The robot snake in a model of human veins. (Credit: Kim et al., Sci. Robot. 4, eaax7329 (2019))
You probably didn’t picture the robots of the future to be slimy, magnetized snakes. But a hyper-flexible robot modeled after the legless reptiles and designed by researchers at MIT could make it easier to diagnose and treat blood clots, aneurysms and perform other small-scale procedures in the brain.
The device, less than a millimeter thick, was designed to crawl through the narrow, twis ...read more
Mimosa plants have long inspired intrigue with their ability to move when touched. (Credit: Discover/Stipple engraving by R. Earlom, 1789, after G. Romney. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY)
When The Secret Life of Plants came out in 1973, Lincoln Taiz was a graduate student, just embarking on what would become a many-decades long career in plant biology. Plants, the book revealed, can make their own trace elements through fusion, just like the sun. More, they can recognize people. If someo ...read more
At 3.8 million years old, this mostly complete cranium of Australopithecus amanensis is the oldest australopith skull in the fossil record. (Credit: Dale Omori, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History)
On Feb. 10, 2016, the face of a ghost emerged from weathered Ethiopian sandstone. The nearly complete skull, 3.8 million years old, was found less than 20 miles from the site where Lucy, the most famous of our distant evolutionary relatives, was discovered in the 1970s.
Lucy was ...read more
Gas glows white, lit by a stellar nursery, in this view of a region within the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxy. Most cosmic gas is not so visible and lies outside of galaxies — in halos surrounding galaxies and in the vast spaces in between. Yet the gas determines galactic life cycles. (Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)
Most of what astronomers know about the universe comes from what they can see. So their ideas have been prejudiced toward stars and g ...read more
An albino lizard hatchling, one of the first to be gene edited with CRISPR. (Doug Menke)
Skittering among the Caribbean flora are anole lizards, tiny reptiles no bigger than a finger’s length. Sporting shades of grey, brown and green, island life has spurred the evolution of some 150 species there.
As a result, anole lizards have become a key scientific model for research into how reptiles develop and evolve. But scientists have been missing a critical element: the tools to investig ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine