Dyret, a four-legged robot, has the ability to adjust the length of its legs in adapting to varying terrain, reports Tech Xplore. "The robot uses a camera to see how rough the terrain is, and it uses sensors in the legs to feel how hard the walking surface is," says researcher and senior lecturer Tonnes Nygaard. "The robot continuously learns about the environment it's walking on and, combined with the knowledge it gained indoors...
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket made a record ninth successful launch and landing as part of a mission to carry 60 satellites into orbit, PCMag reports. Early Sunday morning, the capsule took off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About nine minutes later, its first stage landed on SpaceX's drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-breaks-its-own-falcon-9-flight-record-during-starlink-launch
A team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge found that out of the more than 300 COVID-19 machine learning models described in scientific papers in 2020, none is suitable for detecting or diagnosing COVID-19 from standard medical imaging, due to biases, methodological flaws, lack of reproducibility, and "Frankenstein datasets", reports Tech Xplore. "... any machine learning algorithm is only as good as the data it's trained on," said first author Dr. Michael Roberts...
A supermassive black hole (SMBH) is on the move, it seems. About 230 million light-years from Earth, the black hole is moving peculiarly at a speed of around 177,000 kilometres per hour, reports CNET. In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of astronomers cited abnormal activity in galaxy J0437+2456. A possible explanation is that the SMBH is from an external galaxy that collided recently with J0437+2456 ... but there is a big hole in...
Bob McDonald, host of our favourite CBC radio show Quirks & Quarks, makes the case for lightweight, gas-filled creatures, possibly as close as 128 light years from our planet.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/birthday-balloon-inspires-speculation-about-alien-life-1.5946513
Tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler suggests we can learn a lot about our priorities by taking a good look at what is hot and what is not on our smartphones.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/13/phone-app-home-screen-covid/
This short article by Ingrid Fadelli of Tech Xplore sent us to our science dictionary several times, but it sounds like there could be a breakthrough with those nanoparticle things.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-transistor-based-metal-nanoparticles-ionic.html
Netflix is clamping down on people sharing passwords among different households, CNET reports. Some users have been greeted at the login page with a notification saying, "If you don't live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching."
https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-cracks-down-on-password-sharing/
In his annual internet birthday letter, World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee highlights how a digital divide affects young people, reports CNET. He points to a 2020 report from the International Telecommunication Union that notes that one-third of young people don't have access to the internet. Many are turned away by negative experiences. "How many brilliant young minds fall on the wrong side of the digital divide?" he wrote. "How many voices of would-be leaders...
Scientists have discovered that some decapitated sea slugs can regrow hearts and whole new bodies, the CBC reports. Biology researcher Sayaka Mitoh and Nara Women's University aquatic ecology professor Yoichi Yusa cut off the heads of 16 sea slugs. Six started regeneration and three survived. One lost and re-grew its body twice.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/sea-slug-regeneration-1.5942055
