Mini-robot shifts from solid to liquid to escape its cage—just like the T-1000

Phase-shifting material also useful for smart soldering devices, in vivo drug delivery.

A Lego minifig made out of a new material can "melt" through a cage's metal bars before reassembling into its solid form on the other side.

A Lego minifig made out of a new material can "melt" through a cage's metal bars before reassembling into its solid form on the other side. (credit: Q. Wang et al., 2023)

One of the many iconic moments in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was seeing the T-1000 briefly morph into a liquid to pass through the metal bars separating him from its target: a teenage John Connor. A team of engineers mimicked that famous scene with a soft robot in the shape of a Lego minifig. The robot "melts" into liquid form in response to a magnetic field, oozing between the bars of its cage before re-solidifying on the other side. The team described its work in a recent paper published in the journal Matter.

As we've previously reported, we traditionally think of robots as being manufactured out of hard, rigid materials, but the subfield of soft robotics takes a different approach. It seeks to build robotic devices out of more flexible materials that mimic the properties of those found in living animals. There are huge advantages to be gained by making the entire body of a robot out of soft materials, such as being flexible enough to squeeze through tight spaces to hunt for survivors after a disaster. Soft robots also hold strong potential as prosthetics or biomedical devices. Even rigid robots rely on some soft components, such as foot pads that serve as shock absorbers or flexible springs to store and release energy.

For instance, Harvard researchers built an octopus-inspired soft robot in 2016 that was constructed entirely out of flexible materials. Soft robots are more difficult to control precisely because they are so flexible. So, for the "octobot," they replaced the rigid electronic circuits with micro-fluidic circuits. Such circuits regulate the flow of water (hydraulics) or air (pneumatics), rather than electricity, through the circuit's microchannels, enabling the robot to bend and move. In 2021, engineers at the University of Maryland built a three-fingered soft robotic hand that is sufficiently agile to be able to manipulate the buttons and directional pad on a Nintendo controller—even managing to beat the first level of Super Mario Bros. as proof of concept.

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Kubuntu Focus NX gets a spec bump (mini PC with Kubuntu Linux and 12th-gen Intel Core)

The Kubuntu Focus NX is a small form-factor desktop computer that ships with Kubuntu Linux software pre-installed. When the Kubuntu team first introduced the mini PC last year it was available with 11th-gen Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processor options. …

The Kubuntu Focus NX is a small form-factor desktop computer that ships with Kubuntu Linux software pre-installed. When the Kubuntu team first introduced the mini PC last year it was available with 11th-gen Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processor options. But now there’s a new model called the Kubuntu Focus NX Gen 2 which features […]

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Microsoft officially blesses Parallels as a way to run Windows on M1, M2 Macs

Parallels previously used Insider Program loophole to support Windows installs.

Microsoft officially blesses Parallels as a way to run Windows on M1, M2 Macs

Enlarge (credit: Parallels)

In the absence of a version of Boot Camp that runs on Apple Silicon Macs, the best way to run Windows on them has been to use a virtualization app like Parallels or (more recently) VMware Fusion. The problem is that, until now, the Arm version of Windows that runs on Apple Silicon Macs hasn't technically been allowed to run on anything other than Arm PCs that come with it due to Microsoft's licensing restrictions.

These licensing problems haven't technically stopped people from running the Arm version of Windows on other hardware, including Apple Silicon Macs and the Raspberry Pi, but it could be more of an issue for IT managers who wanted to deploy Windows on Macs without worrying about legal liability.

Today, Microsoft is formally blessing Parallels as a way to run the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs. Windows running under Parallels has some limitations—no support for DirectX 12 or newer OpenGL versions, no support for the Linux or Android subsystems, and a few missing security features. But it can run Arm-native Windows apps as well as 32- and 64-bit x86 apps thanks to Windows 11's code translation features; pretty much anything that isn't a game should run tolerably well, given the speed of Apple's M1 and M2 chip families.

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Doobie-us: Pot ads come to Twitter amid cannabis industry collapse

Weed delivery services could be advertising on Twitter feeds soon.

Then-future Technoking Elon Musk enjoying some cannabis on Joe Rogan's podcast.

