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Cockroach-inspired robot can squeeze through tight spaces
Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a robotic cockroach that can crawl through the tightest of gaps. The team began by studying actual cockroaches, observing how they moved through the densely packed rainforest floor. While some obstacles are pushed past or climbed over, the cockroaches frequently rolled their body at an almost-90-degree angle to scamper through openings. The next step was to fit these real-world 'roaches with artificial shells and see how this aided or hampered their mobility. The result was perhaps obvious: the less cylindrical the shell, the less effective the insects were at performing the roll manoeuvre.
Robot learns skills through trial and error, like you do
As a rule, robots have to learn through explicit instruction, whether it's through new programming, watching videos or holding their hands. UC Berkeley's BRETT (Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks) isn't nearly that dependent, however. The machine uses neural network-based deep learning algorithms to master tasks through trial and error, much like humans do. Ask it to assemble a toy and it'll keep trying until it understands what works. In theory, you'd rarely need to give the robot new code -- you'd just make requests and give the automaton enough time to figure things out.
Scientists close to brewing morphine (or heroin) from sugar
Sugar is basically ubiquitous and it looks like it could be used to make morphine, which is a refined form of heroin. Recent research shows that a genetically modified strain of yeast, when exposed to sugar, could be used to ferment the opioid. Yes, essentially, you could homebrew your own scag. I know what you're thinking: "This sounds like madness." But there's some proof behind it. Researchers from the University of California Berkeley and Concordia University in Canada presented an almost complete means to turn glucose to morphine, while scientists from the University of Calgary supplied the missing piece that completes the process. The idea wasn't to flood the streets with home-made heroin. No, the plan is much more noble than that: to produce "cheaper, less addictive, safer and more-effective" painkillers, according to Nature.
AZ town hides license plate readers in dozens of fake cacti
City officials from Paradise Valley, Arizona have reportedly set up an array of license plate readers, hidden within fake cacti no less, throughout the wealthy Phoenix suburb. Problem is, officials can't seem to explain if the devices are currently in use or why they even need the privacy-invading technology ion the first place. Fox 10 News broke the story earlier this week after residents began noticing that many of the town's cell-phone towers (disguised as cacti to blend into the surrounding scenery) were suddenly sporting the new plate readers. These readers scan the license plates of passing vehicles and compare them against a database of stolen and missing vehicles. If the plate matches an entry in the database, the device alerts authorities who then investigate.
The Big Picture: A far-away supernova split into four
Gravity can play a lot of tricks with light, and we're not just talking about black holes. Take this recent Hubble Space Telescope discovery from UC Berkeley's Patrick Kelly, for example: those four lights are actually a distant supernova magnified and split into four images by the gravitational lensing of a giant galaxy. Besides looking cool, the image promises to be a gold mine for astrophysics. The time delay between those four lights will let researchers study both the properties of the exploding star and the galaxy, including the presence of dark matter. The best part? Due to the light's unusual path, there's a good chance that scientists will get a "rerun" in a few years if they want to see it again. [Image credit: NASA/ESA/FrontierSN/GLASS/Frontier Fields]
UC Berkeley 3D prints an artsy pavilion using dry powdered cement
Here's a project that could pave way to structures both unique and affordable. A team of researchers from the UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design has unveiled the Bloom Pavilion, which they call "the first and largest powder-based 3D-printed cement structure." It measures 9 feet high, 12 feet wide and 12 feet deep, with a traditional Thai floral motif design. The pavilion is not the first 3D-printed building, to be clear. A Chinese company built 10 houses in under 24 hours last year and finished a whopping 5-storey apartment block in January using 3D-printed parts. Plus, there's that 3D-printed castle in Minnesota. However, it was created using dry powdered cement, whereas other 3D-printed buildings were made by extruding wet cement through a nozzle.
Scientists take detailed pictures of the smallest known life forms
Just how small can life get? Almost unbelievably small, if you ask a team of Berkeley Lab researchers. They've taken the first detailed electron microscope pictures of the tiniest bacteria known to date -- at a typical 0.009 cubic microns in volume, you could fit 150 of them in an already miniscule e. coli cell. Scientists had to catch the hard-to-spot microbes by using a new portable cryo plunger, which flash-froze groundwater to near absolute zero (about -458F) to keep the cells intact while they were in transit.
Scientists want to fight the Ebola outbreak using robots
Outbreaks of lethal viruses like Ebola are bad enough by themselves, but they're made worse by having to send in aid workers -- these people can quickly become victims, no matter how careful they are. To eliminate that risk, both the White House and a trio of educational institutions are holding workshops on November 7th where scientists will discuss using robots to tackle the current Ebola crisis. The goal is to minimize physical contact whenever possible while keeping patients and families in touch. At a basic level, they'd like machines to disinfect areas and deliver supplies. Telepresence robots, meanwhile, could both let people visit patients without putting themselves in danger.
Cheap, tiny robots serve as terrain scouts for expensive ones (video)
Big robots like Cheetah and Big Dog cost a lot to make, so it would be such a shame if they get put out of commission after slipping on, say, a patch of ice. To prevent that from happening, UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich researchers propose sending a team of small, expendable robots ahead of the big, expensive one to scout terrain conditions -- in the event that they do get used for real missions, that is. The researchers demonstrated their idea at the IEEE robotics conference in Hong Kong, where they used UC Berkeley's tiny cardboard robot called VelociRoACH to do recon work for ETH Zurich's StarlETH.
Scientists replicate kitty whiskers to help robots 'feel'
Cat whiskers are tremendously sensitive, so much so that cats can navigate around our glassware without sending anything crashing to the floor. It's that sort of sensitivity that a team from the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to replicate to help robots of the future. Ultra-sensitive fibers, made with carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles are designed to respond to pressure, helping future hardware navigate difficult and low-visibility environments. Team leader Ali Javey believes that the material is 10 times as sensitive as your smartphone display, and could even be used to track your heartbeat -- so maybe we'll be seeing this stuff getting woven together to make the next generation of connected onesies.
Google Glass mod gives you control over home appliances with one touch pairing
The beauty of Glass is that we're just barely scratching the surface of what Google's smart eyewear can, and eventually will, do. Leave it then to the brainiac undergrads at UC Berkeley's CITRIS lab to show us one possible direction that sees the wearables modded for at-home convenience. By adding an IR emitter to the side of Glass, the Berkeley team was able to demonstrate remote control of home appliances by pairing them with an Xbee 802.15.4 WiFi radio and microcontroller. The controls for the setup are simple. A user need only look at the intended appliance to bridge a connection -- made possible by an IR-transmitted device ID -- and view toggles for control. We know what you're thinking: how does Glass select one appliance from a cluster of nearby devices? To accommodate for this hassle, the team's made it so that the heads-up display will show the user a numerical range of selectable devices and a blinking, blue LED on the intended target when pairing is successful. Users can also swap between appliances by swiping down on Glass' touchpad or allowing for a connection timeout. Yes, it's still early days for cumbersome Glass prototypes like this one, but we'd bet the farm you'll be turning on the AC with the blink of an eye before long. You can check out the demo video after the break for proof of this Glass concept.
Plastic skin lights up on contact, may lead to touchscreens everywhere (video)
Flexible circuitry is frequently a one-way affair -- we've seen bendy displays and touch layers, but rarely both in one surface. UC Berkeley is at last merging those two technologies through a plastic skin whose display reacts to touch. By curing a polymer on top of a silicon wafer, the school's researchers found that they could unite a grid of pressure sensors with an OLED screen; they just had to remove the polymer to create a flexible skin. As the film-like material can be laminated on just about anything, it maylead to touch displays in places where they were previously impractical, or even very thin blood pressure sensors. It could also be easy to produce -- since the skins use off-the-shelf chip manufacturing techniques, commercial products are well within reach.
CCNY, UC Berkeley develop lasers that could rewrite quantum chips, spin those atoms right round
Computers are normally limited by the fixed nature of their chipsets: once the silicon is out of the factory, its capabilities are forever locked in. The City College of New York and University of California Berkeley have jointly developed a technique that could break chips free of these prisons and speed along quantum computing. They found that hitting gallium arsenide with a laser light pattern aligns the spins of the atoms under the rays, creating a spintronic circuit that can re-map at a moment's notice. The laser could be vital to quantum computers, which can depend heavily or exclusively on spintronics to work: a simple shine could get electrons storing a much wider range of numbers and consequently handling many more calculations at once. Research is only just now becoming public, however; even though gallium arsenide is common in modern technology, we'll need to be patient before we find quantum PCs at the local big-box retail chain. Despite this, we could still be looking at an early step in a shift from computers with many single-purpose components to the abstracted, all-powerful quantum machines we've held in our science fiction dreams.
UC Berkeley freshman shows us his ridiculously automated dorm (video)
Besides beer pong, the whole point of going away to college is to blossom into an independent, motivated, self-sufficient adult. That is, of course, unless your dorm's name is BRAD (Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm), where freshman Derek Low controls devices all around his room without even getting out of bed. An app on his phone can adjust ambient lighting and curtain position depending on the situation. His laptop uses Dragon Dictate to turn shouts into tasks his pile of servos and motors can accomplish. Just saying "Romantic mode" makes a disco ball pop out of the ceiling and plays the epically passionate Elton John song, "Can You Feel The Love Tonight." As if that wasn't enough, the emergency "party mode" button located next to the bed activates a bunch of lasers and strobes, as well as fog and blacklights while a bumpin' stereo system cranks out dance music. This dorm is clearly every college freshman's dream. I mean, who wouldn't want to wake up with Justin Bieber every morning? Check out the video after the break.
