someone to turn on the lights in their apartment by simply tapping the wall.

Zhang said the Electrick surfaces are durable and could get additional protection by adding an extra layer of coating on top.

The researchers presented the technology earlier this month at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Denver.

Original article on Live Science.

As a headless robot crawls over a pile of pebbles, its jointless, rubbery legs carefully but confidently sample the terrain in steady, yet unrushed movements that resemble a turtle's. The robot's ability to reliably walk across different types of surfaces is unique, and so is the fact that its elaborately shaped legs were created with a 3D printer, according to the engineers who developed the bio-inspired creature.

"With soft robots, you can do a lot of things that are difficult for a hard robot," said Mike Tolley, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of California, San Diego, who led the research. "[F]iguring out exactly how to place parts of your body or get around in a very unpredictable environment becomes a lot easier when your body is soft."

The combination of soft and stiff materials enables living creatures to adjust to the irregularities in terrain that frequently stop current rigid robots in their tracks. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

But the new robot, which will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore next week, is a big step forward in robotic agility, according to Tolley.

In a video made by the researchers, the robot can be seen nimbly creeping into a narrowing corridor, just like a real animal would. Its four legs, positioned in an "X" shape, can alternate between walking, climbing and crawling — or even a type of motion that resembles swimming. The robot can move forward and backward, and can rotate and move sideways without needing any sensors to "see" the environment, the scientists said. Its speed, however, is rather modest — about 0.8 inches (20 millimeters) per second.

The researchers said this nimble bot could have a variety of future applications.

"We see it could be useful in search and rescue, being able to crawl through rubble, but we would also like to use it in the study of nature," Tolley told Live Science. "Biologists could, for example, send it into tunnels that turtles dig to see what is in there without being too disruptive."

The key to the robot's abilities is in its soft 3D-printed legs, which consist of three connected spiral-like tubes made of a carefully designed combination of soft and rigid materials.

"What people —including myself — have done previously, is make legs that are essentially bent in one direction, and that’s relatively easy to make with something like molding," Tolley said. "But when you want to make something that bends not only in one way but bends in any direction, then you need a more complicated design, and that's what we focused on."

The researchers first modeled the legs digitally and tried to predict how they would behave in certain situations — for instance, on a soft, sandy surface or when navigating over rocks and pebbles.

Subsequently, the scientists used a sophisticated 3D printer to create the legs, which are hollow inside and inflatable. The amount of pressure and order in which the pistons are inflated determines the robot's gait, the researchers said.

"This particular robot is tethered to a control system, and we are definitely looking at how we could get all the components on board so that we can make it untethered and completely autonomous," Tolley said.

Original article on Live Science.

An artificial Venus flytrap can open and then close on cue, just like its namesake in nature, according to a new study. Scientists said this flexible gripping device could give soft robots a way to grasp and release objects autonomously, without the need for programming or computer-controlled parts.

"If you want to make something intelligent, oftentimes it's made using computers and some control circuitry that incorporates sensors and detectors. You have a system with many different pieces that have to be integrated to make the device work," said the study’s lead researcher Arri Priimagi, an associate professor of chemistry and bioengineering at Tampere University of Technology in Finland. [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

The team tried to make this simpler he told Live Science.

Priimagi and his colleagues described their device in a study published online today (May 23) in the journal Nature Communications.

Although the device could serve in a range of applications, from biomedical manipulators to microchip-assembly lines to warehouse robots that stock shelves, Priimagi said he hasn't devoted much time to thinking about how the technology might be used.

"This wasn't application-driven," he said. 

In nature, the carnivorous Venus flytrap waits with its jaw-like leaves open until an insect descends to drink from a nectar gland inside the plant. Last year, a study published in the journal Current Biology by researchers at the University of Würzburg in Germany, showed that the plant doesn't react instantly if a fly lands on it. Instead, hair-like sensors inside the flytraps' leaves need to be triggered twice in 20 seconds for the jaws to close, and five times to trigger the production of digestive enzymes, the scientists found.

Priimagi's gripper doesn't trap or ingest insects, but it does use a stimulus in order to close its trap, he said. What's more, the power source, sensors and devices that convert energy into motion are combined into one simple device.

The device has two main components: an optical fiber stem and a leaf made from a light-responsive liquid crystal elastomer. When open, the leaf and the fiber form a capital letter "T."

When light in the fiber-optic stem shines up through the leaf and out into the air, it creates a cone-shaped beam. If an object passes into the beam, light scatters back to the bendy leaf, triggering molecules inside the material that respond by changing shape. This changing of shape generates heat, causing the molecules to misalign, and this creates a bend in the elastomer. The leaf closes, opening when the light is turned off.

The leaf is tiny: a strip measuring no longer than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) and thinner than a strand of human hair. But because it's made of soft material that becomes even softer when it heats up a bit, the leaf's gripping strength is high, the researchers said. It's able to grasp objects that have a mass hundreds of times higher than itself, the scientists added.

In lab experiments, the team showed that the device could grab objects of any shape, including round or square objects, as well as random bits of Styrofoam and thin sheets covered with reflective material, such as aluminum foil. The scientists used lasers for the study, but Priimagi said they could do the same with LEDs or even with white light.

"We just need light and optical fibers," he said.

Priimagi said his team has more work to do, such as experimenting with different colors of light, finding ways to move heavier objects and making the device snap shut more quickly, the way a real Venus flytrap does.

Original article on Live Science.

Printed newspapers may be going out of style, but what if you could have a flexible electronic paper that reads headlines or the weather report and skips to the sports section on voice command?

Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a sheet-like device — known as a ferroelectret nanogenerator, or FENG — that acts as a loudspeaker and microphone and can generate energy from human motion, such as swiping a finger across a screen. [Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World]

"It's a device that you can roll up and put in your pocket and then get somewhere and unroll and put it on a screen or a window or any platform and use it as a both a microphone and loudspeaker," said Nelson Sepulveda, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University, and the primary investigator of the new study published online May 16 in the journal Nature Communications.

Last December, Sepulveda and his team detailed the main component of this device, the FENG, in the journal Nano Energy. At that time, the researchers showed off the thin film's ability to generate power from motion. It had the added benefit of being able to exponentially increase its voltage every time it was folded, the scientists said.

This latest research builds on that capability. The device now works as a microphone, picking up vibrations in the air (in other words, sound waves) and converting them into electric energy. It also turns electrical signals, from a computer file, for example, into vibrations that people can hear as sound.

In a couple of different demonstrations, the scientists showed how it could work. They embedded the FENG into the university's Spartan flag and then played the school's fight song through it. They also showed it could work as part of a voice-recognition system to authenticate access to a computer.

"The fidelity and the quality of the sound recognition is high enough to recognize the pitches and the frequency components of an individual's voice," Sepulveda told Live Science.

The device's microphone feature works in a way similar to high-end microphones already on the market. These rely on crystalline components, called piezoelectric transducers, that pick up sound and convert it to electrical signals that a computer can then turn into audio.

Piezoelectric crystals work this way in part because of their atomic structure, which contains pairs of positive and negative charges, called dipoles. As sound waves bounce off the crystal, they cause the positive and negative charges to align and misalign — and that creates a signal.

Sepulveda and his colleagues were able to mimic this structure in the FENG, but with much larger dipoles.

The device is made of very thin layers of environmentally friendly substances, including silver, polyimide and polypropylene ferroelectret. Positively and negatively charged particles are added to the layers, which are stacked in an uneven way. The unevenness creates microscopic pockets of air between the layers that are analogous to the dipoles in piezoelectric crystals, the researchers said. As sound waves bounce off the pockets of air, they compress the hollow dipoles, causing the positive and negative charges to align and misalign.

"We are generating the same electrical output as the very expensive microphones that use brittle crystals," Sepulveda said.

The reverse is also true. An electric signal sent through the device can cause vibrations that produce sound.

Another potential application, Sepulveda said, would be as a noise-canceling device. For example, a person could mount the film on a window, where it would pick up street noise and play the opposite sound waves to dampen the noise.

"There are so many ideas, and we keep learning about the technology and learning its tricks every day," Sepulveda said.

Original article on Live Science.

Laser printers that "sculpt" images at miniscule scales could one day make color photos that don't fade over time the way ink does, according to a new study.

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark made a sheet of polymer and semiconductor metal that reflects colors that never fade, using tiny structures that diffract, absorb and reflect light of different wavelengths. A coating made of the material would never need repainting, and the resulting image would retain its vibrancy over time, the scientists said.

This printing process also allows people to choose more specific colors, because exact wavelengths can be selected, meaning there's less guesswork involved with mixing pigments and comparing color charts, the researchers said. The same technique could be applied to making watermarks or even encryption and data storage, the researchers said. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

In this technique, the images are printed with a laser, which is fired at a sheet made of plastic on one layer and germanium on top of that. The sheets are made by depositing nanometer-thin layers of polymer and germanium into shapes, small cylinders and blocks, none measuring more than 100 nanometers across. (For comparison, an average strand of human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.)

"We generate a nano-imprint," study lead author Xiaolong Zhu, a nanotechnology researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, told Live Science.

Similar to what a laser printer does, the laser reshapes the tiny structures by melting them. Varying the intensity of the laser at tiny scales melts the structures differently, so they take on different geometries.

