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Robotics

Light-powered soft robots that can keep jumping forever

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created teardrop-shaped soft robots that leap upward or forward when exposed to infrared light—and will keep jumping as long as the light is present. The work demonstrates ...

Consumer & Gadgets

A humanoid robot's social expressiveness may backfire when it makes mistakes

For robots to be successfully deployed in real-world environments, humans should trust them enough to cooperate with them. Some roboticists have been trying to determine whether users perceive robots that exhibit socially ...

Engineering

Two ultrathin films turn low-grade heat into cooling without an electric motor

Refrigerators, air-conditioning systems and data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, and cooling demand is constantly rising. A research team from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Brain-reading earbuds are already here, prompting urgent questions about children and neurodata

While it may sound like science fiction, earbuds that read brain activity are already on sale. Wearable technology company Neurable claims that its headphones, equipped with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, can track ...

Technology news

Machine learning & AI

How AI could uncover the hidden ways people work together

Yankai Wang, a Ph.D. student in organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, was reading a paper about how transformers—the architecture behind large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude—might ...

Robotics

Six-legged robot learns to walk from a stick insect

Do you ever see an ant skittering across your kitchen counter and wonder how this little bug overcame all the obstacles in your home just to get there? Insects use their tiny nervous systems to walk with surprising dexterity—a ...