(via We test the baffling hubless Verge TS Pro electric motorbike | Ars Technica)
(via Inflating spider corpse creates robotic claw game of nightmares | Ars Technica)
Shortly after the Preston Innovation Lab was set up at Rice University, graduate student Faye Yap was rearranging a few things when she noticed a dead curled-up spider in the hallway. Curious about why spiders curl up when they die, she did a quick search to find the answer. And that answer—essentially, internal hydraulics—led to delightfully morbid inspiration: Why not use the bodies of dead spiders as tiny air-powered grippers for picking up and maneuvering tiny electronic parts?
Yap and her colleagues—including adviser Daniel Preston—did just that. They transformed a dead wolf spider into a gripping tool with just a single assembly step—essentially launching a novel new research area they have cheekily dubbed “necrobotics.” They outlined the process in detail in a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science. The authors suggest the gripper could be ideal for delicate “pick-and-place” repetitive tasks and could possibly be used one day in the assembly of microelectronics.
(via Koss Corp. founder John C. Koss, who created the stereophone, has died)
John C. Koss, the creator of the stereophone who founded Milwaukee-based Koss Corp., has died.
Koss, whose love for music fueled his business, died Tuesday, the company announced in a news release. He was 91.
Koss founded the company in 1953 with the initial plan to rent television sets to hospital patients. The consumer electronics company is now best known for its headphones.
Koss, with his partner Martin Lange, Jr., developed the first high-fidelity stereophone in 1958. That first stereophone set off the headphone industry…
this is an important advance in data compression:
Fraunhofer, the German company that helped develop the H.264, H.265 and MP3 encoding formats, has unveiled a new video encoding standard that could severely reduce streaming bottlenecks. Called H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC), it’s specifically designed for 4K and 8K streaming and reduces data requirements by around 50 percent compared to H.265 HEVC (high-efficiency video coding). At the same time, the improved compression won’t compromise visual quality….
this is also huge:
The company developed the codec in collaboration with partners including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Sony. It will be licensed by the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF), a group with 34 major member companies. The aim there is to avoid the kind of licensing squabbles that plagued the H.264 codec a decade ago.
…A new study led by Yeongran Hong of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology involves a chemical with an impressive affinity for gold. Subject some circuit boards to an acid treatment to release its materials and this stuff will gather up all the dissolved gold. And after it lets go of that gold, it’s ready to be used again.
The researchers’ gold-scrubber is based on an organic compound called a porphyrin. Linked together in a polymer, it possesses lots and lots of little pores that, energetically, want to host a metal atom. That’s the kind of structure chemists look for to help with recycling…
(via Japanese Artist Makes a Creepy Die With an Eyeball)
The die was created by Japanese artist and DJ Shishido Mazafaka, aka Doooo, whose unsettling creations you’ve probably seen shared online many times before…
(via Coronavirus: FDA authorizes Abbott Labs’ 5-minute COVID-19 test)
this is NOT a Theranos magic box that doesn’t work. :D
this actually does what it claims