This is why the image resolution can be so fine, the researchers said. An image from an inkjet printer or laser printer typically consists of 300 to 2,400 dots per inch. A nanometer-size pixel is thousands of times smaller, meaning a resolution of 100,000 dots per inch, the researchers said. In fact, the whole collection of pixels resembles a miniature city of skyscrapers, domes and towers. 

When white light hits the various shapes, it can reflect, be bent or diffract, the researchers said. Since the shapes are so small, some won't reflect certain wavelengths, while others will scatter or bounce the light. The result is that a person sees a color, depending on the specific pattern of shapes, according to the study.

Butterfly wings and bird feathers work in a similar way, Zhu said. Tiny structures  cover butterfly's wing or a bird's feather, scattering light in specific ways, making the colors that people see. Butterfly wings, though, transmit some of the light, creating iridescence, the researchers said. Zhu and his colleagues got more specific than that — the combination of germanium and polymer means they can control which wavelengths of light are reflected from a given spot or not, so they don't produce the iridescent effect. This means vibrant, single colors where they want them, the researchers said.

Since the colors are built into the very structure of the sheets, they won't fade the way pigments do when exposed to light, the study said. Ordinary paint, for example, fades when sunlight hits it, because the ultraviolet light breaks down the chemicals that make up the pigment. On top of that, paint or ink can oxidize or come off when exposed to solvents, such as heavy-duty detergents. (Just drip water on an inkjet image, and you can watch the ink become dilute and run.) On old masterpieces, there's even a phenomenon called "metal soaps" based on the complex chemistry that occurs as paints age, according to Chemical & Engineering News.

Using their technique, Zhu and his colleagues made small pictures of the Mona Lisa and a portrait of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, as well as a simple photograph of a woman and a bridge, each measuring about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) across.

To mass produce this kind of printer, researchers would need to make laser technology smaller and might need a different material for the layers of sheets, the researchers said. That material would need to have a high refractive index, meaning it bends light a lot and absorbs light at the wavelength chosen for the laser, they added. In their experiments, the scientists chose green light for the wavelength and experimented with silicon for the material, which Zhu said doesn't absorb green laser light as efficiently.

Even germanium, though, is a possibility, because it isn't too expensive. "A few kilograms can cover a football [soccer] field," he said, noting that the germanium and polymer layers are only up to 50 nanometers thick. Germanium, though, isn't necessarily the best option, because it doesn't produce green colors well, Zhu said.

The new study appears in the May 3 issue of the journal Science Advances. 

Original article on Live Science.

What happens when you walk into a wall in virtual reality? Nothing yet, but soon, your muscles could get shocked when you smack into a barrier, thanks to a new research project that aims to simulate walls and other objects in virtual reality.

This expansion on the virtual reality (VR) experience uses electrical muscle stimulation to give users the sensation of hitting a wall or lifting a heavy object. The effect is created via haptic feedback, a type of tactile communication that uses forces or vibrations to re-create the sense of touch. A team of researchers from the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany created a wearable system that can shock different muscle groups throughout a person's body.

In addition to a VR headset and tracking gloves, the researchers outfitted users with backpacks containing electrical muscle stimulators and a series of electrode patches that attach to the wearers' skin and produce the shocks. [Beyond Gaming: 10 Other Fascinating Uses for Virtual-Reality Tech]

The researchers explained that the system can simulate interactions with different types of objects, including walls, shelves and projectiles.

"Our system stimulates up to four different muscle groups," the research team wrote about the project on the Hasso Plattner Institute website. "Through combinations of these muscle groups, our system simulates a range of effects. When pushing a button mounted to a vertical surface, for example, the system actuates biceps and wrist."

Their design uses brief pulses, about 200-300 miliseconds long, calibrated to the specific user's maximum intensity.

Haptics can also be used to simulate the feeling of lifting a virtual object, the researchers said. In one test, the user reaches out to lift a virtual cube. To give the user the feeling of resistance (in this case, a solid shape that has weight), the opposition muscle groups are shocked.

"When the user grabs the virtual cube, the user expects the cube's weight to create tension in the user's biceps and the cube's stiffness to create a tension in the user's pectoralis," the researchers wrote in a study published in the Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 6-11, 2017. "In order to create this sensation, the system actuates the respective opposition muscles. In order to put a load onto the user's biceps, it actuates the triceps, and in order to put a load onto the user's pectoralis, it actuates the user's shoulder muscle."

If the cube is heavier, then the system can apply more electrical stimulation, the researchers said.

So far, the system is limited to the upper body, but the researchers said that with additional research, it could be applied to a range of other muscles.

Original article on Live Science.

Intricate glass creations such as miniature castles and tiny pretzels can now be fabricated using 3D printing, according to a new study. The technique could one day be used to manufacture lenses for smartphone cameras as well as other key glass components, researchers said.

Archaeological research suggests humans have employed glassmaking for millennia. The process typically requires hot furnaces and harsh chemicals. Recently, scientists have investigated whether they could sidestep these drawbacks using 3D printing.

A 3D printer is a machine that creates items from a wide variety of materials: plastic, ceramic, metal and even more unusual ingredients, such as living cells. These devices work by depositing layers of material, just as ordinary printers lay down ink, except 3D printers can also deposit flat layers on top of each other to build objects in three dimensions. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

Until now, the only methods for shaping glass using 3D printing also required using a laser or heating the materials to searing temperatures of about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), the researchers in the new study said. In both cases, the end products were coarse, rough structures that were not suitable for many applications, the researchers added.

"People thought glass was too difficult to work with via 3D printing," said study senior author Bastian Rapp, a mechanical engineer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

Now, scientists have developed a new technique to fabricate complex glass structures using a standard 3D printer. The secret, the researchers said, is something they call "liquid glass."

"What this work does is it closes an important gap in the palette of modern 3D printing," Rapp told Live Science.

The scientists began with particles made of silica, the same material used to make glass. These particles were only 40 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide, which is about 2,500 times thinner than the average strand of human hair.

These silica nanoparticles were dispersed in an acrylic solution. The researchers could then use a standard 3D printer to fabricate complex items using this "liquid glass," the study said. Ultraviolet light could harden these objects into a kind of plastic similar to acrylic glass.

When these pieces of plastic were exposed to temperatures of about 2,370 degrees F (1,300 degrees C), the plastic burned away while the silica nanoparticles fused together into smooth, transparent glass structures, the study said. With the aid of additives, this technique can print colored glasses, tinted green, blue or red, for example, the researchers said.

"Glass is one of the oldest materials that mankind has used, and it's still a high-performance material, and for many applications, the only choice of material," Rapp said. "What our research does is bridge a necessary gap between 21st-century manufacturing techniques and a material that's centuries old."

The commercial 3D printer the researchers used could print features as tiny as a few dozen microns. For comparison, the average human hair is 100 microns wide.

This new method does not require harsh chemicals, and it produces glass components smooth and clear enough for use as lenses and in other applications, the researchers said.

"You can think of creating tiny lenses for smartphone cameras," Rapp said. "You can think about creating chemically and thermally resistant micro reactors made from glass that chemical reactions can take place in."

This new technique could also help create optical and photonics components for high-speed data transmission, Rapp said. (Photonic devices manipulate light just as electronic circuits manipulate electricity.) "You can also think much bigger, with 3D curved pieces of glass for architecture," Rapp said.

"We are now spinning off a company to commercialize this technology," Rapp said. "We hope that in a few years' time, glass will be as convenient to 3D print as plastic is nowadays."

The scientists detailed their findings online April 19 in the journal Nature.

Original article on Live Science.

Though it's not big enough or strong enough to destroy a planet, scientists have developed an amplified laser reminiscent of the Death Star from "Star Wars," according to a new study.

The futuristic superweapon combines multiple laser beams into one destructive blast, the researchers said. The idea of merging laser beams is not new, nor has it been limited to science fiction before now. A decades-old Russian missile defense project looked to use liquid as a beam combiner, but that project was abandoned after it was deemed not practical. A similar project in the U.S. investigated laser fusion, but using different materials. Now, a team of Australian scientists has combined the principles of these two research projects and applied them to a new material: diamond.

An ultrapure diamond crystal is the key to a new proof-of-concept amplified laser. By placing a diamond at the point of convergence of the different laser beams, the power of each individual beam is transferred into one potent laser beam, the researchers said. This power transfer occurs due to Raman scattering — when particles are dispersed and excited to higher energy levels — which is especially strong in diamond, according to the scientists. [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]

Diamonds also have high thermal properties that allow them to harness the laser beams' energies without overheating — a concern with other materials that could be used to combine the laser beams.

"The fundamental problem is that the laser materials struggle to dissipate the very large waste heat load," study co-author Rich Mildren, an associate professor of physics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, told Live Science. "There are technologies on the verge of having enough power, but heat build-up causes the beam to flare and power to drop leading to a lack of power on target."

Researching amplified-laser concepts has become increasingly important as new security threats have arisen, Mildren said. From low-cost drones to missile technology, militaries around the world are looking to high-power lasers as a possible defense solution.

Initial tests of the diamond laser have shown success in short bursts, and the researchers said they are continuing to test the laser for longer periods and at higher powers. When fully operational, the amplified laser could disable drones, missiles and other small objects, according to Mildren.

