Air conditioners and refrigerators quietly eat a huge share of the world's electricity, and the gases inside many of them trap heat in the atmosphere. A team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) now reports a step toward a different kind of cooling: a solid metal that gets cold when it is squeezed, built in a way that is cheap, fast to make and tough enough to run for more than 100 million cycles.
The work, published in the journal Science and described in an HKUST pres...
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refrigeration
RoboBee : The tiny flying submarine
A Harvard University lab has developed the first insect-size robots capable of flight and swimming. Researchers at the Harvard Paulson School have demonstrated a flying, swimming, insectlike robot, easing the way to create future aerial-aquatic robotic vehicles. Coming from the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, this discovery can only mean one thing, swimming RoboBees.
The biggest challenge involved the conflicting design requirements. Aerial vehicles require large airfoils such as wings or sails to...
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Smart Bird – the ultra-light robot bird
A flying robot that imitates a bird has been created.
Plenty of robots can fly but none can fly like a real bird. Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull that flies by flapping its wings.
This invention of a flying robot imitates a bird. It takes off, lands and flies like a real bird.
The flying robot has a two-meter wingspan, and is made of a lightweight (450 gram) carbon-fiber skeleton body.
It uses hybrid drive technol...
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