The amazing ability of sidewinder snakes to quickly climb sandy slopes was once something biologists only vaguely understood and roboticists only dreamed of replicating. By studying the snakes in a unique bed of inclined sand and using a snake-like robot to test ideas spawned by observing the real animals, both biologists and roboticists have now gained long-sought insights.    In a study published...

Read More...

Scientists at the University of Twente are working on robots that are expected to save lives in calamity situations in the Alps. The emphasis within this SHERPA project is on cooperation between human rescue workers, the ground robot ('ground rover') with a robotic arm and flying robots. This week all the members of the SHERPA consortium will meet in Twente in order to...

Read More...

A method borrowed from video gaming can make remote-controlled emergency response robots easier to use -- enabling the operator to focus more on the dangerous situations they face.              An international research team is adapting a technique known to gamers as "free look control," to emergency response robots, which will enable the robots to mimic way the human...

Read More...

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a rapid-fire "storm" of high-energy blasts from a highly magnetized neutron star, also called a magnetar, on Jan. 22, 2009. Now astronomers analyzing this data have discovered underlying signals related to seismic waves rippling throughout the magnetar.                                        ...

Read More...

Earth's protective ozone layer is well on track to recovery in the next few decades thanks to concerted international action against ozone depleting substances, according to a new assessment by 300 scientists.Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2014, is being published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and is the first comprehensive update in four years. The stratospheric ozone...

Read More...