"Such high-power lasers are also potentially useful in management of space junk, propulsion of small space vehicles and beaming power to remote locations," Mildren said.

The proof-of-concept laser was described in a study published online March 30 in the journal Laser and Photonics Reviews.

Original article on Live Science.

Objects that can change shape within seconds after being exposed to heat demonstrate a novel 4D-printing technique that could one day be used to create medical devices that unfurl on their own in the body during surgical procedures.

Engineers created a 3D-printed plastic lattice that quickly expands when submerged in hot water and an artificial flower that can close its petals similar to the way plants do in nature as experiments designed to demonstrate this method of 4D printing.  

The new technique significantly simplifies the process of "teaching" 3D-printed materials to change their shape when triggered to do so, said study co-author Jerry Qi, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. [7 Cool Uses of 3D Printing in Medicine]

"Previously, we had to train and program the material after we 3D-printed it," Qi told Live Science. "We had to heat it up and stretch it and then cool it down again for the material to learn the new form. It was relatively tedious. With this new approach, we do all the programming already in the printer."

The researchers are using two types of materials that are carefully combined in the 3D-printed structure to create the desired shape-shifting effect. A soft material holds the energy that drives the shape-change but in the cool state, the energy of the soft polymer is contained by another, glass-like stiff material. This stiff material, however, softens when exposed to heat, allowing the soft polymer to take over. The material is designed to remember the second shape and default to it when it's heated.

"You can heat it up and deform the structure into a new, third shape and it will keep that shape until you heat it up again," Qi said. "Then it transforms back into the second shape."

Previous 4D-printing techniques were able to create materials that change their shape only temporarily, and then after a while, return to the original printed shape.

In the new study, the researchers used a material that changes shape when it is heated to about 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), but Qi said that by engineering the characteristics of the stiff material, the researchers can choose the temperature at which the object transforms.Previous 4D-printing techniques were able to create materials that change their shape only temporarily, and then after a while, return to the original printed shape.

"It promises to enable myriad applications across biomedical devices, 3D electronics and consumer products," said Martin Dunn, a professor of mechanical engineering at Singapore University of Technology and Design, who worked with the Georgia team.

For example electronic components could be printed in the flat form and then once they are assembled into devices, they could "inflate" into their useful 3D shapes.

"It even opens the door to a new paradigm in product design, where components are designed from the onset to inhabit multiple configurations during service," Dunn said in a statement.

Qi thinks biomedical devices such as stents, which are tiny tubes that are used to widen clogged up arteries to prevent strokes, could be created using the technique. These 4D-printed stents would expand inside a blood vessel, automatically triggered just by exposure to the heat of the human body. Currently, surgeons have to inflate the stents with balloons attached to the end of the catheter through which the device is being inserted.

Qi said the new technique is more suitable for practical applications than approaches that rely on hydrogels. The objects described in the new study could transform completely in less than 10 seconds, compared to about 7 minutes required for a hydrogel-based material that was presented a few years ago by a team of researchers from MIT.

Hydrogel-based 4D printing relies on the combination of hydrogels and non-swelling polymer filaments. When immersed in water, the hydrogel swells, forcing the filaments into a new shape.

"In hydrogel-based materials, the shape-change is driven by the absorption of water," Qi said. "But that's a relatively slow process. It takes time, especially if you have large structures."

Engineers from China's Xi'an Jiaotong University also collaborated on the study, which was funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Singapore National Research Foundation.

The study was published online April 12 in the journal Science Advances.

Original article on Live Science.

On a bet from peers in his high school programming club, a teenager in West Virginia taught himself to build an artificial intelligence program that can rap like Kanye West, according to news reports.

Seventeen-year-old Robbie Barrat thought that artificial intelligence (AI) could accomplish tasks better than humans, and his high school programming club told him to prove it, reported Quartz. Using open-source code and 6,000 Kanye West lines, Barrat built a neural network that could mimic the superstar rapper. Barrat completed the project in a week and showed the program to his peers at their next club meeting, according to Quartz.

It took one afternoon to write most of the code, Barrat said, but a few more days to optimize the AI's results. The program can now write original material and rap, even using semi-appropriate pauses, reported Quartz. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

"Originally, it just rearranged existing rap lyrics, but now it can actually write word by word," Barrat told Quartz.

At first, the challenge came in understanding where the neural network went wrong, which Barrat said was difficult because machine learning models are not very transparent. The teen therefore relied on open-source code and different software to refine the AI program, according to Quartz.

Now, Barrat is developing AI programs that can produce different types of art. For example, he has already built a neural network that can write piano melodies, according to Quartz. Next up: abstract art.

Original article on Live Science.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got to live out every 6-year-old's fantasy when he got behind the controls of a giant "mech" robot.

The Verge reports that Bezos tried out the 13-foot-tall (4 meters) robot yesterday (March 19) at his company's private Machine Learning, Home Automation, Robotics and Space Exploration (MARS) conference. Video of the bot, developed by Hankook Mirae Technology in South Korea, first surfaced in December in promotional clips. Live Science was skeptical of the robot's existence and functionality at the time. 

But the new video reveals that the robot does, indeed, exist. However, it's far from clear how much the mech (a term for piloted, humanoid robots) can really do. Bezos flails the arms around using controls in the robot's torso cockpit, but the robot does not take any steps and is tethered to the ceiling, presumably for safety reasons. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

Giant mech

The robot does not pick anything up in the video, either, which is notable because its developers say that one of their goals is to create piloted robots for real-world jobs, like cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear power plant that was damaged in 2011 when a massive earthquake and tsunami struck Japan. So far, none of the footage of the mech has shown it manipulating objects. The massive bot also runs on external power, which means that, so far, it's unable to work untethered.

@JeffBezos "Why do I feel so much like #sigourneyweaver ?" @amazon #MARS2017 #openpodbaydoors pic.twitter.com/HRRzmQtZbh

— Caleb Harper (@calebgrowsfood) March 20, 2017

Such limitations could be overcome. Roboticists have already developed robots that can navigate uneven terrain, including Boston Dynamics' intimidating "Big Dog" and the bipedal "Atlas" humanoid robot. Atlas can open doors, lift boxes and even right itself when pushed, and operates with an internal power source. Those bots are much smaller than the giant mech Hankook Mirae is trying to develop, however, and don't present the same safety challenges as a piloted robot. According to Hankook Mirae's website, the mech robot, nicknamed Method 2, weighs a minimum of 1.6 tons.  

Sci-fi fantasy

A designer affiliated with Hankook Mirae, Vitaly Bulgarov, told Live Science in December that the giant mech has been under development for several years and is a prototype made to show off particular technologies, like the human-machine interface that controls the arms.

In that case, the mech may never be used for more than demonstration purposes, while the individual technologies used to make it might be redirected to more practical designs.

Whatever the ultimate function of the robot, it certainly taps into human fantasies of what robots should be. Mechs like the Method 2 design appear in the 2009 film "Avatar" as well as in "Starship Troopers" (1997) and in "Pacific Rim" (2013). The character of Ripley (played by actress Sigourney Weaver) also uses one in the classic sci-fi film "Aliens" (1986), which Bezos referenced during his ride in Method 2.

"Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?" Bezos quipped.

Original article on Live Science.

A new transparent, flexible touchpad can sense the touch of a finger even when the material is stretched or bent, which could help engineers one day create advanced wearable touch screens, according to a new study.

Increasingly, researchers around the world are developing flexible electronics, such as display screens, cameras, batteries and solar panels. These devices could one day be woven into clothing, prosthetic limbs or even human bodies, the researchers said.

Previously, scientists developed flexible touch screens based on materials such as carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires that are only nanometers — billionths of a meter — wide. However, these devices typically struggled to operate well when they were stretched, which included the material's inability to distinguish between a touch from a finger and a stretch of the fabric itself. [Body Bioelectronics: 5 Technologies that Could Flex with You]

Now researchers have developed a new, flexible touchpad that can tell the difference between a touch and a stretch. Moreover, the device is also transparent, which suggests that it could get combined with a flexible display to create a flexible touch screen.

"This is the first time anyone has made a transparent, touch-sensitive electronic device that can detect touch while the device is being bent or stretched," said study senior author John Madden, an electrical engineer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

The new device is made with a hydrogel, which is structurally similar to the materials from which soft contact lenses are made. "Often when people think of gels, they think they're soft and weak, like Jell-O, which is purposefully weak so you can chew it," Madden told Live Science. "But people have developed these extremely tough gels to replace cartilage, and some of these can stretch by a factor of 20 or more."

By adding salt to the water-laden hydrogel, electrically charged ions can flow within the hydrogel and generate an electric field around it. When a finger comes near the hydrogel, it interacts with the electric field in a way that electrodes attached to the hydrogel can detect. These signals are readily distinguishable from those generated when the hydrogel is flexed, the researchers said.

The scientists embedded the hydrogel in silicone rubber. They created a square transparent touchpad about 1.2 inches (3 centimeters) wide, with 16 buttons that are each about 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) wide.

The array retained its sensing abilities even when it was bent or stretched, and it could withstand such common environmental contaminants as coffee spills, according to the study. The transparent pad could also detect multiple fingers simultaneously, which is necessary for a typical zoom function on a smartphone, the researchers said.