Enlarge / Then-future Technoking Elon Musk enjoying some cannabis on Joe Rogan's podcast. (credit: Joe Rogan)

Elon Musk’s fondness for 420 jokes is well-documented on Twitter, where the CEO loves responding to tweets with comments like “420 haha.” So it makes sense that Musk is well aware of opportunities for cannabis advertisers to reach Twitter users who like tweeting about marijuana as much as he does. It comes as no surprise, then, that Twitter announced yesterday that it would become the weed-friendliest social platform and start allowing some previously restricted cannabis ads to appear in Twitter feeds of users in states that have legalized weed.

“As of today, in certain US states, we have taken measures to relax our cannabis ads policy to create more opportunities for responsible cannabis marketing—the largest step forward by any social media platform,” Alexa Alianiello, Twitter’s lead of ad sales and partnerships, wrote in a blog post.

This policy change sets Twitter apart from other advertising giants like Meta, which bans both CBD and THC ads, and Google, which allows some CBD ads but bans marijuana ads, including instructional content.

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MediaTek Dimensity 7200 is coming to mid-range phones soon

MediaTek’s new Dimensity 7200 processor is a 4nm chip that features two ARM Cortex-A715 CPU cores, six Cortes-A510 cores, Mali-G610 MC4 graphics, a 5th-gen MediaTek AI processing unit, and support for 5G download speeds up to 4.7 Gbps. It’…

MediaTek’s new Dimensity 7200 processor is a 4nm chip that features two ARM Cortex-A715 CPU cores, six Cortes-A510 cores, Mali-G610 MC4 graphics, a 5th-gen MediaTek AI processing unit, and support for 5G download speeds up to 4.7 Gbps. It’s the first Dimensity 7000-series chip from MediaTek, and it’s positioned as a mid-range alternative to higher-performance processors […]

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Risk of diabetes rises 58% after COVID, even amid omicron, study finds

This the latest study finding COVID infections can spur the development of diabetes.

A woman with diabetes pricks her finger to take a blood sample to measure the glycemia in Paris on March 24, 2020.

Enlarge / A woman with diabetes pricks her finger to take a blood sample to measure the glycemia in Paris on March 24, 2020. (credit: Getty | Franck Fife)

A person's odds of getting a new diabetes diagnosis were 58 percent higher in the months following a COVID-19 infection compared with prior to infection, even amid the era of omicron, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal JAMA Network Open.

The study is just the latest to link the development of diabetes to COVID-19, which pandemic data suggests increases the risk of a range of cardiometabolic conditions, including blood clots, myocarditis, stroke, and diabetes. A study published early last year in Nature Medicine tapped into the medical records of more than 11 million veterans and found that people who had recovered from COVID-19 had a 63 percent higher risk of developing any of 20 cardiovascular diseases, including a 55 percent higher risk of heart attack, stroke, and death.

The data on diabetes is equally worrying. In a systemic meta-analysis published in Scientific Reports last November, researchers compiled data from eight cohort studies involving data from more than 47 million people and found that COVID-19 infection was linked to a 66 percent increased risk of developing diabetes.

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Halbleiterproduktion in Deutschland: Bund genehmigt neues Infineon-Werk in Dresden

Der Chipkonzern will mit seinem Milliardenprojekt in Sachsen 1.000 Arbeitsplätze schaffen. Die Politik will so den Halbleiterstandort Deutschland stärken. (Infineon, Intel)

Der Chipkonzern will mit seinem Milliardenprojekt in Sachsen 1.000 Arbeitsplätze schaffen. Die Politik will so den Halbleiterstandort Deutschland stärken. (Infineon, Intel)

Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

Report reveals the influence lobbyists had on bill.

Repair shop technician solders on laptop-size circuit board

Enlarge (credit: Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

When New York became the first state to pass a heavily modified right-to-repair bill late last year, it was apparent that lobbyists had succeeded in last-minute changes to the law's specifics. A new report from the online magazine Grist details the ways in which Gov. Kathy Hochul made changes identical to those proposed by a tech trade association.

In a report co-published with nonprofit newsroom The Markup, Maddie Stone writes that documents surrounding the drafting and debate over the bill show that many of the changes signed by Hochul were the same as those proposed by TechNet, which represents Apple, Google, Samsung, and other technology companies.

The bill would have required that companies that provide parts, tools, manuals, and diagnostic equipment or software to their own repair networks also make them available to independent repair shops and individuals. It saw heavy opposition from trade groups before its passing. New York Assemblymember Patricia Fahy, the bill's sponsor, told Grist that backers had to make "a lot of changes to get it over the finish line in the first day or two of June." The bill passed with broad bipartisan support, but it was pared down to focus only on small electronics.

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