CLASH is an adorable, cloth-climbing roach-bot (video)
Generally the words "roach" and "adorable" don't get thrown together. But, one look at the video after the break and you'll understand. This six-legged successor to UC Berkeley's DASH scampers not just horizontally, but vertically -- so long as the material it's climbing is cloth. All motion is handled by the bot's front four legs, while the rear two provide stabilization. The CLASH is able to adhere to cloth because its feet have small claws that allow it to grip the fabric, while its appendages scurry about at up to 34 strides per second. Its top speed of 24 centimeters a second may not sound like much, but considering the pest-inspired design is only 10 centimeters long, it's actually quite a brisk pace. Trust us, you don't want to miss watching it in action after the break.
Scientists reconstruct images from our brains, plan to do the same for dreams (video)
This is your brain. And now this is your brain on YouTube. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) software, researchers at UC Berkeley created a visual representation of what our brains see when we watch a TV or movie. It works as such: scientists show subjects random clips and measure the corresponding cerebral activity. After the computer "learns" what vids evoke what brain activity, scientists feed 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program where it reconstructs a movie representation of neural happenings based on the hundred clips most similar to what it sees. Although the method currently only works with images actually viewed, the future goal is to recreate what people see in their dreams and memories -- which could give doctors major insight to the minds of the mentally impaired, stroke victims or those with neurological disorders. Inception in real life isn't exactly around the corner, but the implications of this new technology are pretty mind-blowing. See for yourself in the video after the break -- no totem required.
Samsung studies 3D viewing discomfort, finds out bloggers don't read
Judging by the headlines today, Samsung's 3D R&D department made a huge mistake, just check them out: "Who Could Have Guessed: 3D Hurts Your Eyes", "Samsung-funded study finds 3D video causes extra eye strain, fatigue", "Samsung study finds that 3D video causes eye strain, fatigue". It seems obvious that Samsung's research grant financing a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal of Vision was wasted, except for one minor issue -- all of those headlines are wrong. "The zone of comfort: Predicting visual discomfort with stereo displays" is actually trying to find out why 3D-related eyestrain happens. That it can and does happen with poorly formatted video, whether 2D, 3D or otherwise, is already known. Scrolling down beyond the abstract reveals the prof's data actually indicated a wider comfort zone than 3D video producers commonly assumed with their percentage rule of thumb. It's a Friday night and you don't have to pick thumbing through dry descriptions of experiments over whatever your plans are, but that's why you have us. Shockingly, companies desperately hawking 3D tech are busy making it better instead of undermining their own products, but you'd have to actually read the study to find out for sure.
Paralyzed student uses robotic exoskeleton to walk at college graduation (video)
Austin Whitney hasn't been able to walk since a 2007 car crash left him paralyzed, but on Saturday the 22-year-old triumphantly strode across the stage to accept his degree from UC Berkeley. He had a little help, in the form of a specially crafted robotic exoskeleton developed by Berkeley engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni. Kazerooni and his team designed the exoskeleton with lightness and affordability in mind, resisting the urge to load it up with expensive hardware and tethering the mechanized walker to a backpack that houses a computer and a rechargeable, eight-hour battery. As a result, the Austin walker won't enable the kind of acrobatic leaps that would make Lt. Rasczak proud, but its reduced mobility comes at a reduced cost of just $15,000. That's certainly not an impulse buy, though it's a welcomed alternative to other exoskeletons that retail for $100,000 or more. Walk past the break for a video of Whitney's momentous steps, along with a clip of Kazerooni describing his creation.
Graphene-powered web could download 3-D movies in seconds, give MPAA nightmares
Graphene, is there anything it can't do? Researchers are already trying to put it in processors, fuel cells, and batteries -- now your internet connection might get ten-times faster thanks to the silicon successor. Researchers at UC Berkeley have created tiny, one-atom-thick modulators that could switch the data-carrying light on and off in a fiber-optic connection much faster than current technology. In addition to running at a higher frequency (the team believes it will scale up to 500GHz -- modern modulators run at about 1GHz) the smaller, 25-micron size means thinner cables could be used, reducing capacitance and further boosting speeds. Labs have already crossed the 100 terabit threshold and graphene could push that even higher, yet we're still stuck staring at a buffering screen every time we try to Netflix Degrassi.
Scientists separate plasma from blood with working biochip
Disposable biotech sensors won't let you diagnose your own diseases quite yet, but we've taken the first step -- a research team spanning three universities has successfully prototyped a lab-on-a-chip. Called the Self-powered Integrated Microfluidic Blood Analysis System (or SIMBAS for short, thankfully), the device takes a single drop of blood and separates the cells from the plasma. There's no electricity, mechanics or chemical reactions needed here, just the work of gravity to pull the fluid through the tiny trenches and grooves, and it can take as little as ten minutes to produce a useful result. It's just the first of a projected series of devices to make malady detection fast, affordable and portable. Diagram after the break!