The researchers note that the materials used to make their devices cost about $1 per 10.75 square feet (1 square meter) and are cheap to manufacture.

"You can put these on pretty much anything," Madden said. "It opens up the opportunity to make wearable devices, or some sort of robotic skin, or putting it under a carpet to detect someone elderly falling."

In the future, researchers can experiment with making touchpads that are more durable and stretchable, Madden said. The scientists detailed their findings online today (March 15) in the journal Science Advances.

Original article at Live Science.

The jean jacket is getting a 21st-century upgrade: Levi's and Google are planning to launch a new "smart" jacket later this year, according to news reports.

The companies' so-called Project Jacquard was first announced in June 2015 as a line of "connected" clothing that would interact with wearers' smartphones, reported Tech Times. The so-called Commuter Jacket was unveiled in May 2016, and Levi's and Google revealed more details about the smart jacket project this weekend at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, Tech Times said. The companies said the jacket will cost $350 and will be available this fall.

The garment can interact with a person's smartphone via Bluetooth technology.  Conductive fabric on the connected jacket's wrist acts as a control panel for the wearer's smartphone. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

In a video about Project Jacquard, Ivan Poupyrev, technical program lead at Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, explained how the jacket works. Conductive threads have replaced some of a textile's original threads, so the woven-in technology can recognize simple touch gestures — similar to what a touch screen does, Poupyrev said.

"The tech is becoming a design element like a zipper, so it can be used in many normal ways," Poupyrev said during the SXSW presentation, reported Ars Technica. "I believe this is going to be the first commercial product which takes the touch interaction of the screen and puts it on an actual product."

Wearers can use the smart jacket to answer incoming calls, change music or get directions, said a promotional video made by Levi's. The Bluetooth device is attached to the garment as a cuff and connects the 15 conductive threads to the wearer's smartphone; batteries for the device are designed to last about two days, reported Engadget.

Other than the conductive fabric and Bluetooth cuff, the jacket looks like a standard denim Levi's piece. It's even washable, Engadget said, as long as the Bluetooth cuff isn't attached.

Original article on Live Science.

Fluorescent bubbles inside a liquid display could be the next big thing in 3D technology, allowing viewers to walk around the "screen" without using any special glasses, scientists say.

Technology for 3D images has relied on glasses or headsets for users to experience the dimensions of an image rendered on a flat surface. Now, however, a team of researchers has published a proof of concept for a display that projects 3D images in a way that makes them visible from all angles and, as such, does not require the eye accessories.

The team's new technique uses lasers to create bubbles in a thick liquid. Then, the bubbles are illuminated using a lamp. These colorful bubbles act as voxels (3D pixels), creating three-dimensional images in the fluid "screen," which itself is three-dimensional, or volumetric. [Video: 3D Fog Displays Could Be Screens of the Future]

The researchers say their volumetric bubble display allows for 3D images to be truly three-dimensional. 

"Our bubble graphics have a wide viewing angle and can be refreshed and colored," first author Kota Kumagai, of the Center for Optical Research and Education at Utsunomiya University in Japan, said in a statement. "Although our first volumetric graphics are on the scale of millimeters, we achieved the first step toward an updatable full-color volumetric display."

With fluorescent liquid acting as the screen, the bubble voxels are created through "multiphoton absorption." This phenomenon occurs when photons (light particles) from a laser are absorbed at the point where the laser's light is focused, the researchers explained. Therefore, the microbubbles are created in precise locations in the liquid screen, which is thick enough to keep the bubbles in place. Once the bubbles are formed, the graphics can be projected onto them. Since the bubbles are three-dimensional, the images projected are 3D as well and can be viewed from all angles, according to the researchers.

So far, the researchers have produced only monochromatic images, using an external light source, such as an LED lamp, to color the bubbles. However, the researchers said a projector could be used to illuminate the bubble graphics in different colors.

Although the technology is still a proof of concept, the researchers envision the displays being used for art or museum exhibits. In addition, doctors could use the displays in hospitals to better visualize a patient's anatomy, or the military could use the displays to gain insight into a mission's terrain.

"The volumetric bubble display is most suited for public facilities, such as a museum or an aquarium, because currently, the system setup is big and expensive," Kumagai said in the statement. "However, in the future, we hope to improve the size and cost of the laser source and optical devices to create a smaller system that might be affordable for personal use."

The details of the team's research on 3D imaging and the volumetric bubble display were published online Feb. 23 in the journal Optica.

Original article on Live Science.

When you need to charge your electronic devices on the go, it can be a hassle trying to find somewhere to plug in. And though some devices can already be charged without wires, researchers at The Walt Disney Company have recently supersized the technology by building a wireless "charging room."

Scientists at a branch of The Walt Disney Company called Disney Research have converted an entire room into a wireless charger that can boost the batteries of 10 objects at one time, according to the study. The researchers said they were inspired by inventor Nikola Tesla, who created the first system to wirelessly transmit electricity — the Tesla coil.

Tesla believed there could be a global network of wireless electricity that would use an electromagnetic wave that reverberated between the ionosphere (a layer of the Earth's atmosphere filled with ions and free electrons) and the ground, study co-author Alanson Sample, an associate lab director and principal research scientist at Disney Research, explained in a video. While Tesla's vision didn't come to fruition, Sample and his colleagues were inspired to investigate how wireless charging could be set up in large spaces. [Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World]

"What we really want is a three-dimensional charging experience, where you walk into your living room or office and your cellphone is charged simply by walking in," Sample said in the video. "We have a metalized room, and we're going to use standing electromagnetic waves that reverberate all around this room, providing wireless power to any devices inside."

Known as quasistatic cavity resonance (QSCR), the wireless charging technology uses electromagnetic fields generated by electrical currents. Disney Research's room is outfitted with aluminum-paneled walls and a centrally located copper pole that houses 15 capacitors (which store electrical energy, as batteries do). As the capacitors generate electrical currents, they travel through the ceiling, walls and floor, and then back through the pole. These electrical currents create the electromagnetic fields that circulate around the pole and wirelessly charge devices in the room, the researchers said.

Furniture and other objects can still decorate the room without interfering with the currents, according to the researchers, because magnetic fields don't react strongly with these commonplace objects. It's also safe for humans to occupy the space for any amount of time, because the researchers' simulations met federal safety regulations while still transmitting 1.9 kilowatts of power — enough to charge cellphones, laptops, lamps and other small electronic devices, according to the study.

"In this work, we're demonstrating room-scale wireless power, but there's no reason we couldn't shrink this down to the size of a toy box or charging chest, or scale up to a warehouse or a large building," Sample said.

The new research is detailed in a study published online Feb. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Original article on Live Science.

A new house has been erected in a town outside Moscow, but this home was not built in the traditional sense — it was constructed with 3D printing.

The first 3D-printed residential home, engineered by the tech startup Apis Cor, took less than a day to construct and cost under $11,000 to complete. A mobile 3D printer created the building's concrete walls and partitions as a fully connected structure, rather than printing the building in panels at an off-site facility as is usually done, the company said. The portable machine was then removed from the building, and a group of contractors completed the home — adding the roof and windows, and finishing the interior.

By shifting the construction of the building's shell to 3D printing, Apis Cor aims to prove that this type of construction can be "fast, eco-friendly, efficient and reliable." [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

"We want to help people around the world to improve their living conditions," Nikita Chen-yun-tai, Apis Cor's founder and inventor of the mobile printer, said on the company's website. "That's why the construction process needs to become fast, efficient and high-quality as well. For this to happen, we need to delegate all the hard work to smart machines."

The first example of this work is a cozy, 400-square-foot (37 square meters) home with an unusual, curved shape. The curved design of the home was chosen to demonstrate the 3D printer's ability to print the construction material in any shape, according to Apis Cor.

Inside, the 3D-printed home has all of the standard features of a traditionally built house. The studio-style dwelling has a hall, bathroom, living room and compact kitchen. Apis Cor partnered with Samsung on the demonstration house; the electronics giant provided the home's appliances, including a TV with the same curvature as the living-room wall.

Apis Cor estimated that the total cost of the demonstration house's construction was about $25 per square foot, or $275 per square meter. Of the total $10,134 it cost to build the home, the windows and doors were the most expensive components, the company said.

While the total construction savings of the demonstation house compared to a tranditional home are difficult to estimate, Apis Cor representatives said in a statement that savings from 3D printing the building walls are guaranteed.

Original article on Live Science.

Are you nervous about entrusting your life to a self-driving car? What if you could telepathically communicate with the vehicle to instantaneously let it know if it makes a mistake?

That is the ultimate promise of technology being developed by a team fromBoston University and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The tech uses brain signals to automatically correct a robot's errors.

Using a so-called brain-computer interface (BCI) to communicate with a robot is not new, but most methods require people to train with the BCI and even learn to modulate their thoughts to help the machine understand, the researchers said. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

By relying on brain signals called "error-related potentials" (ErrPs) that occur automatically when humans make a mistake or spot someone else making one, the researchers' approach allows even complete novices to control a robot with their minds, the researchers in the new study said. This can be done by simply agreeing or disagreeing with whatever actions the bot takes, the researchers said.

Working with machines

This technology could offer an intuitive and instantaneous way of communicating with machines, for applications as diverse as supervising factory robots to controlling robotic prostheses, the researchers said.

