Cutting Edge

Robotic prostheses may have a way to go before they work exactly like human limbs, but researchers are making great strides. A team out of Georgia Tech is working on new technology that could give these robotic limbs something akin to a sense of touch.

Thanks to tactile-sensing material that covers the entire prosthesis and software that integrates the gathered data, this robotic arm can maneuver through clutter and distinguish between hard and soft objects as it grips, pushes, and pulls more intuitively.

"Up until now, the dominant strategies for robot manipulation have discouraged contact between the robot's … Read more

If you're looking to attract attention, setting a Guinness World Record is probably a good way to start.

That was the goal -- attracting attention, that is -- for a group of IBM Research scientists who recently set out to make what turned out be the Guinness World Record-certified smallest stop-motion film ever.

Called "A Boy and His Atom," the animated film features a small boy having a good old time as he bounces around, playing catch, and dancing. The twist? The film was shot at the atomic level and features 130 atoms that were painstakingly placed, atom by atom, as the researchers shot 250 individual frames. The images were created at a temperature of negative 268 degrees Celsius and were magnified 100 million times. … Read more

NASA released the most detailed images ever seen of a gigantic hurricane that scientists believe has existed at Saturn's north pole for years.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped the spectacular pictures this past November from a vantage point approximately 261,000 miles from Saturn -- a distance so extreme that the above picture has an image scale of about 1 mile per pixel.… Read more

By far the coolest thing Canada has in space is Chris Hadfield, commander of the International Space Station. He's all over social and news media with his wacky zero-g demos, guitar playing, and amazing photos of Earth.

Today Hadfield notched another first: unveiling a banknote in space. At a Bank of Canada press conference in Ottawa, the mustachioed colonel appeared via ISS video link. He plucked the bank's latest polymer bill from a bracket on the wall, gave it a few weightless twirls, and pointed to the robots it features.

"I just want to tell you how proud I am to be able to see Canada's achievements in space highlighted on our money," Hadfield told Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney. "To feature Canadarm2 and Dextre for the theme of the $5 note, it really marks Canada's contribution to the International Space Station Program, and especially our longtime area of expertise in robotics." … Read more

We know Boston Dynamics is keen on four-legged robots, even creating a cheetah of its very own. So is the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland; its Cheetah-Cub has been in development at the Biorobotics Laboratory since 2008.

Teaching a quadruped robot to walk can be a tricky business, though. Something called a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) network is used to generate movements according to a repetitive pattern. But no matter how robust the rhythm of the movements is, it can be tough to implement outside of a lab environment, where the ground won't necessarily always be even.

Enter the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). The team there broke down the movements of horses via motion capture into what it calls "kinematic Motion Primitives" (kMP), analyses of the trajectories of limbs and bodies, translated into data that can be fed into a CPG. … Read more

First announced in October 2012, version 1.2.1 of the Canon EOS 5D Mark III firmware will allow users to output a clean HDMI feed. One of the key disadvantages up until now for the Mark III has been the extra information that is output alongside the Live View image when using HDMI out, which made the footage unusable for actual recording purposes.

The update allows users to record uncompressed (YCbCr 4:2:2, 8 bit) video to an external recorder or display it on an external monitor during filming. This puts the Mark III in line with several … Read more

To my fellow geeks who've long dreamed of having a lab-quality digital microscope that mounts to your phone, the time has come.

Oregon-based optics manufacturer Bodelin will begin shipping its brand-new ProScope Micro Mobile on May 1. One version fits the iPhone 4, 4s, 5, and iPod Touch; another the iPad; and another the iPad Mini. Whatever size, it will set you back $149.… Read more

Humans have a lot in common with magpies. We gravitate toward shiny things.

It's easy, then, to see why the Glowing Plants project on Kickstarter has more than doubled its goal and still has 38 days to go. It's a fascinating mix of botany, science, and unexpected glowing things.

Some people can boast a green thumb, but very few people can boast a glowing green thumb. For a pledge of $40, Glowing Plants will send you 50 to 100 seeds to let you raise your own glowing plant at home. The project's creators say that this is a one-off opportunity and the seeds will not be available commercially later on.… Read more

If you've got $200,000 to spend on a ticket to suborbital space, your spaceship is nearly ready.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, billed as the world's first commercial space plane, notched an important milestone today by firing its rocket engine during flight for the first time.

The test at Mojave Air and Space Port in California saw the passenger space plane detach from its dual-hull mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, at an altitude of 47,000 feet while being piloted by Mark Stucky and Mike Alsbury of builder Scaled Composites.

The pair then ignited the rocket motor, which propelled the craft up to 55,000 feet. During the 16-second engine burn, SpaceShipTwo went supersonic, hitting Mach 1.2. … Read more