Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have discovered a new Antarctic feather star species with 20 arms and a strawberry-shaped body. Unlike other invertebrate ocean animals, feather stars stand out for their ‘large’ size and alien-like appearance’ when swimming.
MRMC’s CineBot Mini is great for live-action camera shoots, while this robotic sea turtle, built by engineers at the University of Notre Dame, mimics that varied gait patterns of their real-life counterpart. It was designed using data collected from zoological studies on the morphology, gait patterns and flipper flexibility of multiple sea turtle species, thus enabling engineers to maximize adaptability and versatility.
Photo credit: Belloyr
There’s the Cyber Kart, and then the new Tesla Life Cat Nest, which just launched in China. Priced at around $12.38 USD, this cat litter-like box that measures in at 56 cm x 41 cm x 25 cm has a Cybertruck-inspired design and a maximum weight capacity of 15 kg (33 lb).
Jizai’s robotic arms are for show, while this innovative baby sea turtle-inspired robot developed by a team of robotics experts at the University of California San Diego can move through sand. It’s capable of traveling through sand at a depth of 5-inches at a speed of 1.2 millimeters per second. There are force sensors at the end of its limbs for obstacle detection, while a WiFi module lets you control it untethered.
Corridor Crew’s Jake Watson decided to strap the new Insta360 Go 3 action camera onto a farm cat, and the resulting footage is interesting to say the least. The camera was attached to a collar so we get a throat’s eye view of all the action including where the cat spends most of its time.
You’ve probably seen footage of giant squid, but what about the translucent glass squid? The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) used a deep diving submersible to observe these intriguing creatures, which live in the twilight, or mesopelagic, zone.
There are underwater drones, and then this robotic octopus that researchers used to study aquatic life. More specifically, they disguised the robot as a coconut octopus traversing the waters in Indonesia, looking for a hiding spot as Blacktip sharks hunt nearby.
T.R.E.A.T. (Tasty Reward Emission Apparatus Thingy) by iRobot turns your Roomba robot vacuum into an on-demand dog treat dispenser. The attachment simply slides right into the base of the vacuum, replacing the collection bin with just about any dry treats you desire.
If you’ve never heard of the US Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, just know that it’s training sea lions to play video games. Why? Scientists from the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) believe that this is a proven method for cognitive enrichment and it opens doors for more research on keeping marine mammals happy as well as healthy longer.
EPFL researchers have managed to decode a mouse’s brain signals to predict what it sees using a new algorithm for building artificial neural network models designed to capture brain dynamics. This machine learning algorithm is called CEBRA and it can decode what a mouse sees while it watches a movie as well as reconstruct the positions of rats as they freely run around a room.