"When humans and robots work together, you basically have to learn the language of the robot, learn a new way to communicate with it, adapt to its interface," said Joseph DelPreto, a Ph.D. candidate at CSAIL who worked on the project.

"In this work, we were interested in seeing how you can have the robot adapt to us rather than the other way around," he told Live Science.

The new research was published online Monday (March 6) and will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Singapore this May. In the study, the researchers described how they collected electroencephalography (EEG) data from volunteers as those individuals watched a common type of industrial humanoid robot, called Baxter, decide which of two objects to pick up.

This data was analyzed using machine-learning algorithms that can detect ErrPs in just 10 to 30 milliseconds. This means results could be fed back to the robot in real time, allowing it to correct its course midway, the researchers said.

Refining the system

The system's accuracy needs significant improvement, the team admitted. In real-time experiments, the bot performed only slightly better than 50/50, or chance, when classifying brain signals as ErrPs. That meant that nearly half the time it would fail to notice the correction from the observer.

And even in more leisurely, offline analysis, the system still got it right only roughly 65 percent of the time, the researchers said.

But when the machine missed an ErrP signal and failed to correct its course (or change course when there was no ErrP), the human observer typically produced a second, stronger ErrP, said CSAIL research scientist Stephanie Gil.

"When we analyze that offline, we found that the performance boosts by a lot, as high as 86 percent, and we estimate we could get this upwards of 90 percent in the future. So our next step is to actually detect those in real time as well and start moving closer towards our goal of actually controlling these robots accurately and reliably on the fly," Gil told Live Science. [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]

Doing this will be tricky, though, because the system needs to be told when to look out for the ErrP signal, the researchers said. At present, this is done using a mechanical switch that gets activated when the robot's arm starts to move.

A secondary error won’t be created until after the robot's arm is already moving, so this switch won't be able to signal to the system to look for an ErrP, the researchers said. This means the system will have to be redesigned to provide another prompt, they added.

Now what?

The study is well-written, said Klaus-Robert Müller, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin, who was not involved with the new research but has also worked on BCIs that exploit these error signals. But, he said using ErrPs to control machines is not particularly new and he also raises concerns about the low ErrP classification ratesthe group achieved.

José del R. Millán, an associate professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, said he agrees that the performance of the group's ErrP decoder was low. But he thinks the approach they've taken is still "very promising," he added.

Millán's group has used ErrP signals to teach a robotic arm the best way to move to a target location. In a 2015 study published in the journal Scientific Reports, Millán and his colleagues described how the arm in their work starts by making a random movement, which the human observer decides is either correct or incorrect.

Through a machine-learning approach called reinforcement learning, the error signals are used to fine-tune the robot's approach, enabling the bot to learn the best movement strategy for a specific target. Millán said using ErrP to control robots could have broad applications in the future.

"I see it in use for any complex human-machine interaction where most of the burden is on the machine side, because of its capacity to do tasks almost autonomously, and humans are simply supervising," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

Google recently filed a patent for a technology-enhanced baseball cap that can take still photos and capture video from a camera mounted on the brim, according to news reports.

The high-tech cap may be the tech giant's follow-up to its failed Google Glass and could offer competition to similar wearable devices, including Snap's Spectacles.

The patent, granted on Tuesday (Feb. 28), describes a hat-and-camera system that offers users an interactive experience for social media purposes, and it can also be used for personal safety, reported Silicon Beat. Users could share photos or video directly from what's been dubbed the Google Hat to a social media account, but the hat's technology could also be useful in an emergency. [Photo Future: 7 High-Tech Ways to Share Images]

The patent indicates that the wearable camera hat could protect the user from a threatening situation, according to Silicon Beat.

"The user can activate an emergency situation indicator and cause the wearable camera system to transmit a video feed to an appropriate emergency handling system, potentially deterring a dangerous person near the user," according to the patent filing, reported Silicon Beat.

Along with the patent for the Google Hat, the tech company was also granted one for a "camera bracelet," according to Silicon Beat. Drawings of the bracelet show a digital screen and two camera lenses, but potential application details were not included in the patent application.

Another camera-equipped wearable device, Spectacles by Snap, recently became available online. These sunglasses are integrated with camera lenses and wireless technology that allow users to upload their point of view directly to Snap's social app, according to the tech company.

Original article on Live Science.

A small robotic arm can bring your digital sketches to life, by re-creating your on-screen drawings with a pen and paper.

The robotic drawing arm was designed by a team of researchers, who combined their knowledge of kinetic art, drawing machines and internet-connected microprocessor chips to develop the idea. The arm, dubbed Line-us, mimics the user's drawing motions to re-create a digital sketch with pen and paper, by connecting to an app via Wi-Fi.

At its heart, the machine was developed to be a device for people to play with, said Robert Poll, a technologist and one of Line-us' co-founders. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

"We wanted to create a product that was engaging and fun, rather than something that solved a particular problem or fulfilled a need," Poll told Live Science. "Our hope is that Line-us encourages people to doodle and draw, but also to find new and creative ways to use it to do things we haven't thought of."

Line-us is seeking funding through a Kickstarter campaign, but the project has already surpassed its funding goal of $48,469 by raising almost $89,500 as of Feb. 27, and is now gearing up for production. Poll said there's a lot of work involved with moving from working prototypes to a product that can be manufactured, but the researchers are getting ready for the October release of the first 1,000 units for its funders.

Beyond the art-mimicking robot, the Line-us app adds another layer of innovation to the project. The researchers designed the app to be "open platform" to allow users to build on the foundations of the Line-us project.

"You can write your own software, or even hardware, to work with Line-us," Poll said. "We're hoping to build a community that will come up with interesting and new ways to use Line-us. We've had quite a lot of questions from people who want to 'hack' Line-us already, so we're really excited to see what they do."

Line-us is designed to work on iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and Android smartphones, as well as on Mac and PC computers. You can use either a stylus or your fingers to make the drawings that the robotic arm will mimic, the researchers said. When made available commercially, the robot will cost about $124 (99 pounds), the researchers said.

A larger version of the drawing robot, or perhaps a completely new robot, may be in Line-us' future, Poll said. The researchers have also brainstormed ideas for "accessories" for the current version of the drawing robot.

"Maybe we'll produce some ourselves, or perhaps publish plans so people can make their own," Poll said. "We won't really know what direction we will want to take until we see what people do with the first batch of machines. We're looking forward to finding out, though."

Original article on Live Science.

If you're interested in learning how to play table tennis, a robot in Japan is up for the coaching job, and the bot has even earned a Guinness World Record for its tutoring skills.

The robot, called FORPHEUS, was named the "first robot table tennis tutor" for its ability to play and teach the sport. Guinness World Record officials said the robot's "unique technological intelligence and educational capabilities" earned it the title. The record-breaking robot uses vision and motion sensors to track a match, with cameras following the ball 80 times per second.

Beyond game play, the cameras also help FORPHEUS in its role as a teacher, according to its developers. The robot can project an image of where the ball will land to help a competitor or student. Algorithms and artificial intelligence also allow FORPHEUS to rate players, assessing their gameplay to better tailor the lessons. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

However, Japanese electronics company Omron Corp. developed FORPHEUS not only to teach the game of table tennis, but to help "harmonize" the human-robot relationship, lead developer Taku Oya told the Guinness World Records.

"At the moment it is a human who teaches a robot how to behave or teach," Taku said in a statement. "But in the next 20 years it may be possible that a robot teaches a robot or a robot develops a robot."

Original article on Live Science.

Magnetically controlled swarms of microscopic robots might one day help fight cancer inside the body, new research suggests.

Over the past decade, scientists have shown they can manipulate magnetic forces to guide medical devices within the human body, as these fields can apply forces to remotely control objects. For instance, prior work used magnetic fields to maneuver a catheter inside the heart and steer video capsules in the gut.

Previous research also used magnetic fields to simultaneously control swarms of tiny magnets. In principle, these objects could work together on large problems such as fighting cancers. However, individually guiding members of a team of microscopic devices so that each moves in its own direction and at its own speed remains a challenge. This is because identical magnetic items under the control of the same magnetic field usually behave identically to each other. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

Now, scientists have developed a way to magnetically control each member of a swarm of magnetic devices to perform specific, unique tasks, researchers in the new study said.

"Our method may enable complex manipulations inside the human body," said study lead author Jürgen Rahmer, a physicist at Philips Innovative Technologies in Hamburg, Germany.

First, the scientists created a number of tiny identical magnetic screws. The researchers next used a strong, uniform magnetic field to freeze groups of these magnetic screws in place. In small, weak spots within this powerful magnetic field, the microscopic screws are free to move. Superimposing a relatively weak rotating magnetic field could make these free screws spin, the researchers said.

In experiments, the researchers could make several magnetic screws whirl in different directions at the same time with pinpoint accuracy. In principle, the scientists noted, they could manipulate hundreds of microscopic robots at once.First, the scientists created a number of tiny identical magnetic screws. The researchers next used a strong, uniform magnetic field to freeze groups of these magnetic screws in place. In small, weak spots within this powerful magnetic field, the microscopic screws are free to move. Superimposing a relatively weak rotating magnetic field could make these free screws spin, the researchers said.

