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Robotics

Insect-inspired flying robot bounces back after collisions

Flying insects, such as fruit flies, bees, dragonflies and mosquitoes, can dart through narrow spaces and survive collisions with various objects. In contrast, many flying robots fall, suffer damage or even break down when ...

Energy & Green Tech

Researchers establish performance targets for next-generation solar aircraft batteries

A sleek, pilotless, solar-powered airplane that soars through the atmosphere to monitor climate or track wildfires was once just an idea. Now, these high-altitude specialty aircraft are advancing from early prototyping demonstrations ...

Engineering

Designing new nuclear alloys, element by element

The periodic table contains more than 100 elements. Combine them in different ways, and the possibilities quickly multiply. For researchers designing materials for advanced nuclear reactors, the abundance presents an opportunity: ...

Robotics

A new flexible foot pad enables this one-legged, hopping robot to go where few robots have gone before

A team of University of Toronto Engineering researchers has developed a flexible foot pad for the "Hopcopter"—a one-legged, hopping robot they developed—significantly enhancing its performance on sand, ice and other difficult ...

Technology news

Security

AIs fail to reliably detect AIs in reverse Turing tests

The famous "Turing test" of computer science comes from a 1950 paper written by the British computer scientist (and war hero) Alan Turing. There are many variants, but perhaps the most common involves a human asking questions ...

Computer Sciences

New neural framework could make LLMs more empathetic

As more people turn to large language models (LLMs) during personal crises, the companies behind them are engineering these AI-powered models to be more personal, empathetic and understanding when prompts indicate a user ...

Computer Sciences

Seeing Rembrandt through the eyes of a machine

A few hundred years ago, determining whether a painting was created by a master like Rembrandt or a talented copycat depended only on the trained eye of an expert. Then, new tools like X-rays and infrared imaging allowed ...