Science

Using two hook-like claws, a motor and a tail that swings like a pendulum from a cuckoo clock, the ROCR Oscillating Climbing Robot is the first robot designed to climb efficiently and move like a human rock climbers or an ape swinging through trees. The video below explains how it works.Read more

Most materials melt when heated, on other words, they change from a solid to a liquid state. But a few nonconformist materials do the opposite, they melt as they get cooler. A team of MIT researchers has now discovered that silicon, which is the most widely used material in computer chips and solar cells, can display this bizarre property of retrograde melting if it contains high concentrations of certain metals dissolved in it. The finding could lead to applications in solar cells and other devicesRead more

The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope will be built on top of Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii, the National Science Foundation announced last week. The 143 foot tall, 13 foor diameter telescope will be the largest optical solar telescope in the world when completed. The site, the University of Hawaii's Science City, an 18-acre grouping of observatories close to Haleakala’s summit, lies within Haleakala National Park; the construction of another observatory in addition to the existing installations, has been opposed by environmentalists, and still needs to pass a vote by the state Board of Land and Natural Resources before it can begin.Read more

A new type of artificial larynx is being developed by researchers at the the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The new voice box will do away with the robotic, harsh sounding speech produced by current devices, such as that used by physicist Stephen Hawking. The system senses contact between the palate and tongue to figure out which word is being mouthed, with the aid of speech recognition software, and generates audio using a speech synthesizer. Read more

An experiment at the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory has confirmed that spinons, which are particle-like magnetic excitations, can be confined in a magnetic insulator similarly to how quarks are confined within individual protons and neutrons. The finding, could offer new avenues of study in Quantum Chromodynamics, a theory that describes fundamental interactions of quarks.

The spinon confinement observations were made by an international team of physicists, who describe the theory and their new observations in the November 29th issue of Nature Physics.Read more

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), due to be launched December 9 at 9:09 a.m. EST, is ready for it’s roll-out to the launch pad. The satellite is designed for polar orbit around the Earth, to search the sky for 9 months for hidden cosmic objects, such as very cool stars known as "brown dwarfs", dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies.

"The eyes of WISE are a vast improvement over those of past infrared surveys," Edward Wright, mission principal investigator, said. "We will find millions of objects that have never been seen before."Read more