"One could think of screw-driven mechanisms that perform tasks inside the human body without the need for batteries or motors," Rahmer told Live Science.

One application for these magnetic swarms could involve magnetic screws embedded within injectable microscopic pills. Doctors could use magnetic fields to make certain screws spin to open the pills, the researchers said. This could help doctors make sure that cancer-killing radioactive "seeds" within the pills  target and damage only tumors rather than healthy tissues, cutting down on harmful side effects, the researchers said. Once the pills deliver a therapeutic dose of radiation, physicians could then use magnets to essentially switch the pills off. (The pills would be made of metallic material that would otherwise keep radiation from leaking out.)

Another potential application could be medical implants that change over time, the researchers said. For instance, as people heal, magnetic fields could help alter the shape of implants to better adjust to the bodies of patients, Rahmer said.

In the future, researchers could develop compact and magnetic field applicators to control tiny magnetic robots, and use imaging technologies such as X-ray machines or ultrasound scanners to show where those devices are located in the body, Rahmer suggested.

The scientists detailed their findings online Feb. 15 in the journal Science Robotics.

Original article on Live Science.

Netflix engineers recently developed a mind-control gadget that could use your brain to help you browse the streaming service.

As part of Netflix’s hackathon in January, which challenged employees to come up with an innovative project in 24 hours that was aimed at improving the Netflix experience in some way, a group of the company's engineers made a device that allows viewers to choose what they want to watch by using their brain waves. The so-called "Mindflix" uses a Muse headband — a wearable device that measures brain signals — that was designed to help users with meditation. However, engineers hacked the device so that it could be used for the more forgetful (or lazy) viewer.

In a "commercial" that was produced for the hackathon, the developers said that their invention could help Netflix users when they lose their remote — or, if the remote is simply too far away. The people in the YouTube video then demonstrate how the "brain wearable" acts as a remote, with the wearers moving their heads to scroll through Netflix's offerings. [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]

Mindflix was just one of the projects that was developed during Netflix’s internal hackathon. In a company blog post, other projects were highlighted, including a "picture in picture" that allows users to see what other people on their account are watching. Two of the projects were inspired by the hit Netflix-produced series "Stranger Things" — a reimagining of the show as a video game, and a Christmas sweater capable of spelling out messages. One project had a charitable mission, allowing users to donate to organizations that are related to the socially conscious titles they had watched.

While these hacks may be inventive, Netflix said that users may never see them on offer.

"While we’re excited about the creativity and thought put into these hacks, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or otherwise be used beyond Hack Day," company officials wrote in the blog post. "We are posting them here publicly to share the spirit of the event and our culture of innovation."

However, some previous projects have seen the light of day. Engineers first developed a virtual-reality app concept during a Hack Day in 2014, using an Oculus Rift to put users in a 3D-room-version of the streaming service's interface. Netflix now offers users a similar virtual-reality watching experience.

Original article on Live Science.

Whether they're swooping around to catch dinner or delicately hanging upside down to sleep, bats are known for their acrobatic prowess. Now, scientists have created a robot inspired by these flying creatures. Dubbed the "Bat Bot," it can fly, turn and swoop like its real-life counterpart in the animal kingdom.

Since at least the time of Leonardo da Vinci, scientists have sought to mimic the acrobatic way in which bats maneuver the sky. Someday, robotic bats could help deliver packages or inspect areas ranging from disaster zones to construction sites, the researchers said.

"Bat flight is the Holy Grail of aerial robotics," said study co-author Soon-Jo Chung, a robotics engineer at the California Institute of Technology and a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

Learning from animals

Bats may possess the most sophisticated wings in the animal kingdom, with more than 40 joints in their wings that enable unparalleled agility during flight, likely so that they can pursue equally nimble insect prey, the researchers said.

"Whenever I see bats make sharp turns or perch upside down with elegant wing movements, I get mesmerized," Chung told Live Science.

Previous work has developed a variety of flying robots biologically inspired by insects and birds. However, attempts to build robots that mimic bats have been met with limited success because of the complexities of bats' wings, such as their multitude of joints, the researchers said.

Now, Chung and his colleagues have developed the "Bat Bot," or B2, a robot that can fly, turn and swoop like a bat. The aim is "to build a safe, energy-efficient, soft-winged robot," Chung told Live Science.

The researchers said previous bat robots followed the skeletal anatomy of these flying creatures too closely, resulting in bots that were too bulky to fly. Instead, the scientists figured out which components were key to the beating of a bat's wing — the shoulder, elbow and wrist joints, and the side-to-side swish of their thighs — and used only those in their robot.

Whereas conventional flapping-wing robots used rigid wings, the Bat Bot has thin, elastic wings. "When a bat flaps its wings, it's like a rubber sheet — it fills up with air and deforms," said study co-author Seth Hutchinson, a robotics engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During the downward stroke, "the flexible wing fills up with air, and at the bottom of the downstroke, it flexes back into place and expels the air, which generates extra lift," he explained. "That gives us extra flight time."

Meet the Bat Bot

The Bat Bot's wings are made of bones of carbon fiber and ball-and-socket joints composed of 3D-printed plastic, all covered with a soft, durable, ultrathin, silicone-based skin only 56 microns thick. (For comparison, the average human hair is about 100 microns thick.)

The robot flapped its wings up to 10 times per second using micro-motors in its backbone. The Bat Bot weighed only about 3.3 ounces (93 grams) and had a wingspan of about 18.5 inches (47 centimeters) — measurements similar to those of Egyptian fruit bats, Chung said.

In experiments, the Bat Bot could fly at speeds averaging 18.37 feet per second (5.6 meters per second). It could also carry out sharp turns and straight dives, reaching speeds of 45.9 feet per second (14 m/s) while swooping down.

The researchers said their robot's softness and light weight make it safer for use around humans than, for example, the quadrotor drones that are popular commercially. For instance, the Bat Bot would cause little or no damage if it were to crash into humans or other obstacles in its environment, they said. In contrast, quadrotors spin their rotor blades at high speeds of up to 18,000 revolutions per minute, which could result in dangerous interactions, Chung said.

"The high-speed rotor blades of quadrotors and other craft are inherently unsafe for humans," Chung said. "Our Bat Bot is considerably more safe."

The safer, more agile nature of the Bat Bot could enable a wide range of applications. For instance, Bat Bots could serve as "aerial service robots at home or in hospitals to help the elderly or disabled by quickly fetching small objects, relaying audio and video from various distant locations without requiring hard-mounting of multiple cameras, and becoming fun, pet-like companions," Hutchinson told Live Science.

Multitasking robots

Another potential application for Bat Bots would be "to supervise construction sites," Hutchinson said. "The need for automation in construction through advances in computer science and robotics has been highlighted by the National Academy of Engineering as one of the grand challenges of engineering in the 21st century," he noted.

The dynamic and complex nature of construction sites has prevented the deployment of fully, or even partially, robotic and automated solutions to monitor them. "Keeping track of whether a building is put together in the right way and at the right time is an important problem, and it's not a trivial problem — a lot of money gets spent on that in the construction industry," Hutchinson said. Instead, Bat Bots could "fly around, pay attention and compare the building information model to the actual building that's being constructed," he added.

Bat Bots could also help inspect disaster zones and other areas. "For example, an aerial robot equipped with a radiation detector, 3D camera system, and temperature and humidity sensors could inspect something like the Fukushima nuclear reactors [in Japan], where the radiation level is too high for humans, or fly into tight crawl spaces, such as mines or collapsed buildings," Hutchinson said. "Such highly maneuverable aerial robots, with longer flight endurance and range than quadrotors have, will make revolutionary advances in monitoring and recovery of critical infrastructure such as nuclear reactors, power grids, bridges and borders."

Moreover, the Bat Bot could shed light on some of the mysteries of bat flight. Currently, researchers analyze how bats fly with video, but with the Bat Bot, researchers could develop better models of the aerodynamic forces that bats experience "beyond what can be observed with just the eyes," Hutchinson said.

The researchers noted that the Bat Bot cannot carry heavy objects yet, but future versions of the robotic bat could lead to "drone-enabled package delivery," Chung said.

Future research could achieve other aspects of bat flight, such as hovering or perching right side up or even upside down, the researchers said. Perching is more energy-efficient than hovering, "since stationary hovering is difficult for quadrotors in the presence of even mild wind, which is common for construction sites," Chung said.

The scientists detailed their findings online today (Feb. 1) in the journal Science Robotics.

Original article on Live Science.

Princess Leia's holographic plea in the classic film "Star Wars" inspired researchers to work toward a device that could project real-life sci-fi holograms. Now, the futuristic 3D imaging may be one step closer to reality.

A team of physicists at the Australian National University (ANU) invented a tiny device that creates the highest-quality holographic images ever achieved, the scientists said.

Study lead researcher Lei Wang, a Ph.D. student at the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering, said he first learned about the concept of holographic imaging from the "Star Wars" movies. However, these futuristic-looking 3D images could be used for more practical ends than sending messages from a galaxy far, far away. [Photos: Microsoft's HoloLens Transforms Surroundings with Holographic Tech]

"While research in holography plays an important role in the development of futuristic displays and augmented reality devices, today we are working on many other applications, such as ultrathin and lightweight optical devices for cameras and satellites," Wang said in a statement.

