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01 Feb
0

Prosthetic Hand Restores Amputee’s Sense of Touch

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Igor Spetic lost his right hand in an industrial accident. Then he started working with Dustin J. Tyler, a researcher in human-machine interaction, to help develop an experimental haptic prosthetic that lets Spetic feel sensations in his missing hand.   To make the prosthetic work, Tyler tapped into Spetic’s nervous system. Implanted electrodes in the right forearm make contact with three nerves at 20 locations. Stimulating different nerve fibers produces realistic sensations: When one spot is stimulated, he feels a touch on his right palm; another spot produces sensation in his thumb. Thin-film force sensors in the device’s index and…

01 Feb
0

How to Build a Moral Robot

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If robots are going to drive our cars and play with our kids, we’ll need to teach them right from wrong. Here’s how a group of scientists plans to build moral machines.  

01 Feb
0

Watch Six of the Coolest Surgical Robots in Action

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Today’s surgical robots extend a surgeon’s capacities; they filter out hand tremors and allow maneuvers that even the best surgeon couldn’t pull off with laparoscopic surgery’s typical long-handled tools. But tomorrow’s robot surgeons will take over the operating room.  

01 Feb
0

The Bitcoin Blockchain Explained

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Forget the currency; it’s the protocol behind it that matters. Blockchains will mutate and take over everything we do on the Web.   Trusting strangers with your digital information may sound silly, but it’s actually a revolution in distributed computing. And one day, systems like Bitcoin could be the future of all secure digital transactions.  

01 Feb
0

A Cyborg Stingray Made of Rat Muscles and Gold

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A team of researchers have found a way to meld bioinspiration with robotics and cybernetics with the creation of a fully controllable robotic ray that uses light-activated rat muscle cells to swim. The research has just been published in Science, and it’s impressive. And also adorable.  

01 Feb
0

Tackle This: Football’s Newest MVP is a Robot

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A robotic tackling dummy created by Dartmouth College engineering students could turn out to be the most valuable player on the field this football season. Short for Mobile Virtual Player, the MVP robot is designed to take a beating during football drills, sparing players from an accumulation of the kinds of impacts known to result in concussions and long-term brain damage.  

01 Feb
0

This Water Jet Cutter Can Slice Through Anything: Steel, Glass or Steak

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The phrase “desktop fabrication” has for the most part meant 3D printers and laser cutters. There are also small computer-numerical-control (CNC) mills and routers to be had, but until now you’d be hard pressed to find a small computerized machine hefty enough and flexible enough to cut complicated patterns in, say, steel. And you’d be totally out of luck if your material of choice was glass or ceramic.  

01 Feb
0

Build an Air Theremin (For Dance Parties!)

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IEEE Spectrum’s own Stephen Cass has been on a several-month-long quest to make groovy electronic music—in spite of a complete and utter lack of any musical talent whatsoever. So when he stumbled across the TeraRanger One range finding sensor, the wheels in his head started spinning.   The sensor uses reflected infrared pulses to determine distances of up to several meters. Cass quickly realized that with the help of an Arduino Mega, he could translate different distances into musical notes on his 1980s vintage Casio SK-5 keyboard, creating an instrument you can play with your whole body. The result is…

01 Feb
0

High-Speed Classroom: Building an Electric Racing Motorcycle

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Ohio State University’s Buckeye Current Electric Motorcycle Team is no ordinary after school club. Unless, of course, your version of ordinary includes breaking land speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats and taking home racing trophies from the Isle of Man. In about six years, this all-student team has gone from cobbling motorcycles together from whatever they had on hand to competing against professional motorcycle racing teams on some of the world’s toughest courses. The challenge of building an entirely new electric motorcycle from scratch has turned out to be a fantastic testing ground for these soon-to-be minted electrical engineers….

01 Feb
0

Tour the World’s Coolest Floating DIY Lab

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Steve Roberts turned his yacht into an ever-evolving electronics laboratory.   Datawake was 10 years in the making. She’s outfitted with endless gadgets: including a ham radio, a milling machine, a 3D printer, Raspberry Pi and Arduino based systems for data collection, and endless tools for tinkering. She even has a kitty litter box equipped with a carbon filter air cleaner and a security camera for wireless monitoring.  

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