Engineering

E-whiskers may be touchstone for future of e-skin

Those cute little whiskers you see on your pet do more than just twitch adorably. The long, protruding hairs are actually touch receptors, sending vital information about the surroundings to the brain and helping the animals ...

Engineering

Revolutionizing everyday products with artificial intelligence

"Who is Bram Stoker?" Those three words demonstrated the amazing potential of artificial intelligence. It was the answer to a final question in a particularly memorable 2011 episode of Jeopardy!. The three competitors were ...

Robotics

Robot transitions from soft to rigid

Even octopuses understand the importance of elbows. When these squishy, loose-limbed cephalopods need to make a precise movement—such as guiding food into their mouth—the muscles in their tentacles contract to create ...

Engineering

Automating materials design

For decades, materials scientists have taken inspiration from the natural world. They'll identify a biological material that has some desirable trait—such as the toughness of bones or conch shells—and reverse-engineer ...

Engineering

Novel 3-D printing technique yields high-performance composites

Nature has produced exquisite composite materials—wood, bone, teeth, and shells, for example—that combine light weight and density with desirable mechanical properties such as stiffness, strength and damage tolerance.

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