Photographs and computer screens display information only in 2D, limiting views to flat images. Holograms, however, allow for the storage and reproduction of all information in 3D, and the technology relies on the ability to accurately manipulate light in three dimensions, the researchers said.

The ANU invention uses a new nanomaterial to create the 3D projections. Millions of tiny silicon pillars, each up to 500 times thinner than a human hair, act as pixel projectors to create the light-based 3D images, said co-lead researcher Sergey Kruk, a professor at the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.

"This new material is transparent, which means it loses minimal energy from the light, and it also does complex manipulations with light," Kruk said in the statement.

In lab tests, the device created tiny holograms ranging in size from 0.03 inches to 0.2 inches (0.75 millimeters to 5 mm) wide, at a distance of 0.4 inches (10 mm). While the technology is not yet ready to replace computer screens, with further research, the device could lead to new and better holographic technologies, the scientists said.

The device's ability to display the 3D holograms is only part of what makes it innovative, however, Wang said. Due to its miniature size, the invention could replace bulky camera components or help space missions by reducing the size and weight of optical systems, he said.

Details of the new study were published online Dec. 20 in the journal Optica. 

Original article on Live Science.

Knitting and weaving artificial muscles could help create soft exoskeletons that people with disabilities could wear under their clothes to help them walk, according to new research.

Textile processing is one of humanity's oldest technologies, but in recent years there has been renewed interest in using it to create "smart" textiles that can do everything from harvest power from the environment to monitor our health.

Now, Swedish researchers have created actuators — devices that convert energy into motion — from cellulose yarn coated with a polymer that reacts to electricity. These fibers were then woven and knitted using standard industrial machines to create textile actuators, dubbed "textuators" by the researchers. [Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World]

Exoskeletons can be used to boost humans' weight-lifting abilities or help the disabled walk, but they rely on electric motors or pneumatic systems that are bulky, noisy and stiff. The researchers say their approach could one day help mass-produce soft and silent exoskeletons using textile-processing technology, as well as actuators for soft robotics.

"Our dream is suits you can wear under your clothing — hidden exoskeletons to help the elderly, help those recovering from injury, maybe one day make disabled people walk again," said Edwin Jager, an associate professor in applied physics at Linköping University in Sweden, who led the research.

The team started with cellulose yarn, which is biocompatible and renewable, and knitted and weaved it into a variety of textiles. These textiles were then coated with a conducting polymer called polypyrrole (PPy) using a process similar to how commercial fabrics are dyed.

PPy has been widely used to create soft actuators because it changes its size when a low voltage is applied to it, thanks to ions and solvents moving in and out of the polymer matrix. As this material coats the fiber, it contracts when a positive voltage is applied and expands when a negative voltage is applied.

In a new study published online today (Jan. 25) in the journal Science Advances, the researchers found that weaving the fabric resulted in a textuator that produced high force, while knitting resulted in less force but an extremely stretchy material.

By varying the processing method and the weaving or knitting pattern, Jager told Live Science it should be possible to tailor the force and strain characteristics of a textuator to the specific application at hand. To demonstrate the capabilities of the approach, the scientists integrated a knitted fabric into a Lego lever arm and it was able to lift 0.07 ounces (2 grams) of weight.

Xing Fan, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Chongqing University in China, who also works on smart textiles, told Live Science the research was an interesting step toward commercially viable smart textile actuators, but added that there are still some issues to be overcome.

At present, the material still needs to be submerged in a liquid electrolyte, which serves as a source of ions for the PPy. The material also responds much more slowly than mammalian muscle, taking minutes to fully expand or contract.

"Nevertheless, I believe that after years of improvement, the day that a feasible smart textile actuator appears on the desk of a commercial investor is not far away," Fan told Live Science.

Jager said his group is already designing a second generation of textuators that will address these issues. Decreasing response time is simply a matter of reducing the diameter of the yarn to a few micrometers he said, which commercially available textile-processing machines are capable of doing. The researchers are also working on ways to embed the electrolyte in the fabric so that it can operate in air.

The group chose to work with PPy because it was a material they were familiar with, but a limitation is that achieving high force requires thick yarns, which slows response times. Jager said a key innovation was demonstrating that organizing multiple yarns in parallel — just like muscle fibers — was able to increase force without increasing response times.

"We don't see ourselves locked to this material, though; it's more a way of showing that we can use textiles with smart materials to create textuators," he said. "I'm not sure if ours is the best material, but hopefully, people who find better materials will be inspired and use this technique of ours as a starting point and improve from it."

Original article on Live Science.

Modern medicine often feels like magic: A technician pricks your skin, draws a drop of blood and whisks it away into another room. Oftentimes, this gives the doctor enough information to make a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment. But for people in developing countries, these kinds of diagnostics can be more science fiction than reality.

Modern medicine relies heavily on technology, like centrifuges, that are costly, bulky and require electricity. In many places around the world, this kind of equipment can be hard to come by. But in a new study published online today (Jan. 10) in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, researchers described an inexpensive, hand-powered centrifuge that's based on an ancient toy and could help doctors working in developing countries.

The centrifuge is the workhorse of modern medical laboratories. The device spins samples at high speeds to separate particles or cells based on size and density, effectively concentrating specific components. Most diagnostics "are like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Manu Prakash, lead researcher on the new study and an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. A centrifuge, Prakash said, puts all the needles in one place, making them easier to find. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

Unfortunately, even the simplest modern centrifuges are burdensome for doctors in the field. Prakash, who won a 2016 MacArthur "genius" award, is a leader in the so-called frugal science movement, which aims to devise low-cost solutions for complex technologies. Prakash is best known for developing the Foldscope, an origami-like paper microscope that costs about $1.50.

In the past, researchers explored common household items, such as egg beaters and salad spinners, as alternatives to the centrifuge, but these devices gave poorer results than modern diagnostic tests. A simple blood test using these tools required more than 10 minutes to separate cells, compared with 2 minutes for commercial centrifuges. So instead of using these items, Prakash and his colleagues focused on spinning toys.

"We tested many toys, like the top and yo-yo," study lead author M. Saad Bhamla, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, told Live Science. "We wanted to find the most effective way of converting physical energy into rotational energy."

The researchers found that a toy known most commonly as the whirligig had the greatest potential as a centrifuge. By tweaking the basic design, they were able to achieve speeds of up to 125,000 revolutions per minute (RPM), the fastest speeds reported for a hand-powered device, the researchers said. (They have submitted an application to the Guinness World Records, they wrote.)

Also known as a button spinner, buzzer or spinning disk, the whirligig is one of the most ancient toys and can be found all over the world. It is a simplistic child's toy, with a button or disk threaded through two strings that are affixed to handles. A child begins by winding the strings and then pulling on the handles to make the threads unwind and the button spin. Pulling and relaxing the strings repeatedly makes the button spin faster. [The Cool Physics of 7 Classic Toys]

Using a paper disk and fishing wire, the researchers modified the whirligig, turning it into a hand-powered centrifuge that costs about 20 cents to make. They called their device a "paperfuge" and tested it against modern centrifuges to measure red blood cell counts. To do so, Prakash and his team loaded a finger prick of blood into a capillary tube and placed that into a sealed plastic straw that was mounted onto the paper disk.

"With a conventional centrifuge, the [blood test] will take about 2 minutes and that [centrifuge] will cost about $1,000," Bhamla said. "And in a minute and a half, we can achieve the exact same result — at a cost of $0.20 without electricity." The researchers' results were similar in tests for malaria parasites.

To better understand how the paperfuge works and how to optimize it for different types of diagnostics, Prakash and his colleagues generated a mathematical model for the movement of the disk.

"It is quite an unconventional centrifuge," Prakash said. "It's an oscillatory centrifuge, so it flips direction." Most centrifuges spin in only one direction but the paperfuge reverses during its spin, which may limit the volume of liquid that it can separate, he added.

Prakash and Bhamla also found that the toy is essentially self-winding. The spinning disk has inertia that causes the strings to twist. When a person adds force by pulling on the handles, the strings become supercoiled, with twists looping back on themselves, Prakash said. "These supertwists give torque and result in twisting of the disk," he said. "It is amazing how little force it takes."

Prakash and his team are now taking the paperfuge out into the field. "Our current work has put about 100 paperfuges into the hands of clinical partners and health care workers in Madagascar," Prakash said, "in the front line of developing countries where almost nothing is available."

At the same time, the researchers are testing other versions of the paperfuge, using 3D-printed plastics and different designs in hopes of applying the technology to other diagnostic tests, Prakash said.

Original article on Live Science.

A soft, caterpillar-like robot might one day climb trees to monitor the environment, a new study finds.

Traditionally, robots have usually been made from rigid parts, which make them susceptible to harm from bumps, scrapes, twists and falls. These hard parts can also keep them from being able to wriggle past obstacles.

Increasingly, scientists are building robots that are made of soft, bendable plastic and rubber. These soft robots, with designs that are often inspired by octopuses, starfish, worms and other real-life boneless creatures, are generally more resistant to damage and can squirm past many of the obstacles that impair hard robots, the researchers said. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

"I believe that this kind of robot is very suitable for our living environment, since the softness of the body can guarantee our safety when we are interacting with the robots," said lead study author Takuya Umedachi, now a project lecturer in the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo.

