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Gizmorama - August 5, 2015
Good Morning,
A newly designed robot, inspired by skinny-legged insects, could be our future ally in the search for flood victims. I'm interested!
Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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*-- Water insects inspire tiny jumping robot --*
BOSTON - Skinny-legged insects that quietly skate and jump across the surface of the water, called "water striders," were the inspiration for a newly designed robot, developed by scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Seoul National University.
Before they set out to build their robot, the researchers first used slow-motion cameras to film water striders jump. The scientists honed in on the slight curvature at the end of the bugs' legs; the bowed tips seem to enable the creatures' launch, quiet and effortless.
"Water's surface needs to be pressed at the right speed for an adequate amount of time, up to a certain depth, in order to achieve jumping," senior researcher Kyu Jin Cho, director of the Biorobotics Laboratory at Seoul National University, said in a press release. "The water strider is capable of doing all these things flawlessly."
Researchers imagine the robots, which float and jump on water, being deployed by the dozens -- to search for flood victims, for example.
"We were fascinated by the fact that insects can actually jump on water quite well, something that humans or any engineered system cannot not replicate," the researchers wrote in a new paper on the feat, published in the journal Science.
The robot is no bigger than a thumb, and its nearly six-inch vertical jump is executed without breaking the water's surface.
"The resulting robotic insects can achieve the same momentum and height that could be generated during a rapid jump on firm ground -- but instead can do so on water -- by spreading out the jumping thrust over a longer amount of time and in sustaining prolonged contact with the water's surface," explained Robert Wood, a Harvard engineer.
Other engineering teams have built water-walking and water-jumping robots, but those efforts resulted in much bigger, heavier products. Researchers at Harvard and Seoul say their work, for the first time, emphasizes the central ergonomic principle -- the long, skinny, curve-tipped legs -- behind the water strider's effortless water-top acrobatics.
"This is due to their natural morphology," said Cho. "It is a form of embodied or physical intelligence, and we can learn from this kind of physical intelligence to build robots that are similarly capable of performing extreme maneuvers without highly-complex controls or artificial intelligence."
*-- World's most powerful laser fired in Japan --*
OSAKA, Japan - Scientists at Osaka University in Japan say they've fired the world's most powerful laser. The beam was intact for just one picosecond, a trillionth of a second, but brief pulse registered two quadrillion watts of power, or two petawatts.
The energy that was concentrated into the single beam is the equivalent of the world's electricity consumption -- times 1,000. That's double the power of the United States' most powerful laser, a one-petawatt laser at the University of Texas at Austin.
All that power generated in Japan required very little energy input. To create the laser beam, researchers needed only a few hundred Joules -- about the power required to run a few light bulbs or a microwave. Of course, the laser would require a lot more power if it were to run for more than a trillionth of a second.
But lasers don't require much energy for their short powerful bursts. Instead, the laser derives its power from the series of magnifying lenses through which a beam of light is concentrated over a distance of 300 feet.
The complex series of amplifying glass lenses that make up Osaka's Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments, or LFEX, is the most powerful yet designed. It took the researchers at the university's Institute of Laser Engineering several months of testing to finally set the record.
But predictably, the scientists aren't preparing to rest on their laurels.
"With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts," researcher Junji Kawanaka said in a press release.
So what use will all that power serve, aside from setting records?
As Julio Soares, research scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, jokingly told Popular Science: "Well, blow things up."
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