However, soft materials easily deform into complex shapes that make them difficult to control when conventional robotics techniques are used, according to Umedachi and his colleagues. Modeling and predicting such activity currently requires vast amounts of computation because of the many and unpredictable ways in which such robots can move, the researchers said.

To figure out better ways to control soft robots, Umedachi and his colleagues analyzed the caterpillars of the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta, hoping to learn how these animals coordinate their motions without a hard skeleton. Over millions of years, caterpillars have evolved to move in complex ways without using massive, complex brains.

The scientists reasoned that caterpillars do not rely on a control center like the brain to steer their bodies, because they only have a small number of neurons. Instead, the scientists suggest that caterpillars might control their bodies in a more decentralized manner. Their model demonstrates their theory that sensory neurons embedded in soft tissues relay data to groups of muscles that can then help caterpillars move in a concerted manner.

The scientists developed a caterpillar-like soft robot that was inspired by their animal model. They attached sensors to the robot, which has a soft body that can deform as it interacts with its environment, such as when it experiences friction from the surface on which it walks. This data was fed into a computer that controlled the robot's motors, and the motor could, in turn, contract the robot body's four segments.

The researchers found that they could use this sensory data to guide the robot's inching and crawling motions with very little in the way of guidance mechanisms. "We believe that the softness of the body can be crucial when designing intelligent behaviors of a robot," Umedachi told Live Science.

"I would like to build a real, caterpillar-like robot that can move around on branches of trees," Umedachi said. "You can put temperature and humidity sensors and cameras on the caterpillar-like robots to use such spaces."

The scientists detailed their findings online Dec. 7 in the journal Open Science.

Original article on Live Science.

Robot madness

When some people think about robots, they fear the worst: machines on an unstoppable march toward global domination. Bots may not be taking over yet, but this year was a big year for our mechanical cousins — from being able to hunt or feel pain, robots picked up some impressive new skills in 2016. Here's a roundup of some of the coolest (or scariest, depending on how you feel) abilities machines added to their repertoire in the last year.

Be completely soft

Soft robotics is a rapidly growing discipline, but until this year, the devices still relied on some rigid parts. Now, scientists have created the first completely soft-bodied robot that looks like an octopus and can propel itself. The device is made of silicone and uses gas from a small reservoir of hydrogen peroxide to pneumatically power its tentacles. The researchers are now working on adding sensors so the bot can navigate its environment.

Help mend the human body

The world's first autonomous robotic surgery took place this year. The procedure was carried out on a pig intestine, but the Star robot appeared to perform slightly better than skilled human surgeons at stitching up the animal’s intestines, according to the research published in May in the journal Science Translational Medicine. It's not unusual for robotic arms to assist doctors in surgeries these days, but this year, the tiny Preceyes surgical robot was used to operate inside a human eye for the first time. The bot acts like a mechanical hand controlled by a joystick that filters out tremors from the surgeon. Elsewhere, researchers created an ingestible robot from dried pig intestines and a magnet that can be guided through the body using a magnetic field to remove a battery, or other foreign object, from a person's stomach lining.

Do parkour

Borrowing principles from small primates known as bush babies, researchers built a robot called Salto that can spring off walls to gain height faster than any previous robot. Salto uses a latex spring and a carefully designed single leg to leap 3.2 feet (1 meter) high from a standing position. The robot can then readjust in midair to push off from a wall, something previous designs have not been able to do. The researchers said this could lead to robots that can quickly traverse rubble in disaster zones looking for survivors.

Traverse rubble and balance on one foot

The humanoid Atlas robot made by Boston Dynamics, a subsidiary of Alphabet, was already pretty impressive at navigating in the real world. But this year, researchers taught the machine how to  walk on uneven surfaces, like over rubble, by testing its footholds just like a human would before committing its full weight for the step. The machine can even balance on a narrow beam as well as your average human.

Hunt prey

You have to assume that the scientists teaching robots how to hunt prey have never watched any sci-fi movies before. Or, perhaps they just didn't feel the same nervousness we did after watching "The Terminator."  Either way, scientists this year combined a silicon retina with a deep-learning neural network to create a robot that can hunt another human-controlled robot. The goal is to create bots that can identify and track targets in real time, which will be essential if they are to interact with humans and the world around them. The robot also gets better at tracking its prey the more it practices doing so. (God save us all.)

Feel pain

Despite the scary possibility of hunter-robots, researchers are trying to do a good thing for robots — and humans too — by imbuing bots with a sense of pain.

That may sound sadistic for the robots, but pain actually serves a useful function in organisms by encouraging them to stay out of harm's way. By providing robots with a tactile system inspired by human skin that can detect both pressure and temperature, the researchers hope to give bots the same protection. That in turn could aid humans working in proximity to the robot. In particular, scientists at Leibniz University of Hannover are developing an artificial nervous system that would give robots the ability to feel pain, according to their research presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Stockholm, Sweden, this year.

Perch anywhere

Flying robots often have poor range because weight considerations limit the amount of power or fuel they can carry. Being able to take regular breaks can dramatically increase their endurance, but finding an appropriate landing spot can be tough. Now, scientists have found a way to use static electricity to let a miniature flying robot inspired by insects latch onto the underside of any flat surface. The system uses between 500 and 1,000 times less power than flying and works with almost any material. The designers say it could help open up applications that require long-term observation.

Build their own tools

Robots are normally designed with a very specific purpose in mind, but now SRI International has created a tool shop for its mini robots that lets them tackle a wider variety of tasks. Swarms of their microrobots cooperate to build larger structures, but each one previously needed to be individually designed. Now,  scientists have created a system that allows one robot to custom-build new tools or "end-effectors" for its compatriots by building up droplets of a curable liquid similar to how 3D printing works. 

Help paralyzed people walk

The word "exoskeleton" may conjure images of the gigantic robotic suit from the 1986 film "Aliens." However, at 27 pounds (12 kilograms), SuitX's Phoenix is among the lightest and cheapest robotic medical exoskeletons and it is now allowing people paralyzed from the waist down to walk again. Small motors attached to standard orthotics are controlled by pushing buttons integrated into a pair of crutches, enabling a person's hips and knees to move and walk at a pace of up to 1.1 mph (1.8 km/h).

Solve a Rubik's Cube in under a second

The robotics company Infineon created a robot that can solve a Rubik's Cube in 0.637 seconds, 10 times faster than the human record holder. With more than 43 quintillion potential combinations of the Rubik's Cube's colored squares, working out the fastest solution is no mean feat for the robots "brain." Commands are then sent to six motor-controlled arms that spin the cube.

From navigating turbulence, to sleeping midflight, to soaring without a sound, animals' flight adaptations are helping scientists design better flying robots.

Airborne drones and the animals they mimic are featured in 18 new studies published online Dec. 15 in the journal Interface Focus. This special issue is intended "to inspire development of new aerial robots and to show the current status of animal flight studies," said the issue's editor, David Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University in California.

Though humans have been building flying machines since the 18th century, these new studies revealed that there is still much to be learned from looking closely at how birds, insects and bats take flight, keep themselves aloft and maneuver to safe landings. [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

Flying drones are rapidly becoming a common sight worldwide. They are used to photograph glorious vistas from above, snap selfies and even deliver packages, as online retail giant Amazon completed its first commercial delivery by drone in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, on Dec. 7, the BBC reported.

But improving how these robots fly isn't easy, experts said. Fortunately, there are plenty of flying animals that scientists can turn to for inspiration. About 10,000 species of birds; 4,000 species of bats; and well over 1 million insect species have evolved over millions of years to spread their wings and take to the air, and most of these species' flight adaptations haven't been studied at all, Lentink told Live Science.

"Most people think that since we know how to design airplanes, we know all there is to know about flight," Lentink said. But once humans could successfully design planes and rockets, they stopped looking as closely at flying animals as they had in the past, he added.

Now, however, growing demand for small, maneuverable flying robots that can perform a variety of tasks has sparked a scientific "renaissance" and is driving researchers to investigate many open questions about animal aerodynamics and biology, Lentink said.

For example, how are owls able to fly so silently? One team of scientists explored adaptations in owls' wings that could muffle noise, finding that the animals' large wing size and the wings' shape, texture and strategically placed feather fringes all work together to help owls glide soundlessly.

Another group of researchers wondered how frigate birds — a type of seabird that can fly without stopping for days at a time — could sleep "on the wing" during long migrations. The scientists collected the first recordings of in-flight brain activity for these birds, discovering that the animals were able to "micro nap" to rest both brain hemispheres at the same time.

Some scientists puzzled over how fruit flies were able to stay aloft even if their wings were damaged, learning that the insects compensated for missing pieces in wing membranes by adjusting their wing and body movements, enabling the bugs to fly even if half a wing had been lost.

Other studies described new robot designs that can plunge into watery depths from midair, flap their way through buffeting winds or bend their wings like a bird, for better control.

Silent flight, energy conservation and renewal, adapting to turbulent conditions, and the ability to self-correct for wing damage are all features that could significantly improve current models of flying drones, Lentink told Live Science.

"They need to become more silent," Lentink said of drones. "They need to be more efficient, and they need to fly longer. There's a lot of engineering that still needs to happen. The fact that the first steps are being made right now is really exciting and shows that there is a great future in this."

Original